Due to the "denial of justice" in the crime against his father, the children of the naval aide-de-camp to President Salvador Allende, Navy Captain Arturo Araya Peters, will sue the State of Chile tomorrow before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The filing before the body of the American Convention on Human Rights includes a civil lawsuit for the State to provide material reparations to the four children and the widow. In this way, the homicide of the officer, which occurred on July 27, 1973, will leave Chile for the first time to become a matter of international justice.

The action will be filed at 12:00 PM tomorrow at the ECLAC headquarters in Santiago. Lawyer Arturo Araya Jr., who will sponsor the appeal, explained to La Nación that "we are tired of knocking on the doors of Chilean courts to obtain justice for our father's crime." He added that "the State of Chile is responsible for our father's death because it collaborated in the impunity of his assassination.

The process instructed by the naval justice system in Valparaíso had a great number of flaws. Suffice it to say that the case was labeled as ‘mistreatment of Armed Forces personnel’ and the maximum sentence applied, three years in prison, was pardoned shortly thereafter by General Augusto Pinochet." The path of appealing to the IACHR was the same one used by the family of the murdered diplomat Carmelo Soria.

The Naval Court of Valparaíso recently refused to reopen the investigation into the crime. The sentence for the trial was handed down on December 26, 1978. Of 19 individuals prosecuted from an extreme-right group linked to Patria y Libertad, only one was sentenced to three years in prison, which he did not serve.

Of the rest, three were sentenced to 541 days only for illegal possession of weapons, and the other fifteen to sentences ranging from 21 to 61 days in jail. None served their sentences. Regarding the complaint filed last year by the children, which is being investigated by the judge of the 17th Criminal Court of Santiago, Patricia González, Arturo Araya stated that "it has been almost a year and there is no progress.

We have been denied access to the summary six times, and we are tired of asking for justice." In addition to being directed "against those who result responsible" for the "homicide of our father," the complaint was also filed for "denial of justice," due to multiple irregularities in the process, against the former naval judge Vice Admiral (Ret.) Arturo Troncoso; the former naval prosecutor Navy Captain (Ret.) Aldo Montagna; the former naval auditor Frigate Captain (Ret.) Enrique Campusano; and the former secretary of the Naval Court of Valparaíso and current Consul General of Chile in Caracas (Venezuela), Jorge Garretón Iturra.

The surprises of the file

• Guillermo Claverie Bartet: the only one sentenced to three years in prison; he was not arrested until July 15, 1981. He entered the Valparaíso jail that day, and Pinochet pardoned him on August 10 of the same year. He served 25 days of the sentence.
• Andrés Potin Laihacar: while he was being prosecuted while at liberty, he was a member of the repressive organization Comando Conjunto (CC). In January 1979, he asked the Naval Court to go to the U.S. for two months. "As requested," the court authorized it. In August of that year, he again asked for permission to go "to Europe" for three months as an "advisor to the Superintendency of Banks." "Granted," the court replied. In 1980, Potin requested to go to Argentina for one month to practice "parachuting." "As requested," it was authorized. Sentenced to 41 days. Today he is being prosecuted in cases involving the forcibly disappeared.
• Luis Palma Ramírez (alias ‘El Fifo’): while he was being prosecuted and a fugitive, he was a member of the CC. However, "his name is not registered in the Identification Cabinet," it is established in the file. In 1979, he appeared "voluntarily" to be notified of the 541-day sentence, which he did not serve. Today he is being prosecuted in cases regarding the crimes of the CC.
• Edmundo Quiroz Ruiz: the Naval Court of Valparaíso summoned him at the beginning of February 1979 to notify him of the 26 days of prison to which he was sentenced for the crime. According to the file, he replied that "I will go at the end of the month, because I am working."
• Rafael Mardones Saint-Jean: during the process, he asked for permission to "go on a honeymoon to the United States for 17 days." "Granted," the court authorized. Sentenced to 61 days.

Source: lanacion.cl, June 2, 2004

50 years ago in Chile: This was the assassination of Commander Arturo Araya Peeters by right-wing snipers

It was a planned assassination intended to establish within the Navy the principles that would govern the bloody coup d'état of September 11, 1973. The right wing perpetrated the crime; Washington sheltered and financed it.

Our memory remains alive. At midnight on July 26, 1973, the Naval Aide-de-Camp to President Salvador Allende, Commander Arturo Araya Peeters, was assassinated by a sniper who fired at him point-blank from somewhere in front of his home.

Shortly before, he had arrived at his house after attending—accompanying the socialist president—a reception at the Cuban embassy. One of the criminals who participated in the crime, Guillermo Claverie Bartet, was sentenced to three years in prison.

