The passage of the "Caravan of Death" through Calama and Copiapó left a trail of pain and blood due to the large number of people executed in both cities. The officers and non-commissioned officers who committed these treacherous crimes were obeying direct orders from General Sergio Arellano Stark, who in turn had expedited authorization from Augusto Pinochet.

In Calama, according to investigations, this delegation left a total of 26 leaders executed, whose bodies were initially buried illegally and later, in 1976, exhumed and thrown into the sea. It was the captain at the time, Carlos Minoletti Arriagada, who was in charge of choosing the riflemen and carrying out the executions; there are also testimonies that this criminal proceeded to deliver the coup de grâce to the executed prisoners.

Subsequently, he was the one who participated in the burial of the bodies in clandestine graves and later, at the end of 1976, had the mission of locating the graves to exhume them, load them onto a FACh (Chilean Air Force) plane at the local airfield, and then throw them into the sea.

Retired Major Carlos Minoletti currently resides in the US, and his address is: 10833 NW 7th Street Miami, Florida in Miami-Dade County, zip code: 33172-3140. Among the criminals guilty of these crimes, in addition to Carlos Minoletti Arriagada, are the retired colonel Eugenio Rivera Desgroux, commander of the Calama regiment at the time of the caravan; the retired brigadier Carlos Lange Fonfurstenberg, the retired colonel Víctor Santander Véliz, and the retired non-commissioned officer Gerónimo Rojo Rojo.

During its passage through Copiapó, the "Caravan of Death," also under the direct orders of General Sergio Arellano Stark, left another trail of pain. A total of 16 people were executed in this city, of whom 13 were found in an illegal mass grave in 1990 and 3 remain forcibly disappeared.

All these people were taken into the interior of the pampa by a group of officers commanded by retired brigadier Patricio Díaz Araneda. This officer, along with colonels Ricardo Yáñez Mora and Marcelo Marambio Molina, plus lieutenant colonel Waldo Ojeda Torrent, were the ones who executed 13 prisoners on October 17, 1973.

The other 3 prisoners shot on the same day were executed by retired general Erwin Gestaer Gálvez; and retired officers Fernando Castillo Cruz, Oscar Pastén Morales, and Ramón Zúñiga Ormeño.

Four retired uniformed personnel, convicted of the crimes of kidnapping and qualified homicide of the victims of the Copiapó Episode, must serve sentences of more than 10 years in prison inside the Colina 1 penitentiary center, where they arrived last Wednesday.

Since last Wednesday, the Colina I prison has housed four military personnel convicted of crimes linked to human rights violations during the dictatorship. As reported by La Tercera, this occurred after the visiting minister Patricia González Quiroz issued the order to comply and ordered the beginning of the sentences for six retired members of the Army, for kidnappings and qualified homicides of the Copiapó Episode, part of the "Caravan of Death" case.

The Judiciary stated that "of the six sentenced to effective prison terms, four retired Army officers entered the special module of Colina I and two were already serving sentences at the Punta Peuco Compliance Center." The sentence establishes that Sergio Arredondo González and Pedro Espinoza Bravo were sentenced to 15 years and 1 day in prison, as authors of the crimes of kidnapping and qualified homicide.

Both were being held at Punta Peuco. In addition, the retired Army officer, Patricio Díaz Araneda, was sentenced to 11 years in prison, as the author of the repeated crimes of qualified homicide of 13 victims. On the other hand, retired uniformed personnel Ricardo Yáñez Mora, Waldo Ojeda Torrent, and Marcelo Marambio Molina must serve sentences of 10 years and one day in prison at Colina I.

Source: El Desconcierto, May 11, 2017

Santiago Court issues sentence for the Copiapó Episode of the "Caravan of Death" case

The Santiago Court of Appeals issued a sentence against six former Army officers as responsible for 13 crimes of qualified homicide and three qualified kidnappings, illicit acts perpetrated on October 17, 1973, in Copiapó, within the framework of the so-called "Caravan of Death" case.

