The Renovación Nacional deputy for Chillán, Rosauro Martínez Labbé, rejects the accusations linking him to crimes committed during the military dictatorship. “My conscience is clear, I have nothing to hide,” he repeats every time he is asked about his past in the army and the CNI.

However, the stubborn denial of Martínez Labbé (now 63 years old) is beginning to crumble. The Valdivia Court of Appeals has granted the stripping of the parliamentarian’s parliamentary immunity; he is a former mayor of Chillán and a retired army major.

Martínez could be charged for his responsibility in the qualified homicides of Próspero Guzmán Soto, Patricio Calfuquir Hernández, and José Monsalve Sandoval, militants of the MIR, who were murdered on September 20, 1981, in the Remeco Alto sector, in the commune of Panguipulli.

The judicial resolution—appealed to the Supreme Court by the defense of the parliamentarian and former military officer—constitutes recognition of the persevering effort of the families, friends, and comrades of the murdered MIR militants. They have not ceased to struggle to achieve justice and thus put an end to the impunity surrounding this crime.

The resolution of the Valdivia court, adopted unanimously, indicates that the evidence gathered in the investigation is sufficient to support well-founded suspicions of Martínez Labbé’s participation and responsibility in the crimes imputed to him by the accusation.

The right-wing parliamentarian was commander of the 8th Commando Company of the Llancahue Battalion, dependent on the Fourth Army Division, and it was in that capacity that he committed the crimes.

The then-captain Martínez Labbé had the mission of directing and coordinating army troops, Carabineros, and members of the CNI in the area. He is accused of being the “author of the crime of qualified homicide of Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez, Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, and José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, which occurred on September 20, 1981, in the town of Remeco Alto.”

The court’s decision regarding the role played by the retired army major and Renovación Nacional deputy is based on information provided by the Chief of the Army General Staff, who confirmed that the commander of the 8th Commando Company, when the events occurred, was Captain Rosauro Martínez Labbé.

This was ratified by his own statement within the framework of the investigation substantiated by the Military Prosecutor’s Office, in which he acknowledges having been in command of the operation in Remeco Alto.

His statement describes the circumstances in which the MIR militants were killed. Furthermore, the ruling of the Valdivia Court points out that “to the above, we add the consistent testimonies of Eduardo Alberto Inostroza Reyes, Sergio Aliro Cárdenas Navarro, and Alfonso Rosas (the first two members of the army and the last of the Carabineros, Ed.

Note), who place Captain Martínez Labbé at the scene of the events and in charge of the military operation deployed in the town of Remeco Alto, and who describe, among other circumstances, the verbal order to open fire against the house inside which the three guerrillas were located.”

In accordance with the above foundations, the ruling continues, “and having verified in the present proceedings the concurrence of the requirements demanded by article 612 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to give rise to the formation of a case regarding the deputy Mr. Rosauro Martínez Labbé, the request for the stripping of immunity formulated by the plaintiffs will be granted.”

THE MIR GUERRILLA

At the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, Chile was a country occupied by its own armed forces. The civil-military dictatorship, relying on brutal repression, was carrying out a refoundational project.

To that end, it promulgated the 1980 Political Constitution which, with minor reforms, still governs us today. The dictatorship administered power with discretionary prerogatives; it decreed one state of exception after another, while expanding the powers of military courts.

At the same time, it reconfigured security agencies for a new phase of social and political control, following the massive repression of the early years that had weakened the political parties of the Left as a whole.

The anti-dictatorial resistance made immense efforts to give continuity to its struggle and intensify it. Human rights organizations and groups of families of the forcibly disappeared, political executions, and political prisoners strengthened the denunciation of the crimes.

Through their actions, they contributed to the international isolation of the dictatorship. Other social sectors showed initial levels of organization and resumed their struggles for demands.

While other parties of the Left attempted to reorganize in Chile or initiated an internal debate to incorporate a wider repertoire of forms of struggle, the MIR noted the refoundational character of the dictatorship and, with a high degree of will and determination, refined—not without errors and tensions—its own anti-dictatorial policy.

Despite the difficulties of enduring clandestinity, the MIR strove to resume its ties with social sectors where it had achieved a presence in the 70s. It deployed its first offensive actions of armed propaganda that stimulated the will to resist in various sectors of society.

The leadership of the MIR made the decision to reincorporate militants who had been pushed into exile back into the country. The return aimed to strengthen the organization in Chile and promote a higher level of struggle in the urban and rural areas.

Among the objectives was the installation, after an initial exploratory phase, of two guerrilla focal points. One in the Neltume area, in the vicinity of what was the Panguipulli Forestry and Lumber Complex, in the interior of Valdivia.

The other in the Nahuelbuta mountain range. The concept guiding this decision was that these territories could be established as eventual retreat zones for the persecuted, a place for instruction for new militiamen, and at the same time, consolidate themselves as a guerrilla force capable of contesting territory from the dictatorial State.

THE “OPERATION RETURN”

With formidable resolve, men and women, militants of the MIR, entered the Neltume area. A region formed by small villages in the heart of the mountain range. An area of forestry workers, peasants, and the Mapuche people in which the MIR had achieved notable political and social development before the 1973 military coup.

MIR militants, trained abroad, began exploring the terrain to build caches and delineate routes for the supply of weapons, ammunition, food, medicine, and other supplies to ensure survival in the mountains.

Those tasks took more than a year. Amidst very harsh weather conditions, they had built caches and established some camps. Despite the precautions in their movements, they were seen on more than one occasion by locals.

The difficult communications with the MIR leadership, along with new challenges that were emerging and the difficulties inherent to the terrain, prolonged the exploratory phase of the guerrilla. Striving to overcome the inconveniences, on June 27, 1981, near noon, thirteen practically unarmed guerrillas, who were in one of the camps near Lake Quilmo, were attacked by a patrol of the 8th Commando Company of the Llancahue Regiment, sent by Captain Rosauro Martínez Labbé.

Divided into two groups, they managed to break the army’s encirclement, and then tried to regroup to reach the caches where they kept a few weapons and supplies.

From that date on, an implacable persecution—by land and air—of the dispersed and unarmed guerrilla was developed. Army troops, Carabineros, and CNI agents were deployed in the Neltume area, causing terror among the locals. Numerous peasants were detained and tortured as alleged collaborators of the guerrilla.

“THE INTENTION WAS TO MURDER THEM”

While one group of MIR militants was assigned to resume contacts with the party leadership, another was assigned the mission of generating new support networks. Eight men, exhausted, hungry, and isolated, were in the mountains awaiting the results of the teams sent to the city.

The military encirclement was expanding and, through its actions, gave signs that it was operating on accurate information. Forced by illness and physical exhaustion, the MIR members decided to structure themselves into two groups with the intention of creating conditions to get the sick out of the area and break the army’s encirclement.

At the beginning of September 1981, the situation became unsustainable. Some militants had been detained and murdered, and others were retreating, pursued by the army, which at that time was coordinating all repressive forces in the area, including the CNI.

On September 19, 1981, José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, together with Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez and Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, arrived in Remeco Alto, at the modest home of Floridema Jaramillo, Monsalve Sandoval’s godmother.

She received and fed them, but could not overcome the fear that the military had unleashed on the local population, and she betrayed them. The three MIR members, tired, poorly armed, and weakened by hunger and illness, fell asleep in her house. At nightfall, the soldiers commanded by Captain Rosauro Martínez arrived.

For lawyer Magdalena Garcés, there is no doubt that the military operation was one of extermination and not of search and capture. She says that “this was an operation destined to eliminate the MIR militants who were in the area” and adds that “when the facts are analyzed, it is very clear that the purpose was to murder them.” She adds: “It is possible that one of the militants may have fired.

But the situation of malnutrition, fever, exhaustion, and poor physical condition of three people who were resting, compared to a numerically superior force with war weaponry in good condition, cannot be considered a confrontation.” There are witnesses who point out—affirms lawyer Magdalena Garcés—that the soldiers installed a .30 caliber machine gun that opened fire on the house and that between 30 and 40 troops participated.

Captain Rosauro Martínez, before giving the order to fire, told Floridema Jaramillo that they were going to destroy her house, but not to worry, as they were going to return it to her.

Patricio Calfuquir Henríquez, a 28-year-old electrician from Pitrufquén, had a high fever at the time of the attack on the house. Autopsy data indicate that he died while lying down. Próspero del Carmen Guzmán, a 27-year-old lumber worker born in Neltume, tried to leave the house with a white handkerchief in his hands: he died riddled with 28 bullets, according to the autopsy.

José Monsalve Sandoval, 27, a forestry worker from Neltume, managed to get out of the house but was wounded while running; his weapon fell, and witnesses state that he was finished off while taking refuge among some bushes.

STRIPPING OF THE DEPUTY’S IMMUNITY

Rosauro Martínez Labbé has reiterated his usual statements. “I want to express my tranquility and innocence,” he stated in a public declaration and filed an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The plaintiff lawyer, Magdalena Garcés, points out that “the stripping of immunity is a requirement to be able to criminally prosecute a parliamentarian. It is a preliminary procedure, or pre-trial, in which well-founded suspicions of his participation are exhibited.

For the indictment, well-founded presumptions are required, a higher standard of evidence. We are convinced that we have sufficient evidence to convict Rosauro Martínez. It is established that this is a homicide, that he participated in the events, and there are witnesses who saw him firing and directing the military contingent in Remeco Alto.” Lawyer Garcés adds that the victims’ families are beginning to glimpse glimmers of justice despite the pain it causes them to evoke the events, and she announces that the next step will be to obtain the indictment of the military and Carabineros personnel implicated in other actions that ended in the death of MIR militants in the Neltume area.

Source: Punto Final, May 30, 2014

Within the list of uniformed personnel recycled and covered up in the political world, in addition to the names historically known to the courts, there are names such as that of the controversial current mayor of Providencia, Cristián Labbé, that of Jaime García Covarrubias, advisor to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly School of the Americas), and the current Renovación Nacional deputy for the 41st district of Chillán, Rosauro Martínez Labbé.

Rosauro Martínez Labbé is a retired army officer. With the rank of lieutenant, he was a student at the School of the Americas, which the United States Pentagon maintains in Panama, intended to train and instruct the executors of its counterinsurgency and anti-subversive policies in Latin America.

After his special training, he joined the DINA. He remained in this agency until it changed its name to CNI.

Years later, already in retirement, Pinochet appointed him Mayor of Chillán; a position he held until 1992. From there, he began his political career, taking care to omit his time in the criminal repressive apparatus from his curriculum and background.

Furthermore, he does not mention his military career, and he had previously denied his membership in the DINA to the EFE agency. “He completed his primary education at the Colegio Seminario de Chillán and continued his secondary education at the Military School,” is the only reference the deputy makes to his uniformed past.

Launched from the mayoralty of Chillán into a political career, he ran and was elected deputy as an independent in the 1994 parliamentary election for the aforementioned district of Chillán. Later, he joined Renovación Nacional, the party of the current governing coalition. Since then, thanks to his RN membership and the ineffable binomial system, he has been re-elected for five consecutive terms.

However, his time in the DINA is not the only dark chapter of his uniformed trajectory that Deputy Martínez Labbé has kept hidden. Also, through sources linked to the families of the victims of the dictatorship, Resumen has collected evidence involving Deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé in the execution of at least three members of the MIR that occurred on September 20, 1981, in the town of Remeco, in Panguipulli, Valdivia province.

In that year, Rosauro Martínez Labbé held the rank of captain and commanded a special forces company of the Army based in Llancahue, Valdivia. This company was part of the elite forces mobilized by the army high command and the CNI toward the mountain area of Panguipulli, intended to annihilate a group of the MIR that was operating in the mountainous zone.

During the morning of September 20, the unit commanded by Rosauro Martínez Labbé surrounded a house in Remeco Alto where three MIR members fleeing the persecution of the army and the special troops of the CNI had arrived to ask for refuge and food.

Once the owner of the house, named Flora Jaramillo, and her son were outside the house, and after he had verified that the MIR members were sleeping inside, Rosauro Martínez ordered the attack on the house with machine-gun fire.

There, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez, José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, and Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Torres were killed. The house was totally destroyed, torn apart by bullets, to the point that the Army installed a new house for the affected woman who owned the house.

These events, which occurred in September 1981 and in which nine MIR militants were killed, are being investigated by Minister Emma Díaz Yévenes, of the Valdivia Court of Appeals, in her capacity as Minister in Extraordinary Visit for Human Rights violation cases.

In the case filed under Roll No. 1675-2003, Minister Díaz has attempted to interrogate the former uniformed officer Rosauro Martínez Labbé, but she has encountered the immunity that protects the deputies of the republic, and behind the legal shelters, official letters, and subterfuges offered by his current office, the former army officer has evaded facing justice, preserves his impunity, and escapes all harm.

Source: El Ciudadano, April 16, 2012

Justice investigates Deputy Rosauro Martínez for the death of MIR members in Neltume

Last week, PC deputy Hugo Gutiérrez filed a criminal complaint against more than a thousand personnel who belonged to the defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). He attached to the libel a document where the agents appear, among whom was the current RN parliamentarian, Rosauro Martínez.

Martínez was asked by the EFE agency about his past in the repressive service, but he denied having been framed there and limited himself to pointing out that he was assigned to the Army General Command. In many service records of other former DINA members, the same thing was written.

However, Martínez is currently being investigated in another case related to the homicides committed against a series of MIR militants, within the framework of the operation to annihilate the guerrilla that had installed itself in the Neltume area, in Valdivia.

The background information appears in the process substantiated by Minister Ema Díaz, who has been able to establish the participation not only of the CNI, but could also prove the participation of Martínez—nicknamed “pata de gallo” (rooster foot)—although until now he has not been prosecuted.

Surrender or lead

In 1981, Martínez was the head of the 8th Commando Company in Valdivia, and in that capacity, it was his duty to initiate the search for the MIR members in Neltume, and according to different statements contained in the file, he participated in a confrontation.

The first to mention Martínez was the former Carabinero Alfonso Rojas, who gave a statement on August 4, 2010.

According to the man in green, the military discovered a house where the MIR members were hiding. The Army troops, Rojas points out, shouted, “wretches, surrender, you are surrounded.”

Another who mentions Martínez in the Neltume area is the former CNI member and member of the Anti-Terrorist Unit who went to the guerrilla settlement, Luis Bascur Gaete.

Bascur recalls that in the area there was “an enormous contingent of military and air forces of the Army,” in addition to Carabineros and intelligence personnel. He recognized Martínez when asked by the justice system as the head of the Commando Unit that was in the area.

In the same company was the then-lieutenant Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross, who at the end of 1981 would join the CNI and who at the beginning of the 90s would become one of the first military officers to be framed in the Army’s Secret Espionage Service to take them out of Chile, hiding them in Uruguay, all with the aim of avoiding the action of justice in cases of human rights violations.

Sanhueza Ross assured that Martínez had the most seniority and that he gave him the order to carry out a task of “reconnaissance and patrolling” in the area. When they discovered a group of MIR members, another officer notified Rosauro Martínez by radio, who sent reinforcements “and a large operation began.”

According to the statement of Sanhueza Ross, the CNI that arrived at the scene contacted Martínez for all operational purposes.

Complication With the information gathered, the justice system ordered Martínez to be located. The parliamentarian, upon learning that he was required, declared by official letter because he had parliamentary immunity. His testimony has been in the file since November 9, 2011.

In it, he confirms that he was the head of the Valdivia commandos and that he established himself in Neltume to search for the MIR guerrillas and that he sent two patrols for the mission and assured that he did not have support from the CNI.

Another who recognizes him was Enrique Sandoval, a former DINA and former CNI member nicknamed “Pete el Negro,” like the character from the Disney comics, who recognized that after the discovery by the company in charge of Martínez, a contingent of the Army and the CNI traveled to the place.

Martínez’s work as a deputy and as a possible member of the Human Rights Commission of the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino) could be complicated. This week he must travel to Panama together with Jorge Burgos, reported the EFE agency last week. The trip was approved on April 4 by the Internal Regime Commission of the Corporation.

In fact, Martínez also received $16 million, with which he will hold another meeting of Parlatino in Punta Arenas, between April 26 and 27. On that occasion, Martínez will attend the commissions on Indigenous Peoples and Ethnicities and on Citizen Security, Combat, Prevention of Drug Trafficking, Terrorism, and Organized Crime.

For the lawyer and communist deputy Hugo Gutiérrez, sponsor of the legal action, it is “unacceptable” that Martínez serves as vice president of Parlatino and that he should be “removed” from that multilateral body.

Source: The Clinic, April 16, 2012

RN Deputy Rosauro Martínez to be investigated for the homicide of three MIR members during the dictatorship

RN Deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé must appear before the justice system due to a request for the stripping of his parliamentary immunity (desafuero) that will be filed in the coming days at the Valdivia Court of Appeals.

The action will be presented by Deputy Hugo Gutiérrez, a lawyer for human rights cases, who released information that would prove the connection of Deputy Rosauro Martínez, a retired Army captain, to the homicide of three MIR members in 1981.

The information arises from the investigations of former judge Alejandro Solís, who handled 90 human rights violation cases and issued convictions in 44 of them. From these inquiries emerged the acknowledgment by the Chilean Army that Rosauro Martínez, current deputy for Chillán, led the No. 8 Commando Group based in Valdivia as a captain in 1981, and in that capacity, he allegedly ordered the homicide of José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez, and Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, all members of the MIR.

With this information in hand, deputies Sergio Aguiló (of the Citizen Left) and Hugo Gutiérrez (of the Communist Party) will go to the Valdivia Court of Appeals with the purpose of having that body process a request for the stripping of immunity against Rosauro Martínez.

Hugo Gutiérrez stated that this is a necessary condition for investigating criminal responsibility in the case. "He has a link to the assassination of these three young MIR members; consequently, his responsibility must be investigated, and for that, his parliamentary immunity must be removed so that there is no obstacle to pursuing said responsibility," he explained.

Gutiérrez has already instructed his lawyer, Boris Paredes, to present this request for the stripping of immunity at the Valdivia Court, which could materialize next week. The PC parliamentarian explained that this preliminary phase is required, as the justice system cannot investigate Martínez while he holds parliamentary immunity.

"It is a request, a stripping of immunity that is made to the corresponding Court of Appeals, which will have to resolve whether there is sufficient evidence both in relation to the configuration of illicit acts and evidence that relates to the potential responsibility that may fall upon Rosauro Martínez in this illicit act," argued Gutiérrez.