However, he did not spend a single day in jail serving that sentence. Even while a fugitive, he was pardoned by the dictatorship thanks to a decision by Admiral José Toribio Merino Castro. It was a planned assassination intended to establish within the Navy the principles that would govern the bloody coup d'état of September 11, and at the same time a reminder that any man in the Navy who did not agree with the fascist plans of Admiral Merino Castro would be considered a traitor and punished with death.

This is what happened to Araya, a clean man loyal to the Constitution. On the night of July 26 to 27, 1973, a sniper opened fire on the sailor, while mercenaries from Patria y Libertad created a commotion in the street in front of his house, after firing some shots into the air in order to get the presidential aide to come out to the balcony of his home to investigate what was happening.

At that moment, a bullet struck Commander Araya Peters in the chest. The crime, which at the time the right wing and naval intelligence services tried to blame on ghostly armed groups of the left, was in reality the work of a sordid ultra-right-wing conspiracy with the support of coup-plotting officers of the Navy.

A total of 32 members of Patria y Libertad, whose founder was Pablo Rodríguez Grez, were arrested and prosecuted by the Naval Prosecutor's Office, but all were set free after a few slaps on the wrist. Only one of them, Guillermo Claverie, after having been a fugitive for a time, was sentenced to three years and one day in prison as the material author of the crime, a sentence he also did not serve since, in the end, all the conspirators were pardoned in 1981 by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, "for services rendered to the Fatherland." In an interview published by the newspaper La Nación, Claverie swore he was innocent and claimed he was forced to confess after suffering multiple tortures carried out by officers of the Navy and the Air Force, and that he was apparently chosen as a scapegoat by his bosses at Patria y Libertad, among them Pablo Rodríguez. Although he admitted to having been at the scene of the events, he said that he always remained in the street and that the trajectory of the bullet that killed the aide-de-camp, who was on a balcony, was from top to bottom. He also claimed to have fired his pistol after he saw the man fall from the balcony and that at that moment he was unaware of who it was. Claverie's statements were part of the argument in the Court of Appeals by Arturo Araya, the victim's son and a plaintiff lawyer in the trial. The planned crime committed against the Navy Commander and aide-de-camp to President Allende, which occurred on Fidel Oteíza Street—between Marchant Pereira and Carlos Antúnez—in the commune of Providencia, was definitively and clearly a well-mounted terrorist operation of intelligence and political destabilization, structured by the extreme right together with fascist and ultra-nationalist groups embedded in the armed forces, who had the support and financing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), just as the U.S. government recognized many years later when it declassified its confidential documents. The coup plotters of the SIN (Naval Intelligence Service) had already been executing dozens of attacks and self-inflicted bombings, some previously ‘negotiated,’ such as the one carried out at the house of the coup-plotting Admiral Ismael Huerta in mid-July 1973 in Viña del Mar, with the goal of building an environment favorable to the upcoming coup d'état. The “Bataan” machine gun with which the militant of the Rolando Matus Command and SIN agent infiltrated into the state company ECON, Guillermo Claverie Bartet, fired at Commander Araya after setting off a decoy bomb and shooting at the front of the house to make him come out to the balcony, was supplied by the SIN through Mr. Jorge Ehlers Trostel, a figure who later—in the midst of the dictatorship—would occupy a high position in the sports area (DIGEDER). Claverie Bartet had already been detected firing against troops loyal to the Constitution on the day of the tanquetazo (June 1973) from a terrace of ECOM (the guy believed that day the Navy was starting a coup; this was published shortly before the coup by the biweekly directed by Marta Harnecker, ‘Chile Hoy’). He was fired from ECOM, but not handed over to the Police… incredibly!!

THE MURDERERS FABRICATE AN OUTRAGEOUS ALIBI

The then-lieutenant of the SIN, Daniel Guimpert Corvalán, together with the Intelligence Captain of the Carabineros Germán Esquivel Caballero, who would later participate in multiple ‘disappearances’ committed by the Comando Conjunto and the SICAR, was responsible for carrying out one of the dirtiest and most cowardly aspects of the destabilizing plot.

The day after the assassination of President Allende's naval aide-de-camp—a Saturday—Esquivel and Guimpert toured various police stations looking for a “scapegoat” to pin the crime on. The one chosen was a prisoner for drunkenness who worked at a CORFO company (SEAM) and carried a membership card for a party of the Unidad Popular (the Radical Party).

Since that was not very convincing nor enough to complete their plans, they fabricated a Socialist Party membership card and interrogated the official “privately,” who, subjected to savage torture, confessed to having participated in the assassination “together with a PS-Elenos commando” and some Cubans.

The SEAM CORFO mechanic ended up charged and prosecuted by the Naval Justice system under the direction of Prosecutor Aldo Montagna. The name of the electrical mechanic from Seam Corfo tortured by Guimpert and Esquivel was José Luis Riquelme Bascuñán, and he was interrogated and charged by the conspiring minister of the Court of Appeals (Abraham Meerson) and by the Military Prosecutor Joaquín Erlbaum.

