The year 1976 ended with the detention and subsequent disappearance of thirteen people, most of whom were high-ranking leaders of the PC. Regarding many of them, the authorities provided an official version to the Courts of Justice claiming that the affected individuals had left the country through the Los Libertadores border crossing bound for Argentina.

Through judicial expert reports, witnesses, and personal inspections, this was established to be false. In fact, the Ministry of the Interior became a party to the proceedings and provided a certificate issued by the Head of International Police Control, stating that "it is proven once again that there is reliable evidence of the departure of these persons." The investigation into this situation succeeded in determining both the falsity of the version provided by the authorities regarding the departure of the victims from national territory, as well as the illegal deprivation of liberty of two of them.

On November 29, 1976, Santiago Edmundo ARAYA CABRERA was detained in the vicinity of the Vega Central in Santiago. His case, despite the fact that he was a militant of the MIR, is recounted in this section due to the numerous characteristics that link him to the others.

There has been no news of him since the aforementioned date. This person had previously provided a sworn statement regarding the circumstances of the detention and subsequent disappearance of his friend and fellow party member Mario Maureira, which occurred on August 8, 1976, and of which he was an eyewitness.

Upon filing an Amparo appeal (habeas corpus) in favor of Santiago Araya, the Ministry of the Interior informed the Court of Appeals that, having consulted the Foreigners Department of Investigaciones, the affected party had recorded a departure from the country.

On February 7, 1977, the Court conducted an inspection of the documentation and files of the Foreigners Department and it was verified that, according to certificate No. 366, the victim recorded a departure from the country on foot through the Los Libertadores pass on December 22, 1976.

Notwithstanding that the falsity of such documentation was judicially proven, it is important to keep in mind that Santiago Araya had a hip dislocation, which caused him to limp, making it implausible that he could have crossed the border on foot.

On December 9, 1976, around 10:30 a.m., Armando PORTILLA PORTILLA, a member of the Central Committee of the PC, was also detained on a public street. He remains disappeared to this day, and regarding him, the Ministry of the Interior reported that, according to travel certificate No. 364, he had left national territory bound for Argentina on January 11, 1977, which turned out to be false.

On December 13, 1976, another member of the Central Committee of the PC, Fernando Alfredo NAVARRO ALLENDES, was detained at the corner of Ramón Cruz and Grecia streets, in the presence of numerous witnesses, by five agents traveling in two vehicles. He has been disappeared since that date.

On December 15, 1976, seven leaders of the PC were detained, several of whom were members of its Central Committee. On the morning of that day, Horacio CEPEDA MARINKOVIC, a civil engineer and member of the Central Committee of the Partido Comunista, and Lincoyán Yalú BERRIOS CATALDO, the former National President of the Municipal Employees of Chile and also a communist, were detained on a public street after having agreed to meet at the corner of Rodrigo de Araya and Lo Plaza streets.

Regarding Horacio Cepeda, the Ministry of the Interior informed the Court of Appeals that, according to travel certificate No. 356, he had left national territory on January 6, 1977, which was judicially proven to be false.

Regarding Lincoyán Berríos, it was reported that he had left national territory on December 21, 1976, on foot. The day after the latter's disappearance, a check was cashed from his checking account, overdrawing it; it was later proven that a false identity card was used in the transaction.

For his part, Horacio Cepeda was later seen in a clandestine detention center, from where his trail was lost.

Later, university professor Juan Fernando ORTIZ LETELIER and mining technician Waldo Ulises PIZARRO MOLINA, both members of the Central Committee of the PC, were detained in the area of Plaza Egaña and Avenida Larraín in the presence of several witnesses.

The detention was carried out by several agents who hooded the victims; one of the victims managed to shout his name, for which he was struck on the head, and they were violently forced into a vehicle.

Both have been disappeared since that date. According to travel certificate No. 1082 dated April 20, 1977, Waldo Ulises Pizarro left national territory on foot on December 21, 1976, through the Los Libertadores pass, which was judicially proven to be false.

Subsequently, communist militant Héctor VELIZ RAMIREZ was detained on a public street. The Argentine Ministry of the Interior reported, on April 10, 1979, that the victim entered that country, along with Horacio Cepeda, Edras Pinto, and Luis Lazo, on January 6, 1977, in a car with Chilean license plate HG 19 from Santiago.

However, it was judicially proven that the aforementioned license plate was not issued by the Mint to the Municipality of Santiago. For its part, the Chilean Foreigners Department reported that Héctor Véliz had no record of leaving national territory.