"Author, accomplice, or accessory" is the responsibility they seek to establish regarding Deputy Martínez, whose service in the National Intelligence Center (the CNI) during the Pinochet dictatorship had already been established.

Regarding this, the person in question points out that "it is just a matter of seeing what is happening in Valparaíso, and this is not new; I believe it is typical of the election period we are in. This happened 22 years ago, and there have been two trials in which I was acquitted, so I do not give it much importance."

Deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé argued that he was acquitted by the justice system, although to date, he has not been investigated or prosecuted. The RN parliamentarian is seeking reelection at the end of this year for District 41, comprising Chillán, Coihueco, El Carmen, Pemuco, Pinto, San Ignacio, and Yungay, in the Bío Bío Region.

Source: Diario Uchile, May 16, 2013

The Hidden History of Commander Rosauro

Commander Rosauro lunged at the wooden door to kick it open, but his submachine gun jammed. Rosauro stepped back nervously and ordered his men to surround the humble wooden structure. Inside, MIR members Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, Próspero Guzmán Soto, and Patricio Calfuquir Henríquez were taking refuge.

The Chilean flag was still fluttering in the cool wind that morning of September 20, 1981, in Remeco Alto, a short distance from Neltume in the foothills of Valdivia. The air smelled of smoky firewood.

Rosauro, known in the Army as "El Mosquetón" (The Musket), spoke in a whisper to the owner of the house, Floridema Jaramillo Manquel. She informed him that the three young men were sleeping. They had arrived hungry and tired, asking for food, shelter, and beds to rest.

The Special Troops detachment of the No. 8 Commando Company of Valdivia, under the command of Commander Rosauro Martínez Labbé, had approached the house stealthily.

Some agents of the CNI's Anti-Terrorist Unit (UAT) were collaborating that morning with Commander Rosauro's men under the command of "El Monje Loco" (The Mad Monk). That is what the prisoners at the Pisagua camp in 1973 named the then-Army Lieutenant Conrado García Gaier.

Conrado had been the most feared officer there for his refined tortures. Sometimes he would wear a black cape and play the organ stolen from the parish before beginning the torments. Rosauro and "El Monje" were operating side-by-side that morning in search of their coveted prey.

Acting with them in the area was "Pete el Negro." The now-Army Captain Enrique Sandoval Arancibia was the head of the CNI's Red Brigade at the Borgoño barracks in Santiago, a group in charge of exterminating the MIR.

But Pete had another history. In October 1973, west of Santiago, while a lieutenant of the Yungay Regiment of San Felipe, he fired four shots into the head of 13-year-old Carlos Fariña Oyarce with his Steyr pistol. Afterward, he doused his body with gasoline and lit a match, according to the judicial investigation.

He was the youngest victim of the dictatorship. Later, he was an important advisor to former DINA agent Cristián Labbé Galilea when he was mayor of Providencia.

Commander Rosauro operated with them in the foothills in command of his detachment. It was the "Machete" Counter-Guerrilla Operation, as it was officially designated by the Army General Command.

In 1978, the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) initiated the "Operation Return to Chile" with the goal of fighting the dictatorship with arms. At the beginning of the 80s, just under twenty militants settled in Neltume and its surroundings to form the Toqui Lautaro Guerrilla Detachment.

Shortly before the assault on Doña Floridema's house, aided by local guides Dagoberto Pineda and José Flores, Rosauro, his men, and his UAT collaborators discovered the MIR members' "tatoo"—an underground shelter.

The militants managed to flee, but they lost everything they had: food, medicine, documents, and some weapons. From then on, they became hungry, wandering beings in the freezing landscapes of the foothills. They could no longer remain united, having to separate into small groups.

Although she was Monsalve's godmother, Floridema herself denounced the three militants by sending her 15-year-old son to notify the Carabineros at the Neltume station. They climbed into a vehicle and headed to the camp where Rosauro's detachment was staying. Sergeant Alfonso Rozas, head of the station, spoke directly with him and provided the information.

STRAIGHT TO THE HEAD

That September morning, at a signal from Rosauro, the commandos and UAT agents opened fire with automatic rifles and a .30 caliber machine gun installed in a strategic location. The wooden house was completely destroyed by the heavy-caliber fire.

Patricio Calfuquir and Próspero Guzmán died in just minutes, riddled with bullets. Guzmán's corpse had 28 projectile wounds, according to the autopsy report. Eugenio Sandoval was wounded but managed to flee through a back window.

Rosauro and a handful of his men found him a few meters away, still alive, hiding among some bamboo. They shot him straight in the head and killed him. A Puma helicopter sent from the IV Army Division in Valdivia by its commander, General Rolando Figueroa Quezada, collected the three corpses and took them to that city, delivering them to the local morgue.

Some time later, from Valdivia, Rosauro sent Floridema a basic, unlined shack through which the freezing wind blew. Floridema protested the dwelling, which did not manage to replace the quality of the one destroyed, but she obtained nothing more from the commander.

A few days before the assault on the house, they killed MIR member Raúl Obregón Torres. On September 17, 1981, they killed Pedro Yáñez Palacios. He was hiding in the hollow of a tree with a foot gangrenous and amputated due to frostbite. On November 28 of that year, they also killed Juan Ojeda Aguayo in the Quebrada Honda area.

Another officer who operated in the Neltume area under the orders of Commander Rosauro Martínez was Arturo Sanhueza Ros. A prominent repressor who belonged to the CNI, operating at the Borgoño barracks. "El Huiro," as his close associates call him, was part of the No. 8 Commando Company in Valdivia as an instructor.

His crimes lead to Operation Albania and the assassinations of journalist José Carrasco and three other opponents following the attack on Augusto Pinochet in 1986.

Sanhueza himself testified in the trial for the 1981 crimes in Neltume, which is being investigated by Judge Emma Díaz Yévenes of Valdivia. The officer was part of that detachment of the then-Army lieutenants Mario de Toro Gallardo, Iván Fuentes Sotomayor, Julio Arellano Garamund, and Claudio Peppi Onetto.

In the "Machete" Counter-Guerrilla Operation, Rosauro Martínez, with the rank of captain, had 192 personnel of that detachment under his command. It was composed of 4 lieutenants, 1 second lieutenant, 8 non-commissioned officers, 49 corporals, and 130 conscripts.

In the trial, non-commissioned officers Eduardo Inostroza Reyes and Luis Jerez Prussing state that, due to their testimonies, they especially fear their former commander, Rosauro Martínez.

According to what non-commissioned officer and CC8 member Luis Jerez Prussing said in the trial, a Televisión Nacional de Chile crew was part of Operation Machete.

CONGRATULATIONS

For his mission in Neltume in charge of the CCN°8, Commander Rosauro received congratulations from the Army stamped in his service record. On November 11, 1981, it states: "Extraordinary performance in command of the No. 8 Commando Company during counter-subversive combat actions in the Neltume area, where seven extremists resulted dead without Army casualties."

Once the Neltume operation was finished, Rosauro went to the United States Army South Command in Panama. For this, he received another congratulation in his service record in December 1981.

For these crimes, until now, Judge Emma Díaz maintains the current retired colonel Conrado García and retired captain Enrique Sandoval Arancibia under prosecution. This week, the request for the stripping of immunity of the current National Renewal deputy, Rosauro Martínez, is expected to be presented to the Valdivia Court of Appeals by lawyer Boris Paredes.

The intended stripping of immunity aims to subsequently request the prosecution of the parliamentarian for these crimes against humanity, which the magistrate has already classified as aggravated homicides.

Before joining the detachment that killed the MIR members in Neltume, Rosauro Martínez was part of the DINA. Although he has repeatedly denied it, the deputy reportedly holds number 77 on the list of 1,097 former agents that the Army delivered to the extraordinary visiting minister Alejandro Solís in 2008.

Until then, always denied to the courts, this is the only list the Army has compiled so far with the names of officers and non-commissioned officers who were part of the DINA.

The former agent and commander Rosauro has been a deputy since 1994, and this year he is running for reelection for District 41 of Chillán.

Source: El Mostrador, May 17, 2013

The Contradictions of Deputy Rosauro Martínez and His Time in the DINA

A commando trained in that specialty at the Paratroopers and Special Forces School of Peldehue, the National Renewal deputy for Chillán (District 41), Rosauro Martínez Labbé, is currently being questioned due to his participation in the execution of MIR militants who were organizing a guerrilla in the Neltume mountain range in 1981.

For this act, the lawyer for the Association of Families of Political Executions, Eduardo Contreras, requested the stripping of the parliamentarian's immunity before the Valdivia Court of Appeals (which has jurisdiction over the case), a request that was accepted for processing three months ago.

In my latest book, El despertar de los cuervos (Ceibo Ediciones), I disclosed part of Deputy Martínez Labbé's service record within the Army. The document is not related to his participation in Neltume, which occurred during the full operation of the CNI, but to his unknown work in the DINA under the command of Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda.

His case jumped to the press in 2012 when a list of 1,096 Army officials who participated in the DINA became known. The person who prepared said list and delivered it to the justice system was the Army General Staff.

Among the names was that of Rosauro Martínez Labbé. On that occasion, the deputy explained to the international news agency EFE: "I was never a DINA agent, although I was assigned to the Army General Command. I have never been involved in anything with the DINA. If my name is in that document, one would have to ask the Army what mission I carried out in the DINA."

The matter remained there, on ice. There was no way to contrast the published information with a document sufficiently conclusive for the deputy to refresh his memory.

However, that same year, the Army General Staff was more specific and sent the justice system the backing for the names contained in the list of 1,096 members of the institution who fulfilled roles within the DINA.

To achieve the objective, it attached the Institutional Service Records of the DINA officials, a document that, by excellence, records the complete history of each soldier, their assignments, merits, demerits, courses, and promotions. A kind of complete diary that allows each soldier to be evaluated for the purpose of processing promotions and also retirements.

The official document prepared by the Army regarding Rosauro Martínez indicates that he was assigned to the DINA on January 31, 1977. The header of his service record for that year says "National Intelligence Directorate (DINA)." Regarding his functions, it is specified that he was a member of the "immediate security team of the first lady." Following his signature, in the annual evaluation, is that of director Manuel Contreras.

The same sheet is also signed by his superior evaluator, Colonel Juan Saldías Stappung, in that year secretary general of the DINA and member of the Pedro Diet Lobos society, which financed clandestine operations abroad.

Regarding the denunciation made in El despertar de los cuervos, two weeks ago Martínez was interviewed by El Dínamo. Just as in 2012, his response was negative. "I have never belonged to the DINA," and he added: "That gentleman is mistaken; I do not know the book, but I have never belonged to the DINA."

According to the version of Deputy Martínez Labbé, he was only assigned to the General Command, alluding to his presidential security work, but he does not acknowledge having carried it out through the DINA.

This same role was performed by his colleague, the former mayor of Providencia, Cristián Labbé. The difference is that he does acknowledge that he performed his work through the terrorist organization.

The name of the brigade in charge of fulfilling this role was known as "Mulchén." In the service records of its members, the name is not mentioned, but simply "presidential security" or "first lady's security," just as it occurs with Rosauro Martínez.

But all DINA agents of that and other units know that presidential security was in charge of Mulchén and that it was composed of a select group of commandos from Peldehue.

The point is that the DINA's own deputy director, Pedro Espinoza Bravo, has declared judicially that Mulchén's work also included "clandestine operations," just as the Lautaro Brigade did, which was Contreras's guard and, at the same time, an extermination group at the Simón Bolívar barracks in La Reina.

Mulchén has been a ghost for the Chilean justice system. Its only "covert" action that was later "discovered" was the crime of the Spanish diplomat and communist militant Carmelo Soria, assassinated by Mulchén agents on July 16, 1976.

They tortured him, then broke his neck, and finally threw him down a ravine in the La Pirámide sector, with bottles of alcohol inside the vehicle, simulating that he had died in an accident. In the task, they allegedly received the cooperation of the Lautaro Brigade, their sister in "clandestine operations."

Another of the few traces that Mulchén has left regarding its "clandestine operations" is found in the judicial statement of the head of the Lautaro Brigade, Juan Morales Salgado, who placed Mulchén agents at the Simón Bolívar extermination center the same day they poisoned two Peruvian citizens there with sarin gas, a fact detailed in La danza de los cuervos.

It was a test, as it was one of the possibilities to eliminate former foreign minister Orlando Letelier. Finally, they opted for a bomb under his car, and agents from Lautaro and Mulchén participated in the action together.

In the period when Deputy Martínez was part of the DINA, the organization focused its efforts on finding the Communist Party and its funds, in order to continue financing its structure. In this context, the same day that a communist militant linked to finances, Jorge Troncoso Aguirre, disappeared—May 11, 1977—Rosauro Martínez Labbé received a congratulation in his service record: "Command conditions and initiative.

Congratulation: He was congratulated by the unit's daily order. For exceptional command conditions and for his special condition of knowing how to motivate his subordinates in a timely manner and obtain their best performance for the sake of fulfilling the received mission."

Although this does not constitute a crime, these types of annotations have served as a guide for ministers with exclusive dedication to crimes against humanity cases, since, out of ignorance or deliberation, on several occasions DINA agents accused in criminal cases during the dictatorship have received congratulations in their service records on the same date they were participants in crimes.

In the book, I also published part of Rosauro Martínez Labbé's service record during 1978, since at that date his direct evaluating officer was Jaime Lepe Orellana, involved in the crime of Carmelo Soria. He was the one who got into his car disguised as a Carabinero and deceived him to take him to the scene of the crime.

If the absolute denial that Deputy Rosauro Martínez has made regarding his participation in the DINA is true, then the document that the Army sent to the justice system must be false, and in said institution, they must have adulterated his signature and the place where he was assigned.

Is the deputy going to initiate actions against the Army? Can he show his service record and deny his participation there? Until now, Martínez, who has been in office for nineteen years and is running for reelection, has not given a coherent explanation regarding his assignment in 1977, as a counterpoint to the documents that place him in the DINA and, possibly, in the Mulchén Brigade.

When reviewing his official website in the Chamber of Deputies of Chile, it is striking that he does not even present himself as a former Army officer, the profession he held for a large part of his life. Instead, he indicates "farmer."

Source: El Mostrador, September 12, 2013

OPTION OPENED FOR STRIPPING OF IMMUNITY OF DEPUTY MARTÍNEZ FOR MIR DEATHS

Valdivia Court set March 24 for the hearing to analyze the request against the RN member in the case of the crime of 3 MIR members in Neltume. Legislator denied responsibility for the assassinations when he was an Army captain.

The assassinations of 3 members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in Neltume, a logging town east of Panguipulli, continue to haunt the National Renewal (RN) deputy, Rosauro Martínez, who may lose his immunity to be tried as the alleged author of the executions.

The Valdivia Court of Appeals set March 24 for the hearing in which it will hear the arguments for and against the measure, which, if approved, will allow the legislator for Chillán, who until now has denied such responsibility, to be prosecuted.

The appellate court of the capital of Los Ríos, according to what was reported by Radio Bio-Bío, established that the appointment will be at 12:00 hours that day and that, in case it does not take place for any legal reason, it will be postponed to the following Monday: that is, the 31st.

THE MACHETE OPERATION

The plaintiff lawyers requested the stripping of immunity in May 2013, accusing Rosauro of having led the operation in 1981 that culminated in the death of Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, Próspero Guzmán Soto, and Patricio Calfuquir Henríquez.

The three were part of about twenty militants who tried to organize a guerrilla in the Neltume sector, east of Valdivia, which was betrayed. In the pursuit, these 3, badly wounded and unarmed, were riddled with bullets inside the house (the last two) and in some bushes (Monsalve).

The now-deputy allegedly commanded a detachment of 192 Army commandos in "Operation Machete" counter-guerrilla, as the Army high command named the offensive against the nascent guerrilla group formed fundamentally by exiles who returned clandestinely.

Source: La Nación, March 14, 2014

In an investigation that has taken several years, the renowned chronicler Cristian Alarcón reconstructed step-by-step the plot that culminated in the death of 11 members of the MIR in the Neltume mountain range in 1981.

Among the testimonies he collected, those of five former conscripts who participated in Operation Machete are striking; they were witnesses to the hunt led by the then-major Rosauro Martínez, who is currently facing a request for the stripping of his parliamentary immunity for three homicides in Neltume.

One of the officers under his command was Luis Sanhueza Ros, who has been prosecuted and convicted for several crimes of the dictatorship.

Very little is known about the past of the re-elected deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé (RN), who appears as a leading figure in one of the stories of the dictatorship never told by its witnesses. The then-captain of the 8th Commando Company of the "Llancahue" Regiment of Valdivia was, according to an investigation based on the testimonies of five conscript soldiers from that special Army force, judicial documents, and interviews with survivors, the one who commanded a massacre in the surroundings of Neltume that was publicized as a great military triumph in 1981: the annihilation of a detachment of MIR guerrillas that had created a reckless focus of resistance to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Rosauro Martínez (63 years old), who has just been re-elected for his sixth parliamentary term, has denied all responsibility for the events, but the testimonies collected in this investigation provide previously unknown details of his key role in the Neltume massacre.

Everything happened in 1981, eleven years after Martínez joined the Army, whose ranks he left in 1987 with the rank of major. Shortly after, he was rewarded by Pinochet with his appointment as mayor of Chillán, the city he represents in Congress today, a position he held until 1992, the year in which the first municipal elections were held after the restoration of democracy.

The service record of the retired major Rosauro Martínez between 1973 and 1987 is a mystery. What is known with certainty is that most of the time he served in the Army, he did so in the secret services.

He fully utilized what he learned during his time at the School of the Americas, the U.S. counter-insurgency training center in Panama, not only in the Neltume massacre. CIPER heard a testimony that also accounts for his leading role in one of the most secret groups of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE) in the 80s.

Mysteries have also surrounded the Neltume massacre. Officially, it claimed 11 victims, but the testimonies collected in this investigation account for other deaths, who were allegedly peasants from the area.

As witnesses are interviewed, the number of corpses seen by the soldiers does not coincide with the official lists. It is therefore necessary for the justice system to clarify the identity of those dead whom no one wanted or was able to report in that impoverished mountain area.