In a unanimous ruling (case file 1237-2015), the First Chamber of the capital's appellate court—composed of ministers Dobra Lusic, Jenny Book, and Viviana Toro—sentenced former officers Sergio Carlos Arredondo González and Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo to two terms of 15 years and one day in prison, as authors of 13 qualified homicides and three qualified kidnappings.

The now-deceased Marcelo Luis Morén Brito had received the same sentence in the first-instance ruling. Likewise, the ministers sentenced former Army officer Patricio Ramón Félix Díaz Araneda to a term of 11 years for his participation, as an author, in the repeated crimes of qualified homicide of the 13 victims.

Meanwhile, former officers Ricardo Fernando Yáñez Mora, Waldo Antonio Ojeda Torrent, and Marcelo Arnaldo Marambio Molina must serve sentences of 10 years and one day in prison for their responsibility in the same crimes.

Likewise, former officers Edwin Reynaldo Herbstaedt Gálvez and Fernando Raúl de Fátima Castillo Cruz were acquitted of the charges of qualified kidnapping. According to the first-instance sentence, issued in April 2015 by the visiting minister Patricia González Quiroz, it was determined that: "On October 16, 1973, in the evening hours, around 8:00 PM, a group of people belonging to the Chilean Army arrived in Copiapó in a 'Puma' helicopter, commanded by a general of the same, who carried a document stating that he had powers delegated by the then-Commander-in-Chief of the Army to 'carry out tasks of coordinating institutional criteria of internal government and judicial procedures,' as well as 'to review and accelerate the processes'; some of said officials under the command of the general in charge, together with a group of military personnel belonging to the Atacama Regiment of Copiapó, after carrying out a review, study, and selection of the files and backgrounds of the existing detainees, without there being any record of any case or process against them, proceeded on one hand to subtract, to set aside in the night hours, four people who were detained in said military unit, made them board an Army truck, and with them headed to the public jail of Copiapó, from where they subtracted nine other people who were deprived of liberty in said facility by order of the military jurisdictional authority. Then, the group of military personnel belonging to the city's Regiment transported the thirteen detainees to the outskirts of the city, to an area called Cuesta Cardone, forced them to get out of the truck, and proceeded to fire upon them. Their identities were Alfonso Ambrosio Gamboa Farías, Atilio Ernesto Ugarte Gutiérrez, Fernando del Carmen Carvajal González, Agapito del Carmen Carvajal González, Winston Dwight Cabello Bravo, Manuel Roberto Cortázar Hernández, Raúl del Carmen Guardia Olivares, Raúl Leopoldo de Jesús Larravide López, Edwin Ricardo Mancilla Hess, Adolfo Mario Palleras Norambuena, Héctor Leonelo Vincenti Cartagena, Pedro Emilio Pérez Flores, and Jaime Iván Sierra Castillo, using 7.62 mm SIG rifles for this purpose, with all of them dying at the scene. Once the deaths of the aforementioned people were verified, the bodies were transported to the military unit, and subsequently from that place to the city cemetery, and after being identified, they were buried in a mass grave, with the corresponding death certificates being registered." The resolution adds: "With the thorough study of the same background information and evidentiary elements reviewed, appreciated in the same way, it has also been established that in the final hours of October 17, 1973, a group of military personnel belonging to the Atacama Regiment of the city of Copiapó went to some barracks existing in that military unit, a place where Benito Tapia Tapia, Maguindo Castillo Andrade, and Ricardo García Posada were kept, deprived of liberty and as political prisoners, regarding whom there is no reliable record that any process or trial had been followed against them, who had been removed, set aside that same day from the city's public jail, as a consequence of the review of their backgrounds already indicated by some members of General Arellano's delegation and some military personnel of the local Regiment, people whom they subtracted, transporting them, presumably, to the same sector of Cuesta Cardone, a place from which their tracks are lost, without them having been found alive to date, nor their mortal remains, nor are their whereabouts known, exceeding by far and in excess the ninety-day term marked in the aforementioned legal provision, and in those circumstances, it must be understood that the confinement or detention that affected them still persists."

Source: resumen.cl, July 11, 2016