The unfortunate mechanic was tortured so well that he blamed himself for having participated in the crime with a group of GAPs and Cubans led by Bruno (Domingo Blanco), one of the leaders of the GAP. The next day, opposition media and various politicians—among whom stood out the right-wing senators Víctor García Garzena and Fernando Ochagavía, along with the Christian Democrat deputy Claudio Orrego Vicuña and the director of the Christian Democrat newspaper ‘La Prensa’, Jorge Navarrete—began a campaign of insults and accusations against the UP government and the Cuban representation in Chile.

The problem for the conspirators of various stripes and affiliations who conspired around the false discovery of Commander Araya's murderers was that, a few days later, the Investigative Police arrested almost all the members of the band formed by elements of the Rolando Matus Command (CRM), National Party (PN), Radical Democracy (DR), and Patria y Libertad, who had participated directly in the assassination of the aide-de-camp.

Among them, the following stood out: the alleged author of the shots (Guillermo Claverie), a leader of the Youth of the National Party and the CRM—Uca Eileen Lozano—, the “Patria y Libertad” son of the well-known bakery businessman Castaño, Odilio Castaño Jiménez; the Patria y Libertad militant, Luis “Fifo” Palma Ramírez, who two years later would have a prominent participation in the SIFA and in the disappearances of the Comando Conjunto, a CRM nephew of the DINA psychiatrist, Laihlacar, by the name of Potin Laihlacar, the leader of the DR, Guillermo Schilling, and a CRM militant, Miguel Sepúlveda Campos, son of a well-known retired admiral. () Those who were not arrested hid on a farm in the Valparaíso Region and surrendered to a Navy commando the day after the coup. Those who were arrested and prosecuted in the prisons of Valparaíso and Santiago were taken out of prison on September 12 by SIN commandos and integrated into repressive activities. The crime against Commander Araya remained unpunished and with a disappeared file. Everything changes, everything changes. Lieutenant Guimpert Corvalán left the Navy at the end of the 70s and dedicated himself to running an arms sales business in the vicinity of the Armed Forces Building in Plaza Bulnes. He enjoyed release on bail until he was arrested again, accused in more than a dozen cases of forcibly disappeared persons, in some of which he was even pardoned in the early 90s. His accomplice in the attempt to falsify the assassination of Commander Araya—Guillermo Esquivel—reached the rank of Colonel of Carabineros in the DICOMCAR and was arrested—for bounced checks—in 1991. He died in strange and never-clarified circumstances in 1993, while he was being denounced in various trials for disappearances and murders. After 35 years since the assassination of the courageous aide-de-camp to President Allende, the official version provided by the dictatorship began to crumble in the courts and the truth emerged: It was a crime planned by the right wing against Commander Araya. The measure, which the officer's family had requested for the first time in August 2003, was approved following the appearance of new evidence provided by Guillermo Claverie. On April 28, 2008, the Santiago Court of Appeals ordered the investigation into the assassination to be reopened. Unanimously, the Eighth Chamber of the appellate court determined that the court in charge of the case should proceed with the reopening of the investigation, take testimony from Guillermo Claverie Bartet (today he is 63 years old), and carry out other proceedings derived from it. The account that Claverie gave to the journalists of ‘La Nación Domingo’ a few years ago raises doubts. He assured that he still felt fear of what the old (and new) members of the coup-plotting brotherhoods could do to him. “I could never read my statements that they made me sign at the Naval Prosecutor's Office. And one day that I started to read one of them, after an interrogation, the secretary of the naval prosecutor Aldo Montagna, the officer Jorge Garretón Iturra, put his hand into the jacket of his uniform and pulled out a pistol. And he said to me: ‘Hey, you idiot, you’re reading too much, be grateful that you’re still alive and sign there!’ And of course, that’s how I always signed everything.” His confessions confirm what the aide-de-camp's children have been discovering in these last few years, digging into the file of the trial initiated by the naval justice system and which culminated in 1980 with a three-year sentence for Claverie, as the only material author, and with lesser sentences for minor crimes for other members of the group that acted that night: “It’s that that investigation is riddled with flaws,” maintains Arturo, the eldest son of the aide-de-camp, who is a lawyer. With these confessions from Claverie, the aide-de-camp's children managed to get the Santiago Court of Appeals to order the reopening of the new process initiated from the complaint they filed in 2003, but which at the time was dismissed and archived by the 18th Criminal Court of Santiago.

The burning questions.

To make Commander Araya come out to the balcony, Juan Zacconi and Guillermo Necochea (members of ‘Patria y Libertad’) threw a bomb in front of his house. The arrival of the aide-de-camp at his home was announced to them by another bomb that exploded nearby, thrown by another group.