THE AGRARIAN REFORM AT THE ORIGIN

The Revolutionary Peasant Movement, the rural arm of the MIR, played a leading role in the process of seizing timber estates in the Neltume area (about 900 kilometers from Santiago) during the government of Salvador Allende.

Between December 1968 and September 1973, a group of militants from the Austral University of Valdivia carried out work that managed to add the peasants and workers of the Panguipulli Forestry Complex (with more than 360 thousand hectares in the area) to the expropriation process promoted by the Agrarian Reform.

Among those workers, one earned fame: they called him "Comandante Pepe." His name was Gregorio José Liendo Vera, and he was executed by firing squad in October '73, along with 11 other leaders of the 22 estates expropriated from their owners by the Popular Unity government, at the shooting range of the Llancahue Regiment, following a War Council.

Eight years later, in that same regiment, some four hectares surrounded by a swamp that locals call Hualve, the then-Army officer Rosauro Martínez Labbé trained the conscripts who would form the base of Operation Counter-guerrilla Machete, the name given to the expedition in search of the MIR group.

The Neltume rebellion—led by "Comandante Pepe"—deserved special dedication from the military and timber and agricultural businessmen who came to power with Pinochet. There was no truce in that area for political repression.

Those who participated in the Agrarian Reform were either murdered, went through political imprisonment and torture, or managed to go into exile. Some of their younger leaders managed to escape to different cities in Europe, in Holland, Sweden, and France.

They were there in 1978 when they were summoned by the MIR leadership to a meeting in Prague, where they were notified that they would be protagonists of Operation Return.

That decision by the MIR leadership was part of other strategies, designed in the Soviet Union as well as in Cuba, which promoted the creation of revolutionary zones in Latin America. In Chile, Miguel Enríquez, the leader of the MIR murdered in 1974, promoted a Popular Resistance Movement that was to include the various parties and movements of the left and even the progressivism of the Christian Democrats.

The idea—explains history doctor Robinson Silva in his book Resistentes y clandestinos, la violencia política del MIR en la dictadura profunda (1978-1972)—was for that movement to be capable of "connecting the vanguard with the masses," to "thus create a revolutionary army that would confront the dictatorship."

A core part of Operation Return was the clandestine landing of a select group of MIR militants in Nahuelbuta, while others would settle in other cities such as Santiago, Valparaíso, and Concepción. Despite the conviction that emerges from the documents prepared by the MIR leadership for the return to Neltume, the fate of the mission would be very different.

CHOSEN FOR A HUNT

The soldiers who were interviewed for this investigation are now 52-year-old men. Almost all of them were born in 1961. That was the generational group that the then-lieutenant Mario De Toro Gallardo arrived to select at the fiscal gymnasium of La Unión in March 1981: sons of peasant families from the surroundings of Paillaco, Río Bueno, and Puerto Nuevo.

The previous year, there had been no recruitment in that area. For that reason, most of the conscripts were 19 years old. In the gymnasium of that quiet city of about 45,000 inhabitants and wooden houses, they were made to strip and run before the attentive gaze of the officers who were selecting the strongest.

One of them, whom we will call conscript E, remembered in his living room the green and intense eyes of Lieutenant De Toro:

-I had some nice mustaches at that time. The lieutenant looked at me and said: "You are going to go with us and over there I am going to cut those whiskers off you."

The subtle promise of Lieutenant De Toro was a soft introduction to what the chosen conscripts would live from that moment on:

-From the start, we knew what it was like to be active all the time. A quiet minute, without doing something, anything, and the slap would come. Because you blinked on guard duty, because you didn't do what was expected, because you were slow, because the uniform was poorly worn, for any little thing the punishments would come—says one of the former conscripts.

The stories are repeated with the same words and even the same tones and inflections. They speak similarly; they do it in their homes, in a woodshed, in a patio, or inside a car. Many of them flatly refused to talk about the history they do not forget.

But some chose to remember. Everyone asks that their names not be written. There were 130 of them, and they want to merge into that number, even though all the names remained etched in their minds: those of their instructors, those of the military men who tortured them, those who led them in the mountains, and those who killed the guerrillas.

All those names come out of their mouths. And among them all, the names of Arturo Sanhueza Ros (better known in the CNI as El Huiro, convicted and prosecuted for several murders), Mario de Toro Gallardo, Iván Fuentes Sotomayor, Claudio Peppi Oneto (a member of the DINA since its inception), Sergio Aguilera, Hilario Nahuelpán Huayquimil, José Miguel Basaúl, Julio Arellano Garamund, and Eduardo Inostroza are repeated.

And they all saw in the mountains the shadow of the leader of Operation Machete, which later gave way to Operation Pilmayquén: Rosauro Martínez Labbé, the captain.

-Our experience remained in silence for years. No one else spoke about what happened. I tried to look for material on the instructors we had at that time. There is nothing. I tried to look for Lieutenant Mario de Toro Gallardo in the documents. Nothing comes up. The only one I found is the current deputy for Chillán who was our captain: Rosauro Martínez Labbé—says one of the former conscripts.

This former conscript is the son of a union leader. He has been an honest and careful guide to contact his companions from the Commando Company, cushioning the suspicion that has stuck to their skin. He knows almost all of them.

They have been exchanging glances and words during these years at funerals and also at weddings and baptisms. They have met on the corners of Osorno or Valdivia, on buses, and in the evangelical churches to which many became faithful after having abandoned the alcohol into which some fell when they left conscription.

This search for the memory of the Neltume soldiers began three years ago, when this chronicler began the investigation for a book, still in process, that attempts to reconstruct the events.

CHOSEN TO DIE

The MIR guerrillas were mostly young. Five of them had been timber workers at the Panguipulli Complex and later went into exile. René Bravo (25 years old), Julio Riffo (30), Próspero Guzmán (27), and Juan Ojeda (27) lived in Holland; José Monsalve (27) in Canada; Raúl Obregón (31) in Sweden; Pedro Yáñez (31) was born in Constitución and came from France.

Two of the men sent to Chile via Neuquén (Argentina) to settle in the mountains—Luis Quinchalí (38) and José Campos (30)—were from Temuco. Quinchalí came from Holland and Campos from Norway. Both were detained by Argentine gendarmes.

Of the list of eleven MIR members killed in Neltume, they are the only ones who did not fall under the machine-gun fire of the detachment commanded by Rosauro Martínez. Their companions believe they were handed over to Chilean military personnel. They are still among the forcibly disappeared.

Patricio Calfuquir (28) was originally from Pitrufquén and Miguel Cabrera (30), the leader of the entire group, from Temuco. Cabrera, better known as Paine, had lived for two years in a Dutch city near Utrecht.

The group left from Paris toward Cuba in March '79, in several batches. There, they trained in Vietnamese techniques for rural guerrilla warfare. There were 25 of them, mostly men, although there were a few women in what very soon was called the Toqui Lautaro Guerrilla Detachment.

There, they forged their mettle and learned, among other things, to dig shelters in the earth: the "tatús." The story is told in an epic key by some of the survivors in a well-written book: Guerrilla en Neltume. Una historia de lucha y resistencia en el sur chileno. It was published by Lom and signed by the Neltume Memory Committee.

Some survivors do not subscribe to everything the book tells. Among others, Elsa, the only woman who was in the mountains for months and who came down from the camp before the military—half a dozen divisions armed for war—burst in.

The differences and nuances with the story that has been told are related to the responsibility of the MIR leaders who orchestrated Operation Return, and to the scarce material, political, and human support that those who ventured into Neltume had.

Two facts are repeated in the testimonies of the few survivors: they were never allowed to arm themselves, and they were not allowed to make contact with the peasants in the area. The two peremptory instructions were ultimately key to the defeat and serve to understand the level of weakness with which the guerrillas faced the Army.

In February 2007, the head of what was the military commission of the MIR, Hernán Aguiló, made a mea culpa in La Nación Domingo, in which he acknowledges that the risky military gamble of creating a guerrilla focus in Neltume had very serious human costs for hundreds of idealistic combatants. "It was an act of voluntarism on the part of all of us to propose that the MIR should not seek asylum.

And Miguel Enríquez spearheaded that process," said Aguiló. The biggest mistake made, he stated, was "organizing logistical support in the form of a facade without insertion into the masses. The errors were of such magnitude that sometimes the social base of support was the relative of a forcibly disappeared person. This is the case of Neltume."

When on Saturday, June 27, 1981, a patrol of the 8th Commando Company of the Llancahue Regiment, sent by Rosauro Martínez Labbé, discovered them near Lake Quilmo, the 12 MIR members who were in the camp had no choice but to run in a flock toward the quilas (bamboo thickets) around the tents and escape on foot.

Only Miguel Cabrera and his second-in-command, Raúl Obregón, knew that the FAL rifles and ammunition—as scarce as the food—were in one of the seven tatús they managed to build a day's fast march away, in another corner of the cold, snowy, and harsh mountain.

A DEAD MAN IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY

At the beginning of this investigation, it seemed improbable that the man dead from a gunshot to the head, whom the commanders were displaying at the end of June '81 when the soldiers were arriving at the mountain, had existed.

Because the military took 63 days to manage to catch two of the MIR members on August 29—René Bravo and Julio Riffo—and only on September 13 did they riddle the first guerrilla with bullets. During that period, the military harassed the residents of the area and tortured them to reveal the whereabouts of those sought: they believed that the MIR group had made contact with them and were surviving in the mountains thanks to their help.

It is probable, then, that the dead man displayed by the commanders to the conscripts was a peasant whom no one ever claimed and who, for that very reason, does not appear in the lists of victims of the Rettig Report nor in the lists of the forcibly disappeared.

After the interviews with five soldiers, we are certain that this dead man does not match any of the list of MIR members killed in that operation. Everyone saw him. Seeing him was the baptism to begin the action of Operation Machete. As the soldiers' testimonies are cross-referenced, new victims emerge. When counting the fallen, there are too many dead.

Former conscript A has a powerful memory: he keeps details that surprise his two companions, whom we will call B and C. Sitting at the table in the house of one of them, in Paillaco, he remembers the "Casa Hilton," or "Rancho Hilton," as they called the base of operations that was installed in the mountains, in Remeco Alto, between Neltume and Liquiñe.

There was also the river in whose cold waters they were forced to bathe in the middle of winter to keep morale high. Former conscript A was stationed there one day, on guard duty with another soldier, between three and four in the afternoon:

-It was drizzling, it was very cold, and in the distance, we saw that they were dragging a man, tied by his hands or neck to a black horse. They tied him to a tree. He was already wounded, bitten by a dog. I only remember his face of pain and the voice of command with which they ordered the German shepherd dog to attack him.

The account of A coincides with that of two other conscripts who, at different times, saw the peasant who was being interrogated while being bitten by the dog. Another soldier saw him arrive at the regiment in Valdivia.

He allegedly died there. "The dog was from the Valdivia CNI; they called it Casán," says the former conscript, who immediately launches into peasant humor: "We laughed at that dog: on patrols, it would be left kicking in the air, hanging from the quilas, since we would cut them with the machete higher than the height of its paws."

While the Army tortured peasants trying to get information to locate the twelve MIR members who escaped on June 27, the guerrillas, divided into one group under the command of Miguel Cabrera and the other under the command of Patricio Calfuquir, were escaping with one goal: to reach the rifles and the little food they kept in two tatús conditioned during that year they had spent in the mountains.

The first explorations of the guerrilla detachment were in February 1980, and the first camps were installed in July of that year. In August, a contingent arrived, and finally, in October, Cabrera, Paine, went into the mountains.

The problems had been increasing, especially due to the difficulty of obtaining food: as they went deeper into the mountain range, the food was left further behind. The guerrillas' stomachs began to shrink.

Also the thickness of their bodies. The energy expenditure to move through those mountains was greater than what they had consumed in the camp near Havana where they trained in Cuban heat. But no deprivation experienced by them before could give them an idea of the cold and hunger they would come to suffer when they were discovered by the military and in just a second lost their shelter, equipment, maps, and all their food.

Thirty-two years later, the former conscripts gathered in Paillaco also talk about food when remembering the training in the Commando Company. The first month, they too knew a terrifying hunger, in addition to the character of each instructor and their specific weight when hitting with an open palm, with the rifle butt, or with a fist.

The day they received visitors for the first time, they were warned: they could barely touch the food their mothers had prepared. None of them listened. The 130 of them had a feast of empanadas, pork, ducks and chickens from their own coops, calzones rotos, mote con huesillos, leches asadas, and milhojas cake.

When their mothers left and they returned to the barracks, they heard the shout of the lieutenants under the command of Rosauro Martínez. "Body to the ground. Elbow and toe. Sit-ups. One hundred. Arm strength.

Frog jumps. One hundred." Until each of the conscripts had vomited everything they had eaten, they did not stop. Rosauro's instructors were tough guys, trained like him in the U.S. techniques with which the soldiers who had gone to lose in Vietnam were trained. And they repeated the method.

Former conscript A often dreams of a peasant he had to guard while they tortured him:

-One day we found a peasant in the northern sector of Remeco Alto, toward the side of Lake Quilmo. He was coming on horseback with a quintal of flour on his back. We took him prisoner with Lieutenant Claudio Peppi Onetto.

He was ordered to get off the horse, and when he was asked for his identity, one of the surnames matched one of those they were looking for. We took him to Remeco, to an area where there are sheds. They handed him a shovel and ordered him to start digging, that if he didn't talk and say where the others were, they were going to bury him right there.

He didn't say anything. He didn't know anything. He was just a peasant. He dug and cried in silence. They forced us to give him peanut butter, which came in the Army's NA rations (U.S. supplies), and water crackers.

He had to eat the mixture and swallow quickly, and between his crying and eating, his saliva would run out and he would choke. In the end, they took the little man away and we didn't know what happened to him.

THE COLD THAT AMPUTATES

There were days and nights of cold and hunger left until the end. The deaths would follow one another without pause after August 29. Two thousand men trained for war—Martínez Labbé's Commando Company, those of the Anti-Terrorist Unit (UAT) led by Captain Conrado García (prosecuted for three of the Neltume homicides), those of the Cazadores Regiment, those of the Maturana, those of the CNI's Blue Brigade (created especially to eliminate the MIR)—had not been able, over the course of 63 days, to even wound one of the twelve guerrillas.

The mountain had swallowed them.

If the guerrillas had not persisted in their adventure, if they had not believed that even broken and weakened as they were they could get help from their leaders in Santiago to resist, they could have walked back to Argentina, or they could have gradually moved toward "the plain," as they call the less steep land that descends toward Panguipulli, Temuco, and Valdivia up there.

Lost in two patrols, those of the Toqui Lautaro finally managed to meet in one of the shelters 42 days after they were discovered. They had managed to get the rifles that Paine kept in a tatú, but in the reserves, there were barely a couple of kilos of rice, a bag of beans, and some powdered milk.

For weeks, they ate a kind of soup in which each one got ten beans. And then, for dessert, a teaspoon of sugar. Hunger thinned them to the bone and took away their defenses; they got sick. The cold gangrened a foot of Pedro Yáñez until it had to be amputated with a pocketknife. "Trench foot" began to devour several of them: an infection that comes with low temperatures and attacks the toes.

In Yáñez's boot, which oozed at every step, the others saw their own destiny. All the survivors agree: not even in the most painful of moments were there complaints.

At the end of August, they decided: five of them had to go down to look for help. They divided into two groups: three on one side, and Riffo and Bravo on the other. While the trio managed to bypass the towns and reach Temuco, the other two advanced without problems to Huellalhue, a spot before Lanco.

Hunger pushed them toward the enemy. They asked for food at a country house. The locals helped them. They recommended a nearby corner to rest. They also notified the police. They only had one pistol with one magazine.

They didn't get to use it. Detained, they were taken to Lanco and then to Valdivia. Two soldiers claim to have seen them there because they had to guard them when they locked them in some rooms. Later, they saw when they were taken away in a helicopter.

-No one doubts that they were transferred by the CNI to Santiago to be tortured. It is almost the only thing we don't have proof of. But a MIR member who was later interrogated by the same torturers said that they told him he had talked very soon, not like his companions from Neltume whom they had to hit hard for many days until they broke them—says a source who knows the plot of this story well.

It is not necessary to detail the cruelty of the CNI's interrogations. The young Riffo and Bravo knew all the nuances of pain. And in those conditions, they were taken back to Neltume to guide the steps of those who were looking for their companions who were waiting for help there.

The military knew that without torture, there was no chance of reaching the rest. The failure of their massive military action was unpresentable before the Army high command. To such an extent did the detention of Bravo and Riffo change things that Operation Counter-guerrilla Machete ended on August 29. And then Operation Pilmayquén began.

THE CNI IN THE HUNT

In the case investigated by Emma Díaz, the extraordinary visiting minister of the Valdivia Court of Appeals (Case File 1675-2003), the testimonies of some military personnel who participated in the operation are accumulated. At least three admit the same thing that conscript E asserts, only they omit data:

-They took us to some cabins in the Termas de Liquiñe. A patrol of the Commando Company—under the command of Mosquetón (Rosauro Martínez)—was there with the CNI. And they had two young men there. They took those two cabros (lads) out to look for their companions in the mountains—former conscript E told CIPER.

To that testimony is added that of former conscript D, interviewed in La Unión two years ago: "In September, they had both of them walking through the mountains for several days so that they would meet their guerrilla companions. They tied one with a rope to his waist and let him go several meters ahead. That was how he ended up finding the others and one of them came out dead."

What followed is one of the most difficult passages of this story to reconstruct. On September 13, one of the young men in the hands of Mosquetón and the CNI could not avoid the encounter with his companions, the same ones who had decided several weeks earlier that they two and another group of three would leave for the plain to look for help.

Those who remained in the mountains, desperate from hunger and illness, were waiting for help from the MIR leadership. The young guerrilla whistled the song of a southern bird just as it had been agreed.

The others came out to meet him. And the shooting began. The Army's rifles and machine guns fired. There were two from the MIR: they responded, but above all, they tried to escape. The military's superiority in force was total. Even so, the ambush was not successful: they only hit one. There, they killed Raúl Obregón Torres.

The rest of the MIR detachment continued advancing. Pedro Yáñez Palacios no longer wanted to continue: the amputation had not stopped the infection. Under the trunk of a tree that served as a hiding place, he stayed with a FAL rifle and a magazine.