This information provided by the Argentine authority demonstrates the links that existed at that time between the intelligence services of both countries, which collaborated in the creation of alibis to evade their responsibilities in the disappearances and deaths of the people for whom they were responsible.

At the corner of Profesor Fuentes Maturana and Catamarca streets in Santiago, the next detention occurred: Luis Segundo LAZO SANTANDER, a member of the Central Committee of the PC, was detained by several agents and has been disappeared since that date.

As in most of the previous cases, the Ministry of the Interior informed the Court of Appeals that, according to travel certificate No. 357, the victim recorded a departure from national territory bound for Argentina on January 6, 1977, which turned out to be false.

The last of those detained that day was Reinalda del Carmen PEREIRA PLAZA, a medical technologist and militant of the JJ.CC who was five months pregnant. She was seized before numerous witnesses while waiting for public transport at the intersection of Rodrigo de Araya and Exequiel Fernández streets by agents who stepped out of a vehicle with license plate HLN 55 and forced her inside.

The Director of the Mint informed the court that the indicated license plate was not issued in the years 1976 and 1977. The Ministry of the Interior also informed the Court of Appeals that, according to travel certificate No. 354, the victim had left national territory on December 21, 1976, on foot, which was implausible given her state of pregnancy and was proven to be false.

Since the date of her detention, the fate or whereabouts of Reinalda Pereira and the child she was expecting remain unknown.

On December 18, 1976, radio operator and PC militant Lizandro Tucapel CRUZ DIAZ and civil engineer and MIR militant Carlos Patricio DURAN GONZALEZ were detained and disappeared. Lizandro Cruz was detained on a public street.

Carlos Patricio Durán was also detained on a public street after separating from his spouse at the Estación Mapocho. Regarding Lizandro Cruz, the authority reported that, according to travel certificate No. 359, he had left national territory on January 11, 1977, which was judicially proven to be false.

On December 20, 1976, communist militant Edras de las Mercedes PINTO ARROYO was detained by three agents who took him from his parents' home; he has been disappeared since that date. As in the previous cases, the Ministry of the Interior informed the Court of Appeals that, according to travel certificate No. 355, the affected party had left national territory on January 6, 1977, bound for Argentina, which also turned out to be false.

Due to the multiple records that exist, especially the result of the judicial investigation already alluded to and the testimonial statements received by this Commission, it has acquired the conviction that all the aforementioned persons are victims of forced disappearance committed by state agents, in violation of their human rights.

While it is true that it is not possible to attribute the authorship of these disappearances with certainty to a specific state agency, there are indications that the DINA would be responsible for them, as it was the only organization with the capacity to mount a disinformation operation as complex as the one devised to cover up the responsibilities of those involved in these disappearances.

Address: Diego Rojas No. 753, La Reina, Santiago Marital Status: Married, 4 children Occupation: Civil Engineer; retired from the Urban Works Corporation (Corporación de Obras Urbanas) Representative Position: Former Director of the State Collective Transport Company (Empresa de Transportes Colectivos del Estado); Former Director of the Chilean-German Institute (GDR).

Member of the Communist Party Date of Detention: December 15, 1976

Between November 29 and December 20, 1976, thirteen people were detained: eleven belonging to the Communist Party, some of whom were members of its Central Committee, and two to the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR).

The procedures used to detain them share similarities in each case of deprivation of liberty, particularly in that their arrests were carried out on public roads, except in one case, and it is notable that the bulk of the detentions took place on December 15, 1976, affecting seven people on that day alone.

Another common note in their situations was the information officially provided by the military government, to the effect that practically all of them had registered exits from Chile to Argentina between late December 1976 or early January 1977.

The falsity of this version was subsequently established. The other characteristic common to all these people is that they remain forcibly disappeared to this day.

These individuals are: Santiago Edmundo Araya Cabrera, detained on November 29, 1976; Armando Portilla, detained on December 9, 1976; Fernando Alfredo Navarro Allende, detained on December 13, 1976; Lincoyán Yalú Berríos Cataldo, Horacio Cepeda Marinkovic, Luis Segundo Lazo Santander, Juan Fernando Ortiz Letelier, Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza, Waldo Ulises Pizarro Molina, Héctor Véliz Ramírez, all of them detained on December 15, 1976; Lizandro Tucapel Cruz Díaz, Carlos Patricio Durán González, both detained on December 18, 1976; and Edras de las Mercedes Pinto Arroyo, detained on December 20, 1976.