The second bomb, that of Zacconi and Necochea, was the signal for the third group, which was to enter through Fidel Oteíza Street, to commit the assassination. Ballistic experts detected five impacts on the walls of the Navy Captain's house.

But the casings found in front of the house were only four. With the projectile that mortally wounded the aide-de-camp, and which entered directly without first bouncing off anything, the shots add up to six.

But the other two casings were never found. And the ballistic expertise established that the casings found in the street, corresponding to the shots fired by Claverie, did not belong to the projectile that perforated the aide-de-camp's body.

That would mean that the commander was assassinated with a different weapon, and they fired at him from another place—presumably from the front of his house—slightly from top to bottom. Despite all this evidence, the naval investigation concluded that Allende's aide-de-camp died from one of Claverie's shots.

But he insists on making many questions explicit, all of them without official answers. Who fired the two shots that several witnesses, according to their declarations in the Naval Court process, heard immediately before the aide-de-camp fired his burst toward the front and minutes before Claverie fired his four shots?

Did the former naval cadet Jorge Ehlers Trostel hire a sniper to assassinate Commander Araya Peeters, taking advantage of the chaos that Ehlers himself ordered the ultra-right-wing group to create that night in the vicinity of the aide-de-camp's house?

Why did Ehlers literally flee to Germany days after the aide-de-camp's children filed the complaint in September 2003, taking refuge in that country until today? Why did no one take into account the declaration of two prostitutes that appears in the naval justice file, who claimed that, standing that night on the corner of Pedro de Valdivia and Providencia and seconds after hearing shots, they saw two men running from a place, one of them with a rifle in his hand, and that they got into a pickup truck that had a sticker that seemed to them to be a government vehicle?

Torture, pressures, and threats.

Preventively detained in the Public Jail of Santiago, one morning—still in the midst of the dictatorship—the guards took Claverie out and led him to the office of the Naval Prosecutor. In that place, Claverie himself told the newspaper La Nación, he was received by the naval officer Germán Arestizábal, who was acting as a clerk. “He made me get into an Austin Mini, where I recognized the Air Force officer with the last name Schindler, a schoolmate.” They blindfolded him and took him to the Air War Academy, in Las Condes. “There they tied me to a cot and started hitting me on the soles of my feet with a stick or an iron. Later they injected into my vein what I believe was pentothal, because they still hadn’t gotten my own confession of the aide-de-camp's crime, as they wanted. I never knew what I answered, but I couldn’t have said something that was false,” he expresses. Days later, upon leaving an office where he had begun to work, a car approached him from which an individual he knew descended, who forced him to get into the vehicle. It was ‘Fifo’ Palma (Luis Palma Ramírez, who later joined the Comando Conjunto) and in the car I saw about five machine guns. The Fifo told me: ‘Do you know that now we can kill you for talking, you idiot? You know that people who are now very important are involved in this. Don’t you forget it.’” That last phrase of the so-called ‘Fifo’ Palma—assuming Claverie is telling the truth—is what the court in charge of the reopening of the case will have to elucidate, as it is vital to establish the identity of those “people who are now very important.” How ‘important’ are those people today? Parliamentarians? Businessmen? Chilean diplomats abroad? Retired officers of the Armed Forces? Still-active officers? Political leaders? Leaders of employer associations? Sooner or later the country will know their names, which will be added to that of Guillermo Claverie, who indeed was in one of the seditious and criminal groups that fateful night.

() THE LIST OF MEMBERS OF THE MURDEROUS COMMAND (published by CAUCE Magazine No. 15, 07/09/1984). René Guillermo Claverie Bartet Mario Eduardo Rojas Zegers Guillermo Francisco Necochea Aspillaga Miguel Víctor Sepúlveda Campos (son of an Admiral (Ret.)) Uca Eileen Lozano Jeffs (CRM-JN) Guillermo Adolfo Schilling Rojas (cousin of ‘Mamo’ Schilling, leader of the Socialist Party) José Eduardo Iturriaga Aránguiz Luis Guillermo Perry González Luis César “Fifo” Palma Jiménez (subsequently, he was a member of the Comando Conjunto) Ricardo Vélez Gómez Rafael Mardones Saint Jean (first cousin of José Luis Mardones Santander, President of BancoEstado) Adolfo Palma Ramírez (brother of Fifo Palma) Enrique Quiroz Ruiz Wilfredo Humberto Perry González Odilio Castaño Jiménez (current co-owner of the ‘Castaño’ bakery chain) Carlos Fernando Farías Corrales Juan Zacconi Quiroz Andrés Pablo Potin Lailhacar Tito Alejandro Figari Verdugo ======================= by Arturo Alejandro Muñoz

Source: elsiglo.cl, July 27, 2023