He spent several days there. In the end, he was delirious with pain. A patrol led by Lieutenant Mario de Toro Gallardo heard him. Former conscript E, the same one who knew the rigor of Toro Gallardo from the beginning, says that it was that lieutenant who almost sliced him in half with his machine gun. With Yáñez, there were already two killed.

De Toro is another of the military commanders whom, like Rosauro Martínez, the soldiers have not been able to forget. Not only because of that burst that almost split in two the already dismembered body of Yáñez. Married to a former queen of Valdivia...

His imposing stature, his blond hair, and his large green eyes that stared fixedly ahead were less striking than the scars he displayed on his hands, which to this day cause shivers among the former conscripts.

A motorcycle accident, one of his favorite hobbies, was the origin, and he did not hide them. He knew the effect his large hands had on the soldiers he commanded, as well as his exuberant biceps.

“He looked like a movie actor. That was the impression he left us when he came to recruit us in La Unión. It was impressive to see him giving orders that first day he received us in the gym. My last image of him is giving orders in one of the last weeks I was in the mountains.

It was at a camp near Choshuenco. He was quite crazy, but I must say that he looked at the soldier with a certain humanity. He was crazy, like Bruce Willis in Die Hard...” says another of the former conscripts.

ROSAURO AND THE GUIDE

When Pedro Yáñez was murdered, Captain Rosauro Martínez followed the entire development of the operation from the house of the guide who led them through the mountain: Juan de Dios Peña, an elderly man whom the military called “Tata.” Interviewed by María José Flores, a history professor at the Universidad de Los Lagos and author of a thesis on what happened in Neltume, his son, Israel Enrique Peña Patiño, remembered the then-young Rosauro Martínez:

“Captain Martínez was the one in charge. Because my dad worked with them, there was special protection over us; they watched over us at night.”

Israel Peña was in the first grade and knows it was spring because the incidents were after the last snowfall of that year. Martínez spent a lot of time at his house waiting for his men to find the guerrillas.

In gratitude, Martínez himself visited “Tata” Peña a year later and brought him a photograph as a gift, in which the guide can be seen surrounded by soldiers marching through the mountains. This is how he remembers that moment: “The captain took it upon himself to take the photo and give it to my dad. He told him: ‘Tata, here I bring you a souvenir so you never forget your work in Neltume.’”

During that visit, Martínez offered the guide a furnished house, a pension, and schooling for his son, the boy he had taught to read. But Juan de Dios Peña did not want it. “He didn’t accept, because being a guide wasn’t something he did of his own free will, but rather he was ‘voluntarily forced,’ as my dad used to say,” his son recounted.

Israel Peña also remembers that in September of ‘81, when some snow still whitened the mountain peak, his father arrived home and said they had killed three people in Remeco, at the house of Mrs. Floridema Jaramillo.

The woman was the godmother of José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval. José, born in Neltume, was escaping the military cordon along with Patricio Calfuquir Henríquez and Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Torres. They were driven by starvation.

Calfuquir had infected feet and was burning with fever. Cornered, they decided to break the MIR leadership’s mandate: do not make contact with locals. Mrs. “Flora” had seen José grow up; she was his godmother, her mother’s close friend: she had to help him.

She opened the door for them, made them sopaipillas, and even lent her bed to the sick man. But terrified—she later said—she did what Captain Martínez asked all the peasants to do: notify them if they saw the wanted men. She sent her 15-year-old son, Juan Carlos, to alert the carabineros. The pacos went on to notify Captain Martínez, who was the first to arrive at the house.

In the case in which lawyers Magdalena Garcés and Vladimir Riesco requested the stripping of Deputy Rosauro Martínez’s parliamentary immunity, this scene that occurred 32 years ago is key. The plaintiffs are the families of the three young MIR members: they accuse the deputy of qualified homicide aggravated by premeditation and treachery.

The evidence, according to the lawyers, makes it clear that Martínez Labbé led a commando operation not to arrest the MIR members, but to murder them. Which he did with “overwhelming superiority of force.” And that, as it was impossible for the victims to defend themselves with any success, they “acted on a sure thing.” In fact, in that operation, no military personnel or soldier was scratched by a shot from a MIR member’s FAL rifle.

The only casualties were a conscript killed by a burst of fire that accidentally escaped an officer, and a sergeant who committed suicide.

One of the witnesses who incriminates Martínez Labbé is Carabineros Sergeant Alfonso Rosas, head of the Neltume Detachment. In his statement, he says that when he arrived at the house of José’s godmother, the captain spoke with Flora.

The woman informed him that the guerrillas were sleeping. Martínez ordered the place to be surrounded. Alfonso Rosas stayed at the back of the house. Martínez circled it through the hill to take up a position in the front. And there they stayed, waiting for more than 30 men from the Llancahue Commando Company. Then they attacked.

Two conscripts who participated in that operation live in La Unión. When we contacted them, they refused to speak. But memory has other owners. The conscripts interviewed by CIPER remember: “They didn’t just see Martínez Labbé giving orders; he also fired.

Everyone remembers it clearly, because when he wanted to fire his machine gun, it jammed. So, he threw it to the side and took the one carried by the soldier who was with him, Inostroza, and the shooting started,” recounts former conscript B.

Inostroza exists. His name is Eduardo Alberto Inostroza Reyes and he was a 1st Corporal in the Commando Company. In his judicial statement, the corporal lets slip: “A young man came out of the house and was hit by someone from the arriving patrol.

Another came out through a window and managed to escape, although he was apparently shot in the back.” Inostroza thus accounts for the end of Calfuquir, who died having spent the magazine of his FAL. The autopsy indicated a shattered skull.

That of Próspero Guzmán, the young man who came out the front of the house, indicates that he received 28 submachine gun bullets and his skull was also destroyed.

Flora’s godson, José Monsalve, escaped wounded through the mountains until he could no longer advance. He was left lying in a ravine. Inostroza’s statement coincides with that of Juan Carlos, the young man who ran to warn the carabineros of the presence of the guerrillas.

Juan Carlos declared what Captain Rosauro Martínez told his mother: “Ma’am, we are going to destroy your house, but we will give it back to you.” Immediately after, “the captain gave the order to fire.” Juan Carlos also remembered how José Monsalve died, whom he saw crawling wounded to the ravine:

–The soldiers shot him and killed him right there, at a distance of five meters or so. He was curled up under some bamboo plants and did not have the rifle in his hands, as it was about five meters away next to a fuchsia bush. They didn’t tell him to surrender because the person was curled up under the bamboo, wounded, as if hiding, and he didn’t fire at the soldiers.

THE LIQUIÑE THERMAL BATHS BARRACKS

Former conscript D also has nightmares in the mountains. With the mark of the years on his face and in his memory, he agrees to tell the story while sitting in his car. The long version, all at once. It is as if he had been there waiting for someone to ask him: “The boss told us: ‘Soldiers, it is ugly to kill each other among Chileans, but it must be done because these guys cannot be left alive.’” The phrase was uttered on September 21, ‘81.

They were the last deaths of a week that had begun on the 13th with that of Raúl Obregón in the ambush; and continued with the massacre at Flora Jaramillo’s house. For several days, soldier D and at least three military personnel who testified before the justice system saw Julio Riffo and René Bravo held captive by the men of Rosauro Martínez and the CNI: they slept in the cabins of the Liquiñe Thermal Baths, used as a military camp.

The detainees were led, says the soldier, by Arturo Sanhuesa Ros, one of Martínez Labbé’s lieutenants.

–Where did you see them? –They were dragging those three all over the mountain. They took them up, there was a little path, like a trail, and there they made them run over there with a 20-meter rope, looking for their friends. They asked them to look for their friends so they could make contact. –Who was the boss? –Sanhueza. Lieutenant Sanhuesa Ros.

32 years passed. Life after “Operation Pilmaiquén” also continued for the military. Rosauro Martínez has been the one who has had the most success, to the point of being an honorable deputy for the last twenty years.

Mario de Toro Gallardo continued to rise in the Army without being questioned. In 2002, he was still there as commander of the Cazadores Regiment (Armored Cavalry Regiment No. 2). Sanhuesa Ros was rewarded for his performance in the mountains with a promotion and continued his path in the CNI.

He became “El Huiro,” head of the CNI’s Blue Brigade, whose main task was to eliminate the MIR. He was prosecuted as one of the murderers of the Análisis magazine journalist, José Carrasco Tapia, and for the crimes of Operation Albania, among others.

Former conscript D remembers the cold of that September of 1981. The snow that covered everything in that area near Liquiñe. He was with two other conscripts from the Commando Company under the command of Martínez Labbé when a Toyota pickup truck arrived, from which three men were taken down. “We talked to one of them and asked him why he was limping.

He told us he had frostbite on his feet, on his big toe... but that toe had already disappeared. There were three prisoners, two were guerrillas and the third was a peasant who said and repeated that he had only given them medicine.”

Everything indicates that the two guerrillas were Riffo and Bravo. But there is no clue, no indication about the identity of the third man, the peasant. He is another surplus death. A death that does not appear on any list of victims of the dictatorship.

–Where did they execute them? –There, in Liquiñe, about five kilometers back. It was there on a cliff. It is a pre-cordilleran road, just a trail. They took them down from the big Toyota with their cross on their shoulders.

It was just like in those movies where you see Jesus Christ walking to Calvary. Exactly like that. They were crosses made of guaye wood, which they tied to their bodies with wire. They tied them from here (he points to one wrist and makes the gesture of tying the other wrist).

“It is ugly to kill each other among Chileans. You haven’t seen anything!” the head of the operation, CNI officer Molina, told them. The conscripts heard the shots, and then it was their job to bury them. “We took them off the cross and wrapped them in polyethylene. I was very afraid.”

–What were you afraid of? –What do you think, man! Of the dead! We had to wait for them to come and get them. Day and night we had to be with them dead. They had them buried in the snow there for a week before they took them away in a helicopter.

Source: Ciperchile.cl, March 21, 2014

Rosauro Martínez Stripped of Immunity for Murder of MIR Members in Neltume

Deputy placed at the disposal of the courts to be investigated in the complaint against him for his eventual participation in the 1981 operation when he was Commander of the Llancahue Battalion.

A unanimous ruling by the Plenary of the Valdivia Court of Appeals accepted this Monday the request to strip the immunity of RN Deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé, who is being investigated for his eventual responsibility in the “qualified homicides” of 3 MIR militants in the Remeco Alto sector, near Neltume, east of Panguipulli.

The sentence, which approved the request of the visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes, establishes that there are well-founded suspicions of his participation as commander of an Army battalion in the operation that ended the lives of Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Hernández, and José Eduardo Monsalve Sandoval on September 20, 1981.

Martínez, who in the midst of the process asserted his innocence and accused the Communist Party of being behind the request to strip his immunity, will have to answer for his eventual command responsibility as head of the 8th Commando Company of the Llancahue Battalion.

The sentence of the appellate court maintains that the background information of the investigation, so far, is sufficient to have well-founded suspicions of Martínez Labbé’s participation in the imputed crimes, due to his eventual command responsibility as Commander of the 8th Commando Company of the Llancahue Battalion, dependent on the Fourth Army Division.

IDENTIFIED AS THE ONE WHO ORDERED TO OPEN FIRE

In addition to his accredited position, the ruling states that there is evidence against him, including “the consistent testimonies of Eduardo Alberto Inostroza Reyes and Sergio Aliro Cárdenas Navarro, and the statements of the accused himself in the case substantiated before the Military Prosecutor’s Office.”

Regarding his direct participation, it also cites “his own judicial statement within the framework of the investigation (...) in which he acknowledges having been in command of the operation and describes the circumstances in which the three guerrillas identified above were killed.”

“To the above, the consistent testimonies of Eduardo Alberto Inostroza Reyes, Sergio Aliro Cárdenas Navarro, and Alfonso Rosas are added, who place Captain Martínez Labbé at the scene of the events and in charge of the military operation deployed in the town of Remeco Alto, and who describe, among other circumstances, the verbal order to open fire against the house inside which the three guerrillas were located,” the ruling emphasizes.

SECRET OFFICIAL DOCUMENT FOR OPERATION MACHETE IS DISPOSED

The participation of that battalion in the operation against the guerrilla group that the MIR attempted to form in the Valdivian foothills is indicated to be accredited by an official document and a file “that account for the secret order that the 8th Commando Company was to execute under its Commander in order to neutralize the guerrilla group that intended to operate in the Neltume mountain area.”

That secret official document, the resolution highlights, authorizes “the use of counter-guerrilla techniques within the framework of the so-called ‘Operation Machete,’ a fact that is also endorsed by the testimonies referred to above.”

Source: La Nación, May 12, 2014

Justice strips RN deputy Rosauro Martínez of immunity for murder of MIR members while he was in charge of a military commando in Valdivia

In a unanimous ruling, the plenary of the Court of Appeals of the capital of Los Ríos accepted the request of the visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes, who is investigating human rights violations in Neltume, when the legislator, in his capacity as an Army commander and under the nickname “El Mosquetón,” was in 1981 in command of the military unit that committed the murders.

The Valdivia Court of Appeals resolved this Monday to strip RN deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé of his immunity, due to the investigation against him for the qualified homicides of MIR militants Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Hernández, and José Eduardo Monsalve Sandoval, which occurred on September 20, 1981, in the Remeco Alto sector, Panguipulli commune.

The details of the case were published in May of last year by El Mostrador in an article titled “The Hidden History of Commander Rosauro.”

In a unanimous ruling, the Plenary of the appellate court accepted the request of the visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes, who is investigating human rights violations in the jurisdiction of Valdivia.

The sentence maintains that the background information of the investigation, so far, is sufficient to have well-founded suspicions of the parliamentarian’s participation in the aforementioned crimes from a dual perspective: his direct participation in the events and his eventual command responsibility in his capacity as Commander of the 8th Commando Company of the Llancahue Battalion, dependent on the Fourth Army Division.

“Relevant is the official document on page 1,085 in which the Chief of the Army General Staff reports that the commander of the 8th Commando Company, at the date of the events, was precisely Captain Rosauro Martínez Labbé, a circumstance that is endorsed by the consistent testimonies of Eduardo Alberto Inostroza Reyes and Sergio Aliro Cárdenas Navarro, and by the statements of the accused himself in the case substantiated before the Military Prosecutor’s Office,” the ruling says.

It adds that regarding the participation of said Company “in the operation carried out in the town of Remeco Alto, the official document and attached file on pages 828 and 829 are pertinent, which account for the secret order that the 8th Commando Company was to execute under its Commander in order to neutralize the guerrilla group that intended to operate in the Neltume mountain area, authorizing, to that effect, the use of counter-guerrilla techniques within the framework of the so-called ‘Operation Machete,’ a fact that is also endorsed by the testimonies referred to above.”

Finally, it indicates that regarding Martínez’s participation in said military operation, “there is his own judicial statement within the framework of the investigation substantiated by the Military Prosecutor’s Office in case File No. 551-1.981, in which he acknowledges having been in command of the operation and describes the circumstances in which the three guerrillas identified above were killed.”

Source: El Mostrador, May 12, 2014

Justice strips RN deputy Rosauro Martínez of immunity for murder of MIR members in Neltume

In a unanimous ruling, the plenary of the Valdivia Court of Appeals accepted the request of the visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes, who is investigating human rights violations in Neltume, when the legislator, in his capacity as an Army commander, was in command of the military unit that committed the murders of three MIR members in the mountain area of that region.

The deputy belonging to the ranks of Renovación Nacional is accused of the homicide of three MIR members that occurred in the town of Neltume, Los Ríos region, in 1981, and was finally stripped of his immunity by the Valdivia Court of Appeals.

According to the resolution, “in accordance with what was reasoned in the previous foundations, and having verified in the present proceedings the concurrence of the requirements demanded by article 612 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to give rise to the formation of a case regarding the deputy Mr.

Rosauro Martínez Labbé, the request for stripping of immunity formulated by the plaintiffs will be granted.”

The former Army captain is accused of commanding a platoon that entered the mountain area leading Operation Machete, where 11 MIR members died and where he also had Luis Sanhueza Ros under his command, who was prosecuted and convicted for several crimes of the dictatorship, according to a report by Ciper.

Magdalena Garcés, the plaintiff lawyer, told The Clinic Online that “we have to wait for the certain appeal, and it is likely that the issue will have to be resolved by the Supreme Court, but this ruling implies that the plenary of the Valdivia Court of Appeals gave rise to the formation of a case against Deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé; that is to say, his parliamentary immunity is removed and he can be judged by the courts of the Republic.”

“He had never been investigated, stripped of immunity, or subjected to prosecution, therefore it is extremely important because it allows for the investigation and clarification of his responsibility in three homicides,” Garcés pointed out.

According to the lawyer, the relatives of the victims “are shocked because we started this a few years ago and as our investigation has developed, we have discovered that this was not a confrontation, as they wanted to make people believe, but rather it was part of a policy of extermination that was directed by Rosauro Martínez.”

The background of the process: he directed the 8th Commando Company based in Valdivia, that is, the first ones to arrive in Valdivia, and they had the collaboration of CNI agents. During the period in which these massacres occurred, there are many people who come and go, but Rosauro Martínez remains and it is he who directs the operation, and therefore, the greater the seniority, the greater the responsibility.

The parliamentarian is accused by the plaintiffs of having responsibility in the death of Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez, José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, and Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Torres during the period in which he directed the 8th Commando Company based in Valdivia and they had the collaboration of CNI agents.

Previously, Martínez’s lawyer, Fernando Saenger, accused that due process of the case had been violated and that they had not been judged by an “impartial judge” as required by the Constitution.

Source: The Clinic, May 12, 2014

Parliamentarian Rosauro Martínez stripped of immunity sweats cold: risks 15 years in prison. “I never accepted that this criminal was part of Congress”

The Valdivia appellate court unanimously granted the stripping of immunity against Deputy Rosauro Martínez (RN), accused of participating in the murder of three young MIR members in Neltume in 1981. He only has the option to appeal to the Supreme Court to reverse his difficult political and legal situation.

Deputy Rosauro Martínez Labbé (RN) has been part of Congress since 1993 and represents district 41 corresponding to the Biobío Region. Therefore, he had spent 21 years enjoying parliamentary immunity, which until now protected him from the possibility of being prosecuted.

The right-wing parliamentarian, who belonged to the Army and the DINA, is accused of participating in the murder of Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Hernández, and José Eduardo Monsalve Sandoval, members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in Remeco Alto, a town in Neltume, in Valdivia on September 20, 1981.