Horacio Cepeda Marinkovic, a civil engineer, married, with 4 children, and a member of the Communist Party, traveled to the German Democratic Republic on September 8, 1973, in his capacity as Director of the Chilean-German Institute, and later stayed in Italy, finally returning to Chile in July 1975.

He left his home on December 15, 1976, around 09:00 hours, heading to downtown Santiago to buy paint for some household chores and to meet with a party comrade, who likely corresponds to one of the people detained that same day and currently forcibly disappeared. The victim was detained on a public road by security agents, who took him to an unknown destination.

As background, it should be noted that the victim's son-in-law, Luciano Mallea Correa, a member of the Communist Youth, was detained on September 30, 1976, by members of the Joint Command (Comando Conjunto), and was taken to the clandestine detention center known as "La Firma," located on Calle Dieciocho in the city of Santiago, where he was intensely interrogated under torture about people with leftist affiliations.

At one point during the interrogation, they asked him about his father-in-law, Horacio Cepeda, in the following terms: "Your father-in-law was the person in charge of the communists at the E.T.C., right?" (alluding to the State Collective Transport Company, of which the victim was the Director); likewise, they made it clear that they had personal and political information about members of the Cepeda family.

They also expressed an explicit desire to reach the leadership of the Communist Party. Around the end of October, Mallea was released and went south to the countryside. He returned to Santiago on the same day, December 15, 1976, specifically to the house of his father-in-law, Horacio Cepeda, only to find out that he had left and had not returned.

When his wife, Antonia Cepeda Antoine, arrived, he told her: "Your dad hasn't arrived, your mom is doing very badly." In her judicial statement, Antonia Cepeda declared: "...I begged him (Mallea) to hide, but he refused and preferred to stay, because he was convinced that they would arrest him again for not having informed them about my father's militancy.

That night he didn't sleep; terrified, he asked me to wait before filing a writ of amparo, since they had forbidden him from filing that action in his favor, under penalty of death. I asked him if he had spoken with my father (the victim), and he replied that he had done so before leaving for the countryside.

He told me that he had recounted his detention to my dad and what he saw during his captivity, warning him that the Communist Party was infiltrated and that they had tried to convince him to serve as an instrument of penetration.

My dad told him that he would report it to the Communist Party, to which Luciano begged him to let him make a written statement first to be delivered to that political group once he, Ramiro (their common son), and I left Chile; it was not clear to me if my father accepted that proposal but, according to my mother, the first contact my dad was preparing to have with the people from the Communist Party was on December 15, 1976...".

From abroad, Luciano Mallea provided a statement in which he recounted his experience, the interrogations, the torture he suffered, the cases of people persecuted or detained that he learned about during his captivity, and gave descriptions of agents, the clandestine detention site, etc.

It is noted that several of the agents he named and described were charged by Judge Carlos Cerda in the case file 2-77, which is discussed in the case of Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza.

Mallea, at the end of his written account, stated: "I have made this testimony, trying to remember as much as possible the details that surrounded my detention and with the object that it serves for the clarification of those cases of human rights violations, whose investigations are being carried out in Chile. It has no other scope or purpose...".

On the other hand, the victim's spouse, Wilma Elena Antoine Lazzerini, in a statement she gave in the same judicial process, indicated that after her husband's disappearance, an intimate friend, whose name was withheld for obvious reasons, confided in her with data about the victim's whereabouts.

She clarified this further in another statement, saying: "...the intimate friend I allude to... was... who came to see me on December 31, 1976, and offered to make inquiries aimed at locating the whereabouts of my husband, Horacio Cepeda Marinkovic.

About 15 days later, she informed me that a friend of hers, apparently a member of the DINA, had told her that Horacio was detained in an apartment in downtown Santiago, but she did not give me the name of the informant.

I calculate that a week later... (the friend) informed me that Horacio would be taken to a Concentration Camp in the north of the country; she added that the information had been provided by the same source.

I did not receive any more information from my (friend) and when I tried to have her put her statements in a sworn declaration, she expressed her impossibility, because the DINA official had warned her to be careful about revealing such information, under threat...".

The government's official version was that the victim, like others of the forcibly disappeared from the group of thirteen, had left the country through the Los Libertadores pass to Argentina. Thus, regarding Horacio Cepeda, it was indicated that he had registered an exit from Chile bound for Argentina, through the aforementioned pass, on January 6, 1977, without indicating by what means of transport, appearing on a route sheet together with 12 other people—none of the other detainees—with all of them being noted in relation to the vehicle with Argentine license plate 134487; that is, according to that document, a total of 13 people crossed in a single car. Later, as a result of an order to investigate given to the Investigative Police (Policía de Investigaciones), the institution from which the previous data emanated, it was pointed out that the victim had registered an exit in a private car, the details of which were not specified. And, later, the Sub-Commissioner of the Investigative Police, Mario Enrique Guzmán Bustamante, stated in one of his declarations in the same criminal investigation referring to Horacio Cepeda that "surely this person left on foot." By this point, several contradictions were already evident.

