On October 22, 1973, on a property owned by the Gendarmería on the highway connecting Concepción and Talcahuano, four people were executed by firing squad, all of whom were members of the Partido Comunista:

-Vladimir Daniel ARANEDA CONTRERAS, 33 years old, primary school teacher in Lota and union leader of the Teachers' Association;

-Bernabé CABRERA NEIRA, 39 years old, employee at Celulosa Arauco and President of the Concepción Cellulose Union;

-Isidoro del Carmen CARRILLO TORNERIA, 46 years old, public administrator, General Manager of the National Coal Company (Enacar); and

-Danilo GONZALEZ MARDONES, 39 years old, normal school teacher, mayor of Lota.

Following their arrest, the four were subjected to trial and sentenced to the maximum penalty in a Consejo de Guerra, case file Rol 1645 73, on October 18, 1973, for alleged violations of Law 17.798 on Arms Control, as perpetrators of the crimes of organizing armed combat groups with explosive bombs; illegal manufacture, storage, and transport of explosives and devices made with them; and illegal possession of explosives and bombs; all committed during a time of war.

On October 21, the Commander of the 3rd Ejército Division approved the sentence, setting the execution for October 24. However, it was carried out on the 22nd at the aforementioned location. The bodies were not handed over to their families and were buried by order of the authorities in the General Cemetery of Concepción, without the knowledge of their relatives.

It was not until July 1990 that they were located and exhumed by order of the Second Criminal Court of Concepción.

The Commission has reached the conviction that these judicial proceedings and the sentences issued from them were irregular, based on the background information already provided regarding all Consejos de Guerra and specifically the following:

-The rejection of the plea of incompetence of the Consejo de Guerra during a time of war is inadmissible, as the defendants were being tried for alleged crimes that would have been committed prior to the entry into force of the state of war, that is, in peacetime. Despite this, the court did not accept the plea;

-The retroactive application of the law constitutes another question regarding the correctness of the process, as the Consejo de Guerra increased the penalties by applying D.L. 5 to alleged crimes that would have been committed prior to the entry into force of that regulation;

-Likewise, the court disregarded the rules of the ideal concurrence of crimes, breaking down each act constituting a crime, qualifying and sanctioning it separately, and adding the penalties that would correspond to each of the acts if they were autonomous figures;

-The Council dismissed the allegations of the mitigating circumstance of an irreproachable prior conduct, by making a moral qualification of the defendants' backgrounds and considering that "simply good" conduct was not enough, "because the law requires that no blemish whatsoever fall upon it," and "neither was the simple summary information of two complacent witnesses sufficient." In this way, the Council established requirements for the mitigating circumstance that go beyond what the law itself indicates;

-The Tribunal dismissed, without providing further grounds, all the allegations presented by the defendants to mitigate, reduce, or modify their alleged responsibilities.

Consequently, it is the conviction of the Commission that the executions mentioned above constituted a grave violation of human rights, especially the right to life and to a fair trial.