The crime was carried out when Martínez was in charge of a military patrol that gunned down the young men and other peasants in the sector who were unrelated to the country’s political situation. The commander ordered the execution while fighting the “Operation Return to Chile,” led by the MIR, in what became known as “Counter-guerrilla Machete.”

The Valdivia Court of Appeals, after the process was postponed several times, finally decided to strip the parliamentarian of his immunity by unanimously accepting the request presented by visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes. The reason was that the evidence against Rosauro Martínez, so far, is well-founded regarding the parliamentarian’s participation in the crimes he is charged with.

In relation to this, Deputy Hugo Gutiérrez (PC), in conversation with Cambio21, said that “for a long time I have been judicially pursuing Rosauro Martínez and I never accepted that this criminal was part of the Chilean Congress. An individual who had been a member of the DINA and subsequently of the CNI and as such undertook the extermination of MIR militants who were returning to the country.”

Meanwhile, the president of the Association of Relatives of Political Executions (AFEP), Alicia Lira, stated that “for us as an association, it is a great triumph, the fact that for months the trial was being postponed and that finally the stripping of immunity was achieved.

For the families of Patricio Calfuquir, José Monsalve, and Próspero del Carmen Guzmán, it is a great joy that a powerful person like him is left without his immunity to be able to prosecute him for the crimes he committed.”

Regarding the case, human rights lawyer Héctor Salazar highlighted that “as long as he is not the subject of some procedural appeal that can challenge the stripping of immunity, he remains a parliamentarian, that is, he is protected. Once the Supreme Court responds and confirms the resolution to strip immunity, he is then at the disposal of the court to be investigated and judged.”

What comes next

Deputies possess a privilege: they cannot be prosecuted; but the landscape changed for Rosauro Martínez with the resolution taken by the Valdivia Court of Appeals.

Héctor Salazar explained that “the resolution to strip immunity is appealable before the Supreme Court. Martínez has five days, from the moment the ruling is delivered, to file an appeal.”

Legislator Hugo Gutiérrez, regarding this ruling, commented that “he (Martínez) will have to appeal to the Supreme Court, where the stripping of immunity accepted in the first instance will have to be reviewed and, subsequently, if the Supreme Court confirms the ruling, he will have to be judged and while that happens, he remains disqualified from being part of the Chilean parliament.”

Alicia Lira pointed out that “there are overwhelming arguments that Rosauro Martínez had to do with the murder of the young men in Neltume. It would be terrible if the Supreme Court rejected this resolution, as it would be a painful affront and a tremendous denial of justice, therefore, we hope that the Court evaluates and supports the resolution of the Valdivia Court of Appeals.

Otherwise, other measures will have to be taken, although we do not lose hope of being able to prosecute him.”

Human rights lawyer Salazar made a final note from a legal point of view: “as we are talking about qualified homicide, we are facing a sentence of major imprisonment in its medium to maximum degree, that is, from fifteen years and one day to qualified life imprisonment.

It must be kept in mind that the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court has been applying the ‘half-prescription’ (statute of limitations), which means that they lower the sentence, because more than half of the prescription period has elapsed, which is fulfilled after 15 years from when the crime was committed.

As it is a crime against humanity, the statute of limitations does not apply, therefore, the person is criminally responsible, but the half-prescription is applied as a mitigating factor to reduce the sentence, not to exonerate from responsibility.”

Source: Cambio21, May 13, 2014

RN closes ranks with Deputy Rosauro Martínez and bets that the stripping of immunity will be reversed

“We, as a party, trust in his innocence,” asserted the secretary general of RN regarding the accusation of the murder of three MIR members in 1981 currently facing the RN deputy. In practice, the leader explained, this means that as long as the judicial instances that must resolve the merits of the case are not exhausted, Renovación will not take any action against the legislator, such as the suspension of party membership that is used in other groups when one of their members faces a judicial process. “There will be nothing because we must trust what he tells us,” he stressed.

As soon as the resolution of the Valdivia Court of Appeals became known—which in a unanimous ruling granted the request of the visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes, who is investigating human rights violations in Neltume, to strip deputy Rosauro Martínez of his parliamentary immunity for his responsibility in the murder of three MIR members—the president of RN, Carlos Larraín, contacted the parliamentarian and his lawyer.

According to information gathered by the plaintiffs, Martínez operated in the Los Ríos region as an Army commander of the 8th Commando Company of the Llancahue Battalion, dependent on the Fourth Army Division, under the nickname “El Mosquetón.” There, he participated in the aggravated homicides of MIR militants Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Hernández, and José Eduardo Monsalve Sandoval, which occurred on September 20, 1981, in the Remeco Alto sector, Panguipulli commune.

Martínez, just as he has done on other occasions, denied his guilt in the crimes to Larraín and insisted on the thesis of an armed confrontation. The party chose to back him without any conditions. “We, as a party, trust in his innocence,” asserts the party’s secretary general, Mario Desbordes, in this regard.

In practice, the leader explained, this means that as long as the Supreme Court does not resolve the merits of the matter, Renovación will not take any action against the legislator, such as the suspension of membership that is used in other groups when one of their members faces a judicial process. “There will be nothing because we must trust what he tells us,” he stressed.

Yesterday, Martínez asserted through a statement his “tranquility and innocence, and as I have always said, I am respectful of the resolutions of the justice system, and I will make use of the instances it provides me (…) the fact that the stripping of immunity was granted in the first instance in no way means having responsibility for what I am accused of.

The Constitution establishes innocence until proven otherwise, and in this case, there is already a ruling that demonstrates this,” while Larraín argued that “he is a truthful man and I am inclined to believe him. Of course, none of us are in favor of violations of human rights.”

A different view is held by the plaintiff lawyer Magdalena Garcés, who assured The Clinic Online that “there is sufficient evidence to strip him of his immunity and even convict him; therefore, in RN they should better review the parliamentarian’s background.”

In this vein, she argued that “the investigation will help to judicially clarify his responsibility in three homicides where, according to the evidence we have managed to gather, he had direct responsibility, because he directed the operation in the area, so he has a greater responsibility.”

This argument is included in the ruling to strip him of immunity when referring to the verticality of command that explains why Martínez lost his parliamentary immunity.

Source: The Clinic, May 13, 2014

Plaintiff lawyer who succeeded in stripping deputy Rosauro Martínez of his immunity: "Saying he doesn't remember sounds like Pinochet"

Magdalena Garcés is one of the few people who can say she succeeded in having the parliamentary immunity of RN deputy Rosauro Martínez removed so that he can face justice for his alleged authorship in the death of the Neltume MIR members.

The former military officer has already announced that he will appeal the decision, but the jurist says she is calm, given that in her opinion the arguments are solid.

Justice is slow but it arrives.

That is the old proverb that takes on more meaning today. After several years of judicial struggle, the case against the National Renewal deputy, Rosauro Martínez, took shape, succeeding in having the parliamentarian stripped of his immunity so that he can face justice for his alleged responsibility in the murder of MIR members Próspero Guzmán (27), Patricio Calfuquir (28), and José Monsalve (27), within the military operation "Contraguerrilla Machete," whose purpose was to prevent the emergence of MIR schools in the south of the country.

But the militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) would not be the only victims of the operation, supposedly led by Captain Rosauro Martínez. The conscripts who were under his charge were other people who suffered the damages of the operation.

According to the account of some of them, who are at the disposal of the justice system under confidentiality, they were also victims of his mistreatment during the expedition in search of the guerrillas. According to the testimony, there was not even a crossfire confrontation with the members of the MIR, but rather they were riddled with bullets inside the house.

What was experienced that day in September 1981 marked lives. Some of the conscripts fell into alcoholism, others took refuge in religion, but they still live in fear at the memory of the captain. Even the residents of Neltume were also victims of military oppression.

The conscripts are terrified. All because there are still things that are not known, that only they keep and do not say. The lawyer’s theory is that there are more dead than we know, not of MIR members or military personnel, but of neighbors of the locality.

Be that as it may, the stripping of immunity is positive for the plaintiff lawyer in the case against Martínez, Magdalena Garcés, but there is still a long way to go. In fact, the deputy has already announced an appeal, although the professional is confident that the evidence presented is decisive and sufficient to prosecute the former DINA agent.

• It was a long road to reach the stripping of immunity. Were there doubts about what the verdict of the Court of Appeals would be?

• The entire team of lawyers who worked on the stripping of immunity is happy. We knew that we had all the arguments and that the conditions were met for the stripping of immunity to be granted, because all the requirements were fulfilled. It was a forceful, well-founded, and elaborate ruling, and it was unanimous.

• It took quite a long time to reach the stripping of immunity, because obstacles were always being placed.

• There were several dilatory maneuvers that are usually classic in the defenses of military personnel and people who are prosecuted or involved in human rights cases. Clearly, this crossed with elections, vacations, and the change of command.

• Deputy Rosauro Martínez has always denied his participation. How do you take that stance or the alleged forgetting of the facts?

• Denying that he participated is classic in many of these cases where the people who participated in these crimes do not recognize their responsibility. Now, he has rights, like every accused person in a trial, not to incriminate himself. Saying he doesn't remember sounds like Pinochet, that is, saying it isn't true, and if it is, I don't remember.

• You have heard firsthand how Captain Martínez acted, from the mouths of the conscripts. How have they been affected?

• It is quite impressive, because the testimonies of the conscript soldiers are quite heartbreaking, as they relate the mistreatment they received, such as the situations of torture of the civilian population. It is quite complicated, because it shows that this operation was a kind of military occupation in the area, where not only the MIR militants who ended up murdered were victims, but also the civilian population, which was accused of collaborating or hiding [them] or was intimidated into providing information regarding the location of the MIR members who were in the area. The accounts are quite raw because of the torture.

• It was one more example of the dictatorship's oppression.

• Neltume is a fairly small town, which during the last 40 years was twice militarily occupied as a kind of military compound, just like in times of war, both in 1973 and in 1981, with a very high level of repression in relation to the population size. There is a significant number of people murdered in the year 73 and subsequently in the year 81, but there is also a lot of mistreatment of the population, torture.

• I imagine you don't take anything for granted, but what do you expect from the appeal announced by Martínez?

• In legal terms, we are absolutely calm. We believe that here the evidence is much more than sufficient for a stripping of immunity. We believe that here there is evidence to prosecute, that is, there is more than enough to proceed with the stripping of immunity of deputy Martínez and for him to appear before justice. We trust in the independence of the judiciary and in that sense we are calm.

Source: Cambio21, May 16, 2014

The double life of the DINA-deputy: The wanderings of "El Mosquetón," the now-stripped Rosauro Martínez

For decades, the former member of the dictatorship’s security services remained camouflaged among the political class, deliberately hiding his past. He was in charge of the 8th Company that mercilessly exterminated 3 men. He used the nickname “Mosquetón.” Today he reappears like a ghost.

Juan Carlos Henríquez Jaramillo, a child at that time, today, forty years later, relates to the judge on pages 558 to 563: "(...) on September 20, 1981, three men dressed in olive green military-type clothing and with weapons arrived at our house located in Lago Neltume Alto.

I lived with my mother and my stepfather. (...) She sent me to notify the Carabineros (...) I saddled a neighbor’s horse, whom I told I needed it to go shopping, and I set off for the Neltume Carabineros. (...) I arrived at the station and told the Sergeant what was happening."

Thus begins an incredible story that gives rise to a crime that for many years went unnoticed, hidden behind the official history of confrontations between the Armed Forces and guerrilla commandos, which ended with the dismantling of a focus that put the country's security at risk.

The media of that time gave relevance to the "heroic" work of the military forces that defeated the Marxist insurgents.

Toqui Lautaro Guerrilla Detachment

The leadership of the MIR in 1978 ordered some of its men who lived in exile and were from the area to return clandestinely to Chile through Argentina, to install in the Nahuelbuta mountain range area a guerrilla operations center that, in conjunction with the rearticulation of political-military forces, would overthrow the Pinochet dictatorship.

This very select group of militants was to settle in the jungle of the area and from there begin its operations.

Despite the paramilitary training received, the precarious conditions of equipment took their toll on the guerrillas, who in a group of 11 were hidden in tatús (underground bunkers) built by themselves.

The cold and hunger forced the original group to break apart, and some of them advanced toward inhabited areas in search of supplies and help. Thus, Patricio Calfuquir, Próspero Guzmán, and José Monsalve arrived at the house of a peasant woman, Flora Jaramillo, who lived with her partner and her son.

The MIR members approached the house and requested asylum and food; they were exhausted and needed to rest. The woman welcomed them (Monsalve was her godson), and when they went to rest, she ordered her son to set off for the nearby Carabineros station to notify the police.

The boy did so. The story of a crime that threatens to end the political career as a deputy of the now-RN Rosauro Martínez was beginning to be written. It was September 20, 1981.

The hunt led by "Mosquetón" begins

Carabineros notified the 8th Company, a military detachment stationed in the surroundings and which was in charge of Rosauro Martínez, alias "Mosquetón." Notice was also given to the CNI brigades located in the area.

The unit commanded by Martínez immediately headed to Flora Jaramillo’s house, surrounding the place in the Remeco Alto sector, Panguipulli commune. The light wooden building was totally surrounded by "Mosquetón’s" men.

He made sure to take the woman out of the place while the MIR members slept. Juan Carlos Henríquez Jaramillo, who was the one who notified the Carabineros, relates in the file: "At that moment the soldiers were arriving, more or less forty, who spread out to different sides surrounding the house and the fence that divides my mother’s property with that of the neighbor Nazario Catrilaf; they installed a machine gun that has two bullet holes, one on each side, and a captain with a black beret (Rosauro Martínez) told my mom 'ma'am, we are going to destroy your house but we are going to return it to you,' to which my mother said okay, so immediately the captain gave the order to fire and they began to shoot at the house."

In charge of the forces of the Anti-Terrorist Unit (UAT) of the CNI was the feared "El Monje Loco" (The Mad Monk), as he was called by the prisoners who were subjected to his torture in Pisagua in '73.

It is the then-Army Lieutenant Conrado García Gaier. He knew about refined torture. "Sometimes he wore a black cape and played the organ stolen from the parish before starting the torments," his victims have said.

El Mosquetón, El Monje Loco, and Pete El Negro

It was about 10 in the morning that day, September 20, 1981. El Machete, El Monje Loco, and Captain Enrique Sandoval Arancibia, alias "Pete El Negro" -who murdered Carlos Fariña, a 15-year-old boy-, another character of the darkest side of Chilean repression, met at this feast of death.

The accounts of witnesses continue in the file: "On page 1,135, the statement of Alfonso Rosas is recorded, who in relation to the facts indicates: '(...) I can say that I was in charge of the Neltume Station between July 1977 until December 1982. (...) The captain was accompanied by one or two soldiers, we went to the place.

Once at the place, the owner of the house goes out to the patio and meets with the Captain; she told him that the people were sleeping in her house. (...) They say that the people who were inside the house were without food and apparently what Mrs. Jaramillo prepared for them was like an overdose and all they wanted was to sleep.'"

On page 1,754, Conrado Vicente García Gaier declares, indicating the following: "In the year 1981, I was a Commander with the rank of Captain of the UAT (Anti-Terrorist Unit); I was a subordinate of General Gordon. I received instructions from the National Director of Intelligence of the CNI, General Gordon, to move to the Neltume area since a guerrilla focus had been confirmed."

El Monje Loco continues: "Then voices were heard giving orders to come out of the house, that they were surrounded and to surrender, but no voices or movement were heard. In view of this, the shooting began.

After the first shooting, one came out precisely through the window to which we had vision. He ran toward the back of the house toward a ravine; a group followed him and finally he was shot down, apparently in a ravine; they reached him since he was apparently wounded. The other two were shot down inside the house."

The wooden house was absolutely destroyed by the incessant large-caliber gunfire. Calfuquir and Guzmán died in just minutes, pierced by bullets. The latter presented 28 projectile wounds according to the autopsy. The one who fled wounded was Eugenio Sandoval. He didn't get very far, as he was quickly reached by the patrol commanded by El Mosquetón Martínez.

They found him a few meters away, still alive among some coligües (bamboo). He was unarmed, just as the witnesses relate. They shot him directly in the head and killed him.

Statements of Rosauro Martínez (RN)

A statement that appears on pages 793 reverse and 794 of the criminal case, added to the photocopy of case File No. 551-81 of the Military Prosecutor’s Office, where he points out the following: "I remember that between the 10th and 11th of last September we received the Superior Order to move to the Neltume area to join the Special Forces that operated in said area in search of an extremist group."

"Arrived at the house (...) We then proceeded to take cover to then continue with a confrontation that concluded (with) the death of two subjects whom I could not identify, who were reached upon leaving the house opening fire.

A third member fled from that place, being seen by a resident of the nearby house, so we began his pursuit, reaching him at a place called Puente Cortado. There, a deployment of forces and exchange of gunfire began; he resulted shot down..." Martínez concluded by stating, claiming innocence.

The witnesses say otherwise. Juan Jaramillo, the same minor who reported them, declares: "(...) the soldiers went out toward the ravine to locate the one who had run away, and in that place the soldiers shot him and killed him right there because he was still alive.

He was curled up under some coligües and did not have the rifle in his hands because it was about five meters away next to a chilco bush. That is, when he fell rolling, the rifle was left behind. They shot that person immediately and did not tell him to surrender."

The CNI past of the RN deputy

For his "heroic" mission in Neltume, Captain Rosauro Martínez received congratulations from the Army, as recorded in his service record. On November 11, 1981, it says: "Extraordinary performance in command of the 8th Commando Company during counter-subversive combat actions in the Neltume area, where seven extremists resulted dead without Army casualties."

Also as a prize, he was assigned to the United States Army South Command in Panama. For this, he received another congratulation in his service record a month later. Rosauro Martínez was part of the DINA.

Occupying number 77 on the list of 1,097 former agents that in 2008 the Army gave to the extraordinary visiting minister Alejandro Solís. Until then always denied to the courts, this is the only list that the Army has formed until now with names of officers and non-commissioned officers who were part of the DINA.

Rosauro Martínez Labbé was a student at the School of the Americas in January 1972, where he was trained in the commando specialty at the Paratrooper and Special Forces School of Peldehue; he finished his career in the Army with the rank of Major.

He always tried to hide his military past in his curriculum. Until his own men and the tenacity of the lawyers and relatives of those murdered managed to discover it.