But later, another fact was added that raised other contradictory points, which only served to demonstrate that the so-called official version of the exit from the country was implausible or false, and that it obeyed a maneuver to favor the impunity of those involved in the forced disappearance of the detained persons.

Indeed, news was picked up in the press that indicated, according to the Argentine Ministry of the Interior, that four Chileans: Horacio Cepeda, Luis Lazo, Héctor Véliz, and Edras Pinto, had entered Argentine territory on January 6, 1977, in a vehicle with Chilean license plate HG 19.

This information added more questions because, for example, regarding Héctor Véliz, the Chilean government claimed that he did not leave the country, while for the rest it did affirm the exit, but not that they had done so in the vehicle with Chilean license plate HG 19.

Without going any further, in relation to Horacio Cepeda: it was said that he left Chile, noting him on a route sheet with an indication of the vehicle with Argentine license plate 134487, and later it was stated that he surely left on foot.

Furthermore: it was judicially proven that the aforementioned Chilean license plate HG 19 was never sold by the Municipality of Santiago, to which it had been assigned, a license plate that for that same reason was annulled. (See the cases of Héctor Véliz, Luis Lazo, and Edras Pinto).

In the same criminal process, and before Judge Cerda, the same Sub-Commissioner of Investigations, then Chief of the Los Libertadores Outpost, questioned about points detected by said magistrate, for example, replied: "...I wrote the last line (the 13th, in which the victim and his data are registered) of the original route sheet...

I do not know how to answer why the Court asks me if the last line (the 13th) was written days after the rest of the aforementioned instrument; I say that that line was written on the same day, January 6, 1977.

I do not know why, according to what the Court puts to me, the identity of the passengers in lines 2, 4, 7, and 11 of that route sheet does not coincide. Nor can I explain the lack of correspondence between the vehicle data and those that appear included in that route sheet...".

And then, in general terms, since he was questioned about the route sheets in which the other detainees were noted, he stated: "...I categorically say that I never received superior instructions, nor orders, nor influences from friends or interested parties tending to produce alterations in the route sheets. Nor do I believe that this happened with any of my subordinates at that time...".

Regarding the last statement by said police officer, it is enough to take into consideration that in case file 2-77, Judge Cerda charged two Investigations officials who prepared route sheets with the crime of falsification of those instruments, as occurred in relation to the cases of Reinalda Pereira Plaza and Edras Pinto (for more background, see the account of Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza).

Judicial and/or Administrative Actions

On December 20, 1976, before the Santiago Court of Appeals, Horacio Cepeda's spouse filed a writ of amparo in his favor, which was registered under roll 1084-76, reporting the events that had occurred, and requested that the Ministry of the Interior and the DINA be officially notified regarding her husband. Regarding the request to notify the DINA, the Court resolved that it would rule later.

At the end of 24 days after the appeal was filed, the information provided by the Ministry of the Interior was certified: "he is not detained by order of that Ministry." On January 17, 1977, having seen what was reported by that Ministry, the Court rejected the writ of amparo, and regarding the request to notify the DINA, it argued that, as all information obtained from said Intelligence Directorate is provided by that State Ministry, that request would not be granted.

Without prejudice to the rejection of the habeas corpus, the Court ordered the background information to be sent to the Criminal Court to instruct a summary to investigate the possible commission of a crime in the disappearance. All of the above was sentenced by Ministers Servando Jordán, Germán Valenzuela, and the member lawyer Enrique Montaner.

In the appeal process before the Supreme Court, the need to notify the DINA about the victim's situation was insisted upon, but that Supreme Court, without ruling on that proposed diligence, proceeded to confirm what was ruled by the Santiago Court of Appeals on January 24, 1977, with Ministers Octavio Ramírez, Marcos Aburto, Estanislao Zúñiga, and member lawyers Darío Benavente and Raúl Rencoret concurring in that sense.

Ultimately, the case of this victim and that of other disappeared persons from the so-called group of thirteen was investigated in the aforementioned roll 2-77, which is discussed in the case of Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza.

Source: Vicariate of Solidarity (Vicaría de la Solidaridad)