From the major prize to the stripping of immunity

Pinochet still had another gift for him for his "heroic" work in the extermination of Neltume. He appointed him mayor of Chillán. That and his entry into National Renewal catapulted him, thanks to the binomial system, as a deputy until today.

But apparently not for much longer. According to the unanimous ruling of the Valdivia Court of Appeals -if that ruling remains final-, Rosauro Martínez will lose the status of deputy and will be criminally judged.

Deputy Hugo Gutiérrez pointed out that "(Martínez) will have to appeal to the Supreme Court, where the stripping of immunity granted in the first instance will have to be seen and, subsequently, if the Supreme Court confirms the ruling, he will have to be prosecuted, and while that happens, he remains disqualified from being part of the Chilean parliament."

The PC parliamentarian assures: "for a long time I have been judicially pursuing Rosauro Martínez and I was never satisfied that this criminal was part of the Chilean Congress. He is a subject who was a member of the DINA and subsequently of the CNI and, as such, undertook the extermination of MIR militants."

Eleven were the MIR members dead in Neltume, although the witnesses say there were more, since peasants were also murdered, which will have to be investigated. Several are those prosecuted in this case that now has a new actor who will have to account for and take responsibility for his actions.

The possibility of ending up facing justice seems this time certain. The stripping of immunity sentence indicates that Martínez’s participation in said military operation, "is counted with his own judicial statement, within the framework of the investigation substantiated by the Military Prosecutor’s Office in case File No. 551-1.981, in which he acknowledges having been in command of the operation and where he describes the circumstances in which the three guerrillas previously identified resulted shot down."

That, added to the witnesses and his own men who incriminate him, seems to have sealed the fate of the RN-CNI deputy. Things are looking tough for Rosauro Martínez.

Source: Cambio21, May 24, 2014

Last chance for the DINA-Deputy to escape trial for the aggravated homicide of young leftists

Deputy Rosauro Martínez (RN) will present an appeal to the Supreme Court for the stripping of immunity granted in Valdivia, which allows for the pursuit of a process against him for the death of three young MIR members in 1981.

Deputy Rosauro Martínez (RN) was stripped of his immunity on May 5 by the Valdivia Court of Appeals, by unanimously accepting the request presented by the visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes. The parliamentarian has the possibility of presenting an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Regarding this appeal, human rights lawyer Héctor Salazar explained to Cambio21 that "the appeal resource seeks to reverse and revoke a resolution taken by a lower court. In the case of the stripping of immunity, they are heard in plenary session in which all the ministers (there are 20) participate and all vote.

The arguments of the involved parties are heard and then the plenary decides. Maybe not everyone goes, but there has to be a minimum quorum."

It must be remembered that Rosauro Martínez is accused of the murder of three MIR members in Neltume on September 20, 1981, in Remeco Alto, when he was captain of the 8th Commando group based in Valdivia, in what was "Operation Contraguerrilla Machete." He was subjected to a trial that, after several postponements, resulted in the stripping of immunity, which allows the Association of Relatives of Political Executions (AFEP) to take him to trial and convict him for the death of Patricio Calfuquir, José Monsalve, and Próspero del Carmen Guzmán.

Regarding the resolution of the Valdivia Court of Appeals to remove the immunity of the parliamentarian, the deputy (PC) Hugo Gutiérrez expressed, "I risked persevering against the case of Rosauro Martínez and today all these years of questioning a parliamentarian who enjoyed a certain impunity among his peers, I refer to the other deputies, are bearing fruit."

The Supreme Court will hear the arguments of deputy Martínez, which according to the plenary, will be reviewed preferentially. The parliamentarian’s lawyer, Fernando Saenger, presented the appeal on May 16 against the decision of the Valdivia Court of Appeals regarding the alleged link of the legislator to the Neltume case, which decided that there are "well-founded suspicions" of his participation in the crimes he is charged with "as author of the crime of aggravated homicide."

As seems to be the custom for the legislator, the hearing in which Martínez would appeal to the Supreme Court the decision of the Court of Appeals of Valdivia in which it was accepted to remove the deputy’s immunity was postponed to June 13; however, this situation is not like the previous ones.

Héctor Salazar commented that "the arguments can be suspended for a week and each party has the right to do so once without expressing a motive or cause."

During the entire process that follows this accusation, Rosauro Martínez has maintained his innocence; however, until now all the evidence proves otherwise.

The fact that the parliamentarian is stripped of his immunity does not mean that the deputy stops doing his work. He is only prevented from attending sessions in the Chamber. He continues to receive his parliamentary salary and continues to carry out his duties as a legislator.

Source: Cambio21, June 12, 2014

Supreme Court confirms stripping of immunity of RN deputy Rosauro Martínez, implicated in the crime of three MIR militants

The justice system possesses five testimonies from former conscripts who assure that the current deputy was the commander of the troops who perpetrated the homicides.

The Supreme Court resolved to ratify the stripping of immunity of the National Renewal deputy, Rosauro Martínez, who faces charges for human rights violations recorded during the dictatorship.

The Valdivia Court of Appeals had stripped the deputy of his immunity so that he can face the investigation for his alleged responsibility in the homicides of three MIR members that occurred on September 20, 1981, as reported by Radio Biobío.

They are Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Hernández, and José Eduardo Monsalve Sandoval, who were shot down in the Remeco Alto sector, in the Panguipulli commune, in false confrontations with a military patrol that was commanded by the then-captain Rosauro Martínez, today 63 years of age.

It was the visiting minister in charge of the inquiry, Emma Díaz Yévenes, who determined that the parliamentarian was the Commander of the Commando Company, dependent on the Fourth Army Division.

The military operation was a true "hunt" that ended with 11 MIR members dead, who at the time were carrying out a sort of return operation, entering through Neltume.

The justice system possesses five testimonies from former conscripts who assure that the current deputy was the commander of the troops who perpetrated the homicides.

Representing the parliamentarian, lawyer Fernando Saenger assured at the hearing that here there was a factor of implication regarding minister Díaz.

Source: Cambio21, June 13, 2014

OPERATION MACHETE: SUPREME COURT RATIFIES STRIPPING OF IMMUNITY OF ROSAURO MARTÍNEZ

The RN legislator is accused of the murder of 3 members of the MIR, part of the group that tried to form a guerrilla against the dictatorship in the Neltume jungle.

The Plenary of the Supreme Court confirmed the stripping of immunity of the National Renewal (RN) deputy, Rosauro Martínez Labbé, to investigate him as the alleged author of the homicides of 3 opponents in 1981 when he was a commander in the Army.

The Plenary of the highest court heard this morning the arguments of the parliamentarian’s defense, led by lawyer Fernando Saenger, and by the plaintiff lawyers, and resolved to ratify the resolution of May 12 in the Valdivia Court of Appeals.

Saenger himself confirmed the resolution: "the only thing I can tell you is that they notified us that the resolution of the Valdivia Court was confirmed. We do not know by what percentages and neither the foundations, that is all I can say."

The statement was made to the press amidst shouts of "No to impunity" from those close to the victims, accompanied by the president of the Association of Relatives of Political Executions, Alicia Lira, who accompanied the procedure.

THE REQUEST FOR STRIPPING OF IMMUNITY FOR 3 AGGRAVATED HOMICIDES

Martínez is investigated for his eventual responsibility in the "aggravated homicides" of 3 MIR militants, in the Remeco Alto sector, near Neltume, east of Panguipulli, as established by the petition of the visiting minister Emma Díaz Yévenes.

The magistrate pointed out that there are well-founded suspicions of his participation as commander of an Army battalion in the operation that ended the lives of Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Hernández, and José Eduardo Monsalve Sandoval, on September 20, 1981.

Source: La Nación, June 13, 2014

Stripping of immunity confirmed for Rosauro Martínez, the RN deputy accused of 3 homicides during the dictatorship

The Supreme Court of Chile confirmed today the stripping of immunity of deputy Rosauro Martínez, National Renewal (RN), accused of the homicide of three opponents of the dictatorship committed in 1981 when he was an Army captain.

The highest Chilean court, meeting in plenary session, ratified a resolution adopted on May 12 by the Court of Appeals of the southern city of Valdivia, which deprived Martínez of his parliamentary immunity, so that he can be prosecuted.

The Supreme Court of Chile confirmed today the stripping of immunity of deputy Rosauro Martínez, National Renewal (RN), accused of the homicide of three opponents of the dictatorship committed in 1981 when he was an Army captain.

The highest Chilean court, meeting in plenary session, ratified a resolution adopted on May 12 by the Court of Appeals of the southern city of Valdivia, which deprived Martínez of his parliamentary immunity, so that he can be prosecuted.

According to that resolution, there is sufficient evidence in the investigation of the case regarding Martínez’s participation in the crimes charged, in his capacity as commander of a commando company of the IV Army Division, within the framework of a so-called "Operation Machete."

Said operation consisted of a military offensive against a group of guerrillas of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) that operated in the Neltume area, about 836 kilometers south of Santiago.

On September 20, 1981, the military found in a house in the "Remeco Alto" sector three alleged guerrillas: Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Hernández, and José Eduardo Monsalve Sandoval, unarmed and one of them seriously wounded, despite which they were executed by the patrol commanded by Rosauro Martínez.

The official version of the authorities of the time was that they were terrorists shot down in combat, the same as four other members of the MIR dead in other incidents that occurred in the area.

In November 1981, Martínez received a congratulation in his service record, "for the extraordinary performance in command of the 8th Commando Company during counter-subversive combat actions in the Neltume area, where seven extremists resulted dead, without Army casualties," the document points out.

The trial is in charge of the special judge Ema Díaz, of the Valdivia Court of Appeals, who previously prosecuted former colonel Conrado García Gaier and former captain Enrique Sandoval Arancibia, who were part of a group of agents of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), who also participated in the persecution of the guerrillas.

Martínez also appears, with number 77, on a list of 1,097 agents of the DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), which preceded the CNI as the dictatorship’s secret police, which the Army provided in 2008 to special judge Alejandro Solís and which only became known in 2012.

At that time, the parliamentarian denied having been an agent and assured that at that time he was on a service commission at the Ministry of Defense.

Rosauro Martínez has been an RN deputy for the Chillán district since 1994 and was re-elected in the parliamentary elections last November for a new term, until the year 2018.

Source: The Clinic, June 13, 2014

New murders involve the DINA-deputy; now he is accused of two other crimes of workers opposed to the dictatorship

For this reason, an extension of the stripping of immunity of Rosauro Martínez will be requested, already granted for three other crimes that occurred when he was an Army officer.

Lawyer Magdalena Garcés, who is a plaintiff against the National Renewal deputy Rosauro Martínez, announced that she will ask the visiting minister Ema Díaz to extend the stripping of immunity of the parliamentarian for other murders committed in the Los Ríos region, said the Radio Biobío portal.

Martínez was stripped of his immunity by the Valdivia Court of Appeals and the resolution was ratified last Friday by the Supreme Court in the case of the death of three militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement in the Remeco Alto sector, Panguipulli commune, within the framework of a military operation commanded by the now-parliamentarian.

The cases to which this new request alludes refer to René Eduardo Bravo Aguilera and Julio César Riffo Figueroa, both workers and members of the MIR who were detained in the town of Nalalhue, subjected to torture by the CNI, and subsequently murdered in September 1981.

Source: Cambio21, June 18, 2014

For 13 years, Andrés Lübbert investigated what was hidden behind his father’s escape from Chile in 1978. He dug even into the archives of the Stasi, the intelligence service of the GDR. And he uncovered a secret box that had remained closed until today: a CNI group that operated within the former CTC (Compañía de Teléfonos), where people were tortured, murdered, and where other young men were trained to kill.

He captured this in the documentary "The Color of the Chameleon," which has just premiered in Chile. This is the untold story of that search, unknown episodes involving Deputy Rosauro Martínez, General Guillermo Ramírez, and civilians who have never been questioned.

To the Stasi, the powerful intelligence service of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Chilean Jorge Lübbert was a DINA agent. To the community of Chilean exiles in the GDR, the 21-year-old who arrived there in September 1978 was a victim of the dictatorship. To his son, the documentarian Andrés Lübbert, he was a total stranger:

-My father was someone who was absent. Our relationship was silent. We spoke, but we had no intimacy or dialogue.

Andrés sensed from a young age that something strange was happening in his family history:

-When we were children, my mother told us that my dad had been in prison in Chile, but that he hadn't done anything wrong. I always wanted to have a different relationship with him. And at one point, I discovered that the relationship that didn't exist had to do with his past—he recalls today, sitting in a café in Ñuñoa, while recounting his story.

Andrés arrived at that certainty and became obsessed. His first trip to Chile was when he was 19 years old.

-I came to Chile because I wanted to know where my father came from. I made a small 40-minute documentary: "My father, my story." I didn't speak Spanish; it was very complicated. And there, my uncle and my grandfather told me things I didn't understand, that something had happened and that, because of that, my dad had left Chile.

That he started working at the Compañía de Teléfonos and that he had problems there. And they told me other things that I couldn't manage to understand.

That documentary was the first of four that Andrés Lübbert, now 32, has made to understand his father's history. It is not strange that he translated his doubts into films. In his family, it is common to pick up a camera and film.

His uncle, the renowned filmmaker Orlando Lübbert, was the one who opened a window to the past for him. On his second trip to Chile, he gave him a testimony that his dad gave in 1979, shortly after arriving in Europe, as part of therapy. A very intimate account where he reveals the true reasons that led him to escape from Chile.

In that testimony, his father recounts details of the training he was forced to undergo while working at the Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile (CTC), when he was 21. In those pages, he relates how they taught him to intercept phones, to spy on his colleagues, to shoot, to torture.

There, his father reveals the functioning of a group that, until today, has remained in a black box that no one had opened. None of the men whom Jorge Lübbert was able to identify have ever been questioned by the justice system or by anyone else. A group composed of agents from one of the most secret compartments of the dictatorship, dedicated to preparing young men to do the dirty work.

A story that has its breaking point in August 1978, when the then-Army officer Rosauro Martínez punished him for having spoken about the "training." He beat him, insulted him, put the barrel of a submachine gun in his mouth, and threatened him while continuing to beat him.

Until, in a moment, Jorge Lübbert became desperate, kicked him in the face, and broke his lip. Rosauro Martínez lost control: "Do you want to see blood?" he shouted; and he tied him up and placed him half-naked under a grill.

This is how Jorge Lübbert himself would recount that breaking point in the only testimony he gave about what he lived through in Chile in 1978:

"He went into another room and from inside a large drawer, he took out a corpse of a guy who was naked, bleeding from the mouth, from the face, he was slashed all over, totally mistreated, very thin, the hair... he only had tufts of hair, as if he had had a disease, as if his hair had fallen out.

You could tell he was a young guy but very aged... I spent a whole night underneath him. He put the corpse on top of the grill and I was underneath, I spent the whole night seeing that. I wanted to die there.

It was terrible, the only thing I had movement in was my head and I hit my head, I wanted to end it, I didn't want to know any more about this, I couldn't, it was desperate, the blood was dripping onto my face."

Jorge Lübbert knew that same day that the man who tortured him was the then-Army officer Rosauro Martínez:

"This same guy arrived early in the morning. He was covered in blood. He was hysterical, and he took me out of there. I didn't want anything... I was totally screwed. He was struck by the fact that I was like that, he laughed, he took me and said: 'Have a drink.' He threw me out of the shed where other guys who worked there cleaned me, washed me, offered me breakfast, and gave me some pills. 'So you can relax,' they told me. 'We are your friends, this guy is crazy!

This guy is dangerous! We were afraid of him too, try not to mess with him anymore,' they repeated to me. And that day I learned the name of the man who tortured me, because another guy arrived there and said to me: 'Ah, you were with Rosauro Martínez.' Later I learned that they had appointed him as Pinochet's bodyguard.

It was said around there: 'this is going to be the one who will accompany my general even to go to the bathroom.' I think he was very trusted by Pinochet."

Years later, when that man was already a National Renewal (RN) deputy for Chillán, Jorge recognized him immediately when his son showed him a photo he took from the Internet (check here the Army file of Rosauro Martínez, where it is proven that he belonged to the DINA).

THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON

Andrés Lübbert is in Chile presenting his latest documentary, the fourth he has made about his father's history. "You have spent a whole life escaping, from us, your family, and from yourself," Andrés says to his father at the beginning of "The Color of the Chameleon," the film that officially premiered at Sanfic 2017 (see the trailer here).

It is a very personal story. And at the same time, it immerses itself in the streets of Chile, in its history, in its horrors. Andrés says that his search "was born from a very strong need to get closer to my father and to have a better relationship with him.

To understand him and help him. To understand his past. While I was investigating, I realized that it was something important. Justice and denunciation are important, but it is not a film of denunciation either." Andrés says it is the story of a father and a son.

Andrés was a witness to how his father suffered and did not speak. For years, the son asked, there were no answers, and Andrés became obsessed. He traveled to Chile and investigated. And on that journey, which included other countries and lasted 13 years, he managed to reconstruct his father's story step by step.

From when, in 1977, Jorge Lübbert graduated from the Technical Drawing program at Inacap and a friend and neighbor got him an internship at the Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile (CTC). That neighbor was Gerardo Ramírez Parga, father of Gerardo and Guillermo Ramírez Chovar, two military men who occupy a leading role in this story.

-He (the neighbor) was also a manager at Banco Estado. And he wrote a letter to friends he had at the CTC recommending my father so he could go there to do his internship. I have seen the letter. First, he did his internship for about half a year and everything was normal.

What he did was technical drawings of telephone lines. My dad designed the little phone logo for the CTC. Those were the things he did. When the internship period ended, they offered for him to stay there working.

And later they invited him to an office (in the building where the DC operated on the Alameda) where they pressured him to sign something he doesn't know what it is. There they told him: "We want you to work for us now." They invited him to sign a contract, but it was a blank sheet. He never knew what he signed—Andrés Lübbert told CIPER.

The testimony that Jorge Lübbert prepared in his therapy provides details of that meeting. On May 2, 1978, at eight in the morning, he arrived at that office on the Alameda to meet with Jaime Letelier Montenegro, who appeared to be the boss of everything.

In the office of this former Navy officer, there were pennants of a center for former naval officers (which he later identified as the Club El Caleuche). Letelier asked him a couple of questions and took him to an adjoining office where a man with the last name Cano was, who put the cards on the table.

That man lectured him about his family. He knew every detail of their activities and their lives. Cano threatened him. He emphasized the links to the left in his circle. He knew that his father was a Radical militant, that his sister was a Socialist, that his mother had been part of the JAP during the Unidad Popular.

He spoke to him about his brother Orlando, who was in exile, and asked him if he was a member of any party.

"This guy got up from the table, approached me, and said to me violently: 'Have you realized that we know everything?' We, he spoke of 'we,' and I didn't know what 'we' was. I asked him who those 'we' were, the company? 'Yes, of course, the company,' he told me. 'We need you to work for us (...) you have aptitudes for the work, you have very good references'" (from the testimony written in therapy in 1979 by Jorge Lübbert).

When Jorge Lübbert had a blank contract in front of him, he insisted on knowing what it was about. He insisted a lot until the situation became violent. Cano told him that he had no problem wiping his family off the map:

"Well, he said, if you don't sign, your family will feel it. He threatened me with my father, he threatened me with my brother, with my brother who was abroad, he told me that if I didn't sign I had no other way out, that if I walked out the door now I wouldn't be safe anymore."

Jorge Lübbert signed. After that episode, they kidnapped him. One night, upon arriving at his house on Avenida Salvador with José Domingo Cañas, in Santiago, a car stopped and unknown men put him inside.

Upon seeing the driver of the vehicle, Jorge calmed down a little. He knew him: José Miguel Pavéz Ahumada, the brother of one of his classmates at the Instituto Nacional. He remembered him as a young man of the left, one who had a portrait of Mao in his room and who later joined the Army and was assigned to Antofagasta.

Pavéz also recognized him and tried to go unnoticed. It was not possible. That first time, Pavéz told him to be calm, that he was going to work with them, not to worry, and that they would contact him again.

Andrés specifies the details of his father's second encounter with José Miguel Pavéz's group:

-They take him to Pavéz's house in the Villa Olímpica. There was a Nazi flag there, and the house was full of small military figures. There were also two statues, one of Hitler and another of Erwin Rommel, the famous Nazi field marshal.

Pavéz's alias was "Balmaceda," who had unique characteristics in his clothing. Leather boots up to the knee, military, German boots. And he used a riding crop, with which he would hit his boots. He always had it with him. In that house, they tell my father that now he has to do tasks for them, that they are the Security Service of the Compañía de Teléfonos.

His father's direct boss at the CTC was Alfredo Ugarte Salcedo, who gave him the instructions on what to do. He was his link to the "CTC Security Service." His father told him that Ugarte always treated him in a special way, that he invited him to have coffee and told him about his adventures.

In one of those conversations, he revealed that he was from Patria y Libertad. Good treatment and orders. Jorge Lübbert portrays him as an intellectual, as a man convinced of his cause.

Andrés says that his investigation points to the fact that Gerardo Ramírez Parga, Jaime Letelier, and Ugarte were friends. History connects them. Ramírez sent Letelier the letter of recommendation for his father to enter the CTC. And Ugarte and Letelier belonged to the Club Naval El Caleuche; there, during the government of Salvador Allende, the first conspirators of the 1973 Coup d'État met.

-The first thing Ugarte asked him to do was to spy on CTC coworkers to see if they had subversive material. For my father, it was strange; he says that at one point he found something, but that he didn't hand over the product of his finding.

For that, he had to check the drawers when the workers weren't there and things of that type. Something "innocent" for what was happening in those days, but it was a step to involve him, to see if he could do it—Andrés tells CIPER.

That "something" that his father found was a cassette he found in a drawer of Pedro Córdova, who had been a union leader. It was an audio that an exile sent him with information about what was being done abroad. Jorge Lübbert says in his testimony that he made that tape disappear: "I said, damn, if I give them the cassette, they'll liquidate this guy."

The testimony of Andrés's father continues by relating how, little by little, the supposed CTC security team involved him more and more:

"The head of the division, Jaime Toro, called me one day to his office (...), he knew that I was working in the security service, he told me totally openly: as a draftsman, you are the optimal person to clean up all these things.

They were sketches of organizational charts of the company's security service, with all the names, and I had to clean them up as a draftsman on special paper. This person put a table for me to work in his office and I was working there for more or less a week, making organizational charts, work guidelines, and they gave me a lot of work that they said was special for me, they praised me a lot, they told me: how beautiful this turned out."

From then on, the special assignments turned into training in other facilities. Far from the hangar in Carrascal where the Technical Control Office and the CTC Workshop Sub-directorate operated at that time.

TRAINED IN HORROR

Jorge Lübbert relates in his testimony some passages of the instruction to which he was subjected. One day they took him to the morgue along with other young men whom he says he did not know. In the auditorium of the place, he faced three corpses:

"A very tall guy came out, he was a 'boina negra' (black beret) with a rubber apron and rubber gloves, he made us enter a large room with tiles, where there was a very unpleasant smell, of chemicals, and three corpses.

The guy with a scalpel took the testicles of one of them and cut them off. My stomach started to turn there, I was totally pale. The guy approached me and handed me part of a corpse, its jaw, and put it in my hands, and I think I lost consciousness there because I fainted.

The guy made me wake up and told me: 'That's enough, you have to get through this stuff, you have to get used to death, you have to know these things.' Violently he grabbed the piece, brought it close to me, and rubbed it on my face."

That part of his testimony is narrated in the documentary "The Color of the Chameleon" by an actor. Jorge Lübbert, Andrés's father, says on camera that he does not want to go into details, out of respect for the dead. But there are other episodes that were not included in the film, and that Andrés told CIPER:

-Curfew. Sunday night at 2:00 in the morning. They take my father and other military men to San Bernardo, on the outskirts of Santiago, and tell them that they must reach the General Cemetery (Recoleta) by 5:00 by their own means.

They have no identification or anything; they must bypass every police checkpoint. It was a test. My dad manages to reach the cemetery via Avenida La Paz, but he had to enter. And he sees that someone is climbing to enter: a military man who was with him in the instruction is climbing the wall when they shoot him from a Carabineros patrol and he falls. My dad got scared and left.

That person who was shot and whom Andrés's father saw fall was Guillermo Ramírez Chovar, one of his neighbors. One of the sons of the man who recommended Jorge Lübbert to do his internship at the CTC. They were also training him.

The shot pierced his collarbone and he had to be admitted to the Military Hospital. Later, they congratulated Ramírez for having fulfilled the orders to the letter. In contrast, they punished Andrés's father by locking him up for an entire weekend for not having fully completed the mission.

The training continues. They take Andrés's father at night to an old mansion, with a hood so he doesn't know where he is going. The reconstruction of events that Andrés performs in his documentary "The Color of the Chameleon" concludes that it is the mansion on República where the Salvador Allende Museum currently operates.

There, a man with a "gringo" accent explained to his father how to intervene in telephone communications, how to transform a radio into a microphone, and also sabotage techniques. In that mansion, the CNI had installed the machinery to intervene in telephones. There, the man who instructed him told him that he had to learn to use those machines.

The power of the group that provided the instruction to Jorge Lübbert seemed to have no limits in that year of 1978. For a 21-year-old technical draftsman, some of the boxes that opened before his eyes left him perplexed, insecure, and fearful. This is how he related another of those surprising sessions in his testimony:

"They took me to a room in the CTC Computing Department. But in a smaller office, which only people from the security service could enter—and they explained that to me there—they had a computer head that came out of the INE, which was located at Vicuña Mackenna with Diagonal Paraguay.

This head, they said, worked with all the data that the main machine of the INE had. They handled the data and information of everything they want to know about Chile and its people that way. All that information—they told me—was in those heads.

The other head they had very close to the INE, half a block from a CNI headquarters. And they left me in the CTC Computing office. They taught me how to locate names, something very simple, with a television screen with numbers and keys.

They also gave me some codes to be able to extract information. And they told me: 'Stay here, do whatever you want.' The first thing that came to my mind was to put in my name. After a while, my full name, studies, my relatives appeared...

And they were all there; all my data and a small summary of my life. That scared me. I pressed other buttons and all the information about my father, my mother, my siblings appeared... Even a trip my father made to Germany appeared there and another one my sister made to the United States."

There was also military instruction in that "training." He received it in El Alfalfal, in the heart of the Cajón del Maipo. Andrés Lübbert described it to CIPER like this:

-There were many military men and my father went as an invited civilian. They took him several times for two or three days to learn to shoot, climb the mountain, war simulations with shots, a classic of military training.

There, he did have special treatment. There were people who invited him to have coffee and he had different treatment than the military. He also had long hair, never a military cut.

There is an image rescued, no one knows how, from those trainings. A photo where his father is seen manipulating an FAL (light automatic rifle), with an Army flag in the background. Jorge Lübbert does not remember where that photo came from. His son says he took it many years ago from a box of memories that his father treasures.

The instruction included many practices. In a section of "The Color of the Chameleon" where his father's testimony is paraphrased, he describes José Pavéz Ahumada—the Army officer and brother of his classmate at the Instituto Nacional—as a sadist. One of the scenes in which he portrays him is in his testimony:

"Pavéz entered violently and grabbed me by the arms, that I had to pass the test too, that everyone had to pass it. He said he had the endurance record, he put electricity on himself until he fainted. He told me that when he regained consciousness it was a nice, precious sensation and that now he felt stronger.

I told him that I didn't need it to feel stronger, and then he got angry and put electricity on me until I fainted."

It was not the only act of violence that Pavéz starred in and that Jorge Lübbert kept in his memory. There were other episodes where he saw him applying electricity and hitting detainees with his riding crop.

Andrés relates other trainings that his father had to go through. There is one that remained engraved, when they buried his father alive in the cemetery so that he would temper his resistance. Or the mock executions that they rehearsed by mixing the trainees with detainees in torture centers.

On those occasions, he says that his dad saw Guillermo Ramírez Chovar, the other son of his military neighbor, who tried to help him.

Jorge has told his son that, recurrently, three other people similar to him participated in the training courses, of whom he only knew their aliases: "Hippie," "Fanta" (not the executioner of the Degollados Case), and "Peineta."

REVIVING A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

After Jorge Lübbert could not withstand the "class" at the morgue, he was punished. They took him to a mansion in Tobalaba. Andrés's investigation determined that that mansion could be Villa Grimaldi, one of the DINA's secret prisons.

The scene that Jorge Lübbert describes in his testimony seems taken from the film "A Clockwork Orange." From that scene where Alex is forced to watch images of brutal violence:

"They left me alone there for a while, in the kitchen. A person arrived with a white apron and a doctor's face, with glasses, a bit old, he saw me, looked at me for a while, he was watching me and well, I asked him what's happening, what's happening...

The guy looked at me as if I were a strange bug (...) After a while, another person arrived, it was a bald guy, a private, he was wearing soldier pants and one of these white t-shirts. He was more or less burly, he took me and took me to a room where he sat me in a very special chair, with straps...

One ended up as if plugged in, as if stuck, one couldn't move. The thing is that there he tied my head and I couldn't move it. After that, this person left and the other one arrived, with a doctor's look and inside a little thing he brought some little devices.

He put them here in my eyes, he put them inside my eyes and I couldn't close them, it was a really unpleasant matter (...) The guy told me to stay calm, not to worry, that now I was going to see what is good, and that if I passed this test I was already saved."

"Suddenly there was no light left, total darkness, and a very soft music started to be heard that came from behind, a classical music, and it kept increasing in tone, but very slowly... I don't know if it was a long time, if it was a lot or if it was a moment, but I relaxed well.

And these devices that hurt me a lot, that made my eyes itch and that tears constantly came out, and I couldn't do a single thing, a totally terrible sensation... Well, suddenly, the music that was already at an unbearable tone, I didn't want to hear anymore and abruptly they cut the music, you can see that there are movements behind, I felt something and they started to show slides, photos...

The first one I always remember... The first photo they put on me was that of my family and I was not in the photo. My whole family was there and I don't know why I wasn't there. They left it there for a moment and I started to look and didn't understand (...) After that, they passed them very fast, like that, almost so I didn't see the photos.

I started to see images of different types; people playing, children playing, beautiful things, a couple holding hands on the beach, photos like very typical, everything very tender (...) Suddenly, the tone of the slides started to change, they were no longer in color...

They were all brown, brown, brown and in the end they all ended in black and white, the same photos... And more and more marked, that is, the total contrast, there was already black and white... And when these photos started, they started to put others of the war in Vietnam, in black and white, also very contrasted, very strong, very fast, one after the other, where decapitated Vietnamese appeared, Americans with heads of Vietnamese.

There were photos of mutilated bodies, of wounded Americans."

"They were minutes where they showed me hundreds of slides. I couldn't stand the pain in my eyes anymore, I couldn't stand it anymore. I tried to close my eyes a little because they had put the music on me again at full volume and at certain moments they lowered the volume, it made me uneasy and I started to get disoriented, and I became a little violent, I didn't want to look, I tried to look the other way, I couldn't look, I had my view to the front, already, the last one, they started to put photos in color, very beautiful... in very beautiful colors, but some horrible photos where mutilated bodies appeared, a guy shaved to the skin, with an arm, a piece of arm, eating it... Suddenly they cut this and a color movie starts, it was dubbed in Spanish. I was very tense, I didn't want any more, I felt bad, bad, bad... I remembered my family a lot because of the photo they had shown me."

The movie they showed Jorge was about the Vietnam War. The scenes of the Americans were in color, and those of the Vietnamese in black and white. The scenes that followed showed a torture session where the Asians stab knives into the body of a US soldier.

Andrés's father says in his testimony that he began to feel the pain of the tortured soldier as his own. The movie advances and the soldier escapes. He manages to reach his country, his house, with his family. Everything seems happy. But they knock on the door, two guys enter, slit his daughter's throat, kill his wife, and strip him and cut off his testicles.

ROSAURO AND THE ESCAPE

Several months have passed and Jorge Lübbert is still in training. Andrés's father has a friend. A supposed friend, someone who talks to him during the instructions. Someone who one day takes him to the Paseo Ahumada, invites him to a gallery where they sell watches, guides him to the second floor, and leaves him alone with another man, who starts to dictate his results in the "training" courses.

He tells him that he is well evaluated. He is the first person who speaks to him directly about joining the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI).

The same "friend" who took him to the office on Paseo Ahumada, a few days later took him to the Infantry School in San Bernardo. There, they took a photo of him, printed a kind of identification card for him, and gave him physical exams: "They made me run, they took my blood pressure, they drew my blood, they took X-rays, they put some little wires here and told me they were going to do an electroencephalogram."

The doctor who performs the exams asks him how he is. Jorge Lübbert responds angrily. He tells him that he doesn't understand, he relates every place they have taken him. He tells him what they have done to him. The doctor tells him that he doesn't know what he is talking about. He informs him that he is going to make inquiries.

Two days later his "friend" picks him up and takes him to the military facilities of Cerro Chena. They had a room ready for him, with a television, bed, and radio equipment: "I was told that that was going to be my workplace from now on, that I had to integrate gradually and that I had to do my work only there, that I was going to have to check and control the entry and exit of the CNI people from the camp," relates Jorge Lübbert in his testimony.

But his conversation with the doctor changed the plans. A group of CNI agents put him in a pickup truck, beat him, and took him to a hangar. They accused him of having spoken to his family, of having told things. "Big mouth," they called him, and blamed him for "screwing things up." It is in that hangar where Jorge Lübbert met the man he identified as Rosauro Martínez, who tortured him and forced him to spend a night with a warm and bleeding corpse on top of him.

The day of the breaking point...

His son Andrés believes that what happened in that shed—which he calculates could be a hangar in Cerrillos—ended up strengthening the will of his father, who had already tried to flee Chile through the mountains. A military checkpoint in the Cajón del Maipo scared him and ruined that first escape attempt.

But this time it was different. As soon as he left that facility, he decided for the first time to speak with his parents. He told them some things. Not all. He was 21 years old. His family activated the solidarity network that operated to save lives in Chile during the dictatorship.

His father contacted the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), an organization specialized in getting persecuted people out of the country. Since the family has roots in Germany and his brother Orlando was settled in East Germany, that was his destination. He got his passport on September 1, 1978, and a day later he was already flying to Europe.

Start of the testimony of Jorge Lübbert, written in 1979

LÜBBERT'S NEW ESCAPE

"I received a brother, but soon I realize that I am receiving a castaway. I remember that I would lock myself in a room and he would put his head here, I would hold him and he would cry, cry, cry and I would end up crying with him. I assumed that what was happening to him was very serious," says Orlando Lübbert, Andrés's filmmaker uncle, who received Jorge in East Berlin.

Jorge Lübbert's arrival in Europe did not go unnoticed. As soon as he settled in the GDR, he was contacted by the intelligence apparatus of the Socialist Party—they called it the "Technical Committee"—to interrogate him. His son Andrés relates that "they told my father that what he told them would serve to help people in Chile. That is why my father was quite open and told many things."

Jorge Lübbert's stay in the GDR did not last long. Shortly after, the exile community knew his story and various people recommended he cross to the other side of the Wall. That is what he did. Later, they prohibited his entry into East Berlin. In the Stasi archives, he was cataloged as an agent of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA, the repressive agency that preceded the CNI).

Jorge was standing in the middle of a dangerous limbo in the middle of the Cold War. To the rejection of the intelligence agency of German socialism was added the persecution he suffered from the repressive apparatuses of Chile. His son Andrés says that one day, while his father was in a café in West Berlin, a guy with a Chilean accent appeared and threatened him:

-He told him that he had to be ready to "work with us," and he conveyed the message that he was still part of "them." This happened approximately seven months after he ran away from Chile.

It was not the only warning they gave him on the streets of West Berlin. In "The Color of the Chameleon," Jorge himself narrates on camera what happened one day, upon entering the boarding house where he lived: a couple of guys were waiting for him, again Chileans, who beat him and insulted him.

To those attacks was added the letter from a woman, a former coworker at the CTC with whom he had a romance. In the letter that Jorge receives in Germany, she takes off her mask and for the first time speaks to him using the already known "we." That part of the story is related by his son Andrés:

-She tells him in her letter: we want you to come back, you have to take such flight, such day and at such time. My father was so angry that he burned it. My uncle Orlando saw that letter. After that, my father disappeared from the map.

Everyone lost track of him. What happened was that between my uncle Orlando and my father, they looked for a solution. They contacted the secretary of Amnesty International in Germany, Helmuth Frenz (a Lutheran pastor who participated in the creation of the Pro Paz Committee in Chile and was later expelled by the Military Junta, he passed away in 2011).

He took him in at his house in Bonn. Frenz circulated a letter with false information, communicating that my father was going to Sweden. But in reality, my father went to Bochum (Rhineland), where he stayed for a couple of months.

From there, he traveled to Belgium. To undergo therapy with Jorge Barudy, a psychiatrist who specialized in working with people who carried traumas as a result of the violence of the dictatorship.

A key piece was missing for Andrés Lübbert to lift the veil on his father's past: checking the Stasi archives to investigate if his father appeared there. It is what the main character of the film "The Lives of Others" does, and the one that inspired Andrés to decide to check those documents. He searched and found a 180-page file. A true jewel. CIPER was able to review some of those archives.

When Jorge Lübbert arrived in the GDR, the intelligence of communist Germany was already on the trail of the group that Andrés's father was part of in Chile from May to September 1978. In fact, one of the biggest surprises was finding a photo in that thick file. In it, Jorge Lübbert's entire work team at the CTC appears. Jorge had never seen it before (see photo of the group).

What is clear is that Jorge's testimony provided pieces to assemble the puzzle. In that file, Andrés found the confirmation of key parts of his investigation and much more. Despite the conclusiveness that arises from those archives, neither the group nor the victims it may have left in its wake has ever been investigated in Chile.

Nor its members, most of them Army officers who reached the highest levels of the military hierarchy and politics (see box).

THE STASI ARCHIVE

In the file that Andrés Lübbert found about his father's history in the Stasi archive, there is a section where the training that was given to future agents of repression is detailed. There, some contents of the theoretical instruction for appear.

clandestine work and infiltration (“taught in secret locations”), and it is mentioned that the instructors were both civilians and military personnel. There was instruction in first aid (through, among other things, American films about the Vietnam War); initial measures for someone who has received electric shocks; and even training on how to assume a false identity.

It also includes what must be done in case of facing extreme situations: suicide, killing without hesitation.

And there, in those documents, Andrés found the addresses of the places where the group responsible for the torture of Jorge Lübbert operated, which the GDR Intelligence managed to identify: the hangar at Carrascal 3420, where the Technical Control Office and the CTC workshop subdivision operated; the CTC Risk Prevention office, on Calle San Martín between Agustinas and Moneda; La Cañada, which would be the former DC building on the Alameda; the “Tres Álamos Contact House”; as well as other apartments located in the Villa Olímpica on Calle Los Jazmines, another belonging to the “Tres Álamos Chief” at Isabel La Católica and Manquehue (northeast corner); and two properties in the center of Temuco. Contacts in southern inns are also mentioned: an inn on the banks of Lake Caburga, where the name of the contact appears crossed out; an inn next to Lake Todos los Santos (on the side of the Petrohué Falls); a shelter-house at Lake Caburga; and “a military sector with an airstrip through Angelmó” (review that excerpt from the Stasi report here).

In total, the Stasi file describes 50 people from Jorge Lübbert’s circle at the CTC in that year, 1978. Gerardo Ramírez Parga appears there, who is identified as an Army reserve major and manager of Rationalization at Banco Estado. And also Alfredo Ugarte Salcedo, who was allegedly the head of Quality Control at the CTC.

LIVING BEHIND A CAMERA

In the midst of his therapy, Jorge Lübbert decided to settle in Belgium, a country where he started a family and built a career as a cameraman and war correspondent in the most violent conflicts of recent decades.

His son Andrés relates that his father has been in the Gulf War, the second Palestinian Intifada, the armed conflicts that shook Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that he had to cover the fall of Gaddafi in Libya, among many others. He has also worked as a cameraman for the European Community and has had to accompany diplomats on missions around the world.

He describes him as a man without fear outside the borders of Chile. He says he has been captured by the Taliban, by guerrillas from different countries, and by the United States intelligence service, and that he has endured it well.

But in Chile, everything changes. In The Color of the Chameleon, one can observe the tics that attack his face when he tours various former torture centers he passed through with his son. In all those scenes, it is impossible for him to hide the knot that invades him when speaking about his past and his experience as a hostage of the CNI.

Jorge Lübbert has never testified in Chile. No one has asked him to, and he has never filed a judicial complaint. A text, this time written by him for an experimental documentary he made in Belgium in the early 80s (“Day 32”), illustrates some of what he experienced when beginning a journey through his past:

“Names, military personnel, unpleasant situations. My identity almost lost. The sensation and the smell of death. Tunnels, houses conditioned for torture. Animals with human figures who had the power to torment and to trample on life.

In this labyrinth I was, tortured and torturers, the disappeared and the appeared. Everything perfectly camouflaged by the national and transnational intelligence services… In Chile, the repressive force had tried to strip me of every feeling of humanity and depersonalize me.

I was to transform into just another puppet in the middle of their infernal machine… Neither the most sophisticated repression nor evil are capable of destroying our feelings and hopes. Of how difficult it is to destroy the human that lives within us.

As a testimony to this, the images-denunciation are born, extensions of my experience. Which rise up against that other symbology: that of the denial of life.”

THE MEN OF THE CTC “SECURITY”

The investigation that Andrés Lübbert conducted for 13 years to unravel his father’s past reveals a totally unknown chapter of the dictatorship’s secret services in collusion with civilians and military personnel stationed in state companies, which were later privatized. These are the men Jorge Lübbert managed to identify:

There was Rosauro Martínez, the Army commando, deputy, and protagonist of one of the dictatorship’s massacres that only came to be told in 2014 (see CIPER report “Neltume: the five conscripts who accuse deputy Rosauro Martínez”).

In 1981, while a captain of the No. 8 Commando Company of the “Llancahue” Regiment (Valdivia), Martínez directed the annihilation in the Neltume area of a detachment of MIR guerrillas that had created a center of resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship.

By then, Martínez had been in the Army for eleven years. In 1987, he left its ranks and was rewarded by Pinochet by being appointed mayor of Chillán, a seat he held until 1992, two years after democracy was restored. From there, he would jump to the Chamber of Deputies, being elected by Chillán representing Renovación Nacional. He was re-elected five times (1993 – 2013).

In the trial for the murder of at least three MIR members in Neltume, which led to his stripping of parliamentary immunity in May 2014, no one ever said that Rosauro Martínez had belonged to the DINA and the CNI and that he had been a bodyguard for Pinochet.

And even less that he had been part of a secret group of the repressive agencies where torture and murder took place. Andrés has his Army service records, signed by Manuel Contreras himself, the head of the DINA (see here).

Another of the men from the repressive detachment that Jorge Lübbert identified is José Miguel Pavéz Ahumada. His service record as an Army officer registers that he was part of the CNI at least between 1977 and 1978, when Jorge Lübbert claims to have seen him in meetings and torture sessions.

That evaluation sheet says “Central Nacional de Informaciones” in the header and is signed by Hernán Brantes Martínez, one of the high-ranking commanders of the DINA and the CNI.

The then-lieutenant Pavéz received instruction at the School of the Americas in October 1974. On the Transparent Government website, he appears today as an advisor in strategic planning for the Army with a salary of $1,300,000.

His fondness for collectible soldiers and Nazism, as Lübbert observed in his apartment in the Villa Olímpica, remains intact. On Pinterest, he has a profile where he displays images of soldiers from all over the world, including a gallery of German women from the Second World War.

The magazine Peking Review reports on a trip he made to China together with his father in September 1971, where he was with the then-ambassador Armando Uribe and was able to admire Mao’s homeland.

The investigation by Andrés Lübbert, who had the collaboration of journalist Javier Rebolledo, shed new light on the relationship his father observed between José Miguel Pavéz and the Ramírez Chovar brothers (Gerardo and Guillermo); all of them received anti-subversive instruction at the School of the Americas.

Gerardo Ramírez and José Miguel Pavéz were there together in October 1974, and Guillermo Ramírez in 1975. The latter marched in a Military Parade at the head of the Paratrooper School commandos, as seen in the documentary.

In 2005, as a general, he was on the shortlist that Ricardo Lagos had before him to appoint the new commander-in-chief. He was not chosen, and in 2008 he assumed the position of commander of the Army’s Education and Doctrine Division.

In 2010, he was in charge of restoring order in Concepción after the earthquake of February 27. After retiring at the end of 2011, he dedicated himself to business. In 2012, he appears as an advisor at the Military Geographical Institute.

Until now, neither the Ramírez Chovar brothers nor Rosauro Martínez had been disturbed by their time in Augusto Pinochet’s exclusive security group. Until now, with Andrés Lübbert’s documentary The Color of the Chameleon.

Source: ciper.cl, August 22, 2017

New indictment issued against former RN deputy Rosauro Martínez for crimes committed in Neltume in 1981

The minister on extraordinary assignment for Human Rights cases of the Court of Appeals of Temuco, Álvaro Mesa Latorre, issued a new indictment against the former deputy of Renovación Nacional (RN), former appointed mayor of the commune of Chillán, and former Army officer, Rosauro Martínez Labbé, in the case investigating the repressive events that occurred from mid- to late 1981 in the town of Neltume, Panguipulli commune, Valdivia province. by Darío Núñez

The criminal acts were perpetrated by repressive units of the CNI and Army commando forces that turned to dismantle and annihilate the members of the Toqui Lautaro Guerrilla Detachment, promoted by the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), which was developing resistance activities against the dictatorship in the mountains of the Valdivian Andes.

Participating in the extermination operations were units of the Special Forces Battalion, based in Llancahue, Valdivia, in particular the No. 8 Commando Company commanded by the then-Army captain Rosauro Martínez Labbé.

In addition, CNI units headed by the Rojo group, coming from Santiago and specializing in the persecution of MIR militants, were mobilized in the annihilation operations, along with the Anti-Terrorist Unit, also coming from the capital. To these were added CNI personnel from regional units in the south and Carabineros from various units located in the mountain towns.

In this latest resolution, the minister indicted Martínez Labbé as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide, as a crime against humanity, of the MIR militants Raúl Rodrigo Obregón Torres, executed on September 13 of that year, 1981; Pedro Juan Yáñez Palacios, executed on September 16, both in the Pasas sector; and Julio César Riffo Figueroa and René Eduardo Bravo Aguilera, murdered in the Cachín Alto sector on September 21 of that year.

In the case of these last two victims, it is worth noting that they had been detained by Carabineros at the end of August, handed over to the CNI, whose criminal units subjected them to bestial torture in secret barracks in the city of Valdivia, then taken to Santiago to continue the scourges at the CNI’s Borgoño barracks, and finally returned to the south, where they were tortured in the facilities of the Termas de Liquiñe, which had been converted into a clandestine center of political imprisonment and torture for the objectives of this extermination operation in the mountain zone.

The now-former right-wing deputy was previously indicted in this same case as the perpetrator of the qualified homicides of MIR members Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez, Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, and José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, executed on September 20 in the Remeco Alto sector.

This previous indictment was issued in September 2014 after the plaintiffs requested, and the courts of justice decreed, the stripping of the then-sitting deputy’s parliamentary immunity.

For the aforementioned previous indictments, the accused Rosauro Martínez Labbé enjoys the benefit of provisional release on bail. The minister terminated this benefit and ordered total house arrest for the accused former officer.

In the recent resolution, Minister Mesa Latorre issued an indictment against three other subjects involved in the aforementioned criminal acts. He indicted the former operational chief of the CNI’s Anti-Terrorist Unit (UAT) and former Army officer Conrado Vicente García Giaier as the perpetrator of the qualified homicide, as a crime against humanity, of the MIR militant Juan Ángel Ojeda Aguayo, committed on November 27, 1981, in the Quebrada Honda sector in the vicinity of Puerto Fuy.

Previous indictments in this case also weigh on this individual. He is indicted for the qualified homicides of Pedro Juan Yáñez Palacios, Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez, Próspero Guzmán Soto, José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, Julio César Riffo Figueroa, and René Eduardo Bravo Aguilera.

As in the case of Rosauro Martínez, the minister terminated the provisional release that benefited the accused García Giaier and, in its place, ordered total house arrest.

Furthermore, he issued an indictment against the former Army non-commissioned officer and former member of the No. 8 Llancahue commando group, Julio Mariano Araki Tepano, as the perpetrator of the qualified homicide of the victims murdered in Remeco Alto: Patricio Calfuquir Henríquez, Próspero Guzmán Soto, and José Monsalve Sandoval.

Finally, the minister indicted the former Carabineros non-commissioned officer Paulino Flores Rivas as the perpetrator of the qualified homicide of the MIR member Miguel Cabrera Fernández, perpetrated on October 15, 1981, in the town of Choshuenco in the same mountain region.

Given certain special conditions, the minister also decreed—for now—the precautionary measure of total house arrest for these last indicted individuals.

Source: resumen.cl, December 28, 2022

Minister Mesa indicts two retired military officers for qualified homicides in Neltume in 1981

The minister on extraordinary assignment for human rights violation cases for the jurisdictions of Temuco, Valdivia, Puerto Montt, and Coyhaique, Álvaro Mesa Latorre, submitted to trial the retired Army Major Sergio María Canals Baldwin and the retired Army Lieutenant Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross as perpetrators of the consummated crime of qualified homicide of: Rodrigo Obregón Torres, René Eduardo Bravo Aguilera, Julio César Riffo Figueroa, and Juan Ángel Ojeda Aguayo.

These crimes were perpetrated in the town of Neltume, Panguipulli commune, in 1981.

In the resolution (case file 1675-2003), Minister Mesa Latorre subjected Canals Baldwin and Sanhueza Ross to the precautionary measure of preventive detention, in consideration of the nature of the crime and the sentence they face for their responsibility in the crime against humanity.

“Given the merit of the background information, from which it is clear that the freedom of the accused constitutes a danger to the safety of society; also taking into account the probable legal sanction for the crimes in which they are attributed participation; and having seen the provisions of Article 363 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the benefit of provisional release will not be granted to them,” the resolution states.

“Having knowledge that the accused are currently being held in the ‘Colina I’ Penitentiary Center of the Gendarmería de Chile, serving a sentence for crimes investigated by another court, the decree of preventive detention is suspended until the completion of said sentence, and they shall be admitted at the appropriate time,” the sentence concludes.

In the investigation stage, Minister Álvaro Mesa gathered sufficient evidence to establish the following facts:

A) That during the month of March 1979, a group of Chilean exiles belonging to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR), who were residing in Europe, decided to create a guerrilla front in the southern zone of Chile, for which they met in Paris at the end of 1980, traveling from Madrid to Argentina and entering our country, specifically the Neltume area, through unauthorized border crossings, creating the group called “Toqui Lautaro Guerrilla Detachment.” In this place, they began a period of logistical work and military preparation, constructing shelters for the purpose of keeping their food, weapons, and clothing protected. (as stated in the declaration of Jorge Enrique Durán Delgado on page 536 (Volume I), declaration of Jorge Antonio Acuña Reyes on page 542 (Volume I), page 1,982 (Volume V), among other evidence)

B) That the local residents noticed this situation and reported it to the Carabineros of the Neltume Station, in the current Los Ríos region, so in the month of June 1981, a group composed of personnel from the No. 8 “Llancahue” Special Troops Commando detachment, under the instruction of Captain Rosauro Martínez Labbé, went to that sector for the purpose of verifying if the reports received were real or false.

C) That subsequently, on June 26, 1981, this group in charge of checking the area discovered one of the camps created by the members of the aforementioned Detachment and decided to raid it. As a result of this military operation, the Detachment group split, and the Army seized some of the belongings found in their shelters (maps, passports, food, weaponry). (according to evidence on page 1092 (Volume III), among others)

D) That from that moment, the Military operation led by Captain Rosauro Martínez Labbé officially began, which had as its objective the annihilation of the members of this group of young guerrillas, with the following military and Carabinero units participating in this operation: Rancagua Aviation Regiment; No. 8 Special Troops Commando Company; Valdivia Prefecture of Carabineros, and all its dependent units. (as stated in IV Army Division Official Letter No. 3560/112/1184, sending secret order on page 828 and page 829, Volume II).

E) That during the second fortnight of August 1981, and with the objective of reinforcing the battalion led by Rosauro Martínez Labbé, the Anti-Terrorist Unit of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) arrived in the conflict zone, composed of approximately 15 uniformed personnel, and in charge of Captain Conrado Vicente García Giaier.

By this date, the units from Santiago and Valdivia of the Central Nacional de Informaciones were already annexed to the battalion commanded by Rosauro Martínez Labbé, as well as its “Rojo Group,” which was in charge of Chilean Army Captain Enrique Erasmo Sandoval Arancibia.

F) That in this context, also having to keep in mind the inclement weather and scarce food that caused health problems for the young people belonging to the “Toqui Lautaro guerrilla detachment” group, the following situations occurred:

1) That on August 30, 1981, Julio Riffo Figueroa and René Bravo Aguilera, at a time when both were resting after being fed by locals Pedro Morales and Julia Navarro, were detained by a patrol composed of three Carabineros officials from the Malalhue Station in the Huellahue sector.

After their detention, they were sent to Valdivia, specifically to the Las Ánimas Station. There, they were interrogated by Carabineros from the OS7 of Santiago. Subsequently, Julio Riffo Figueroa and René Bravo Aguilera were transferred to the Borgoño Barracks in Santiago, of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), where they were tortured and interrogated.

On September 16, 1981, Julio Riffo Figueroa and René Bravo Aguilera were again transported to the conflict zone, particularly to Neltume, for the purpose of being used by the battalion in charge of Rosauro Martínez Labbé in the search for the other guerrilla camps and their members.

Finally, on September 21, 1981, they were executed, with the cause of death for René Bravo Aguilera being listed as craniocerebral and thoracic gunshot wounds, and for Julio César Riffo Figueroa as a craniocerebral gunshot wound. (as stated, among other evidence, in declarations by Adrián Ewaldo Porras Riffo on page 1, page 15 (Volume I), page 1292 (Volume IV); by Juan Pablo Cea Villalabeitia on page 679 (Volume II); by José Antonio Mora Sanchez on page 680 (Volume II); by Renato Cortés Muñoz on page 681 (Volume II); by José Andrés Vial Martínez on page 682 (Volume II); by Jaime Patricio Martínez Fuentes on page 687 (Volume II); by Luis Alberto Jerez Prussing from page 1024 to page 1029 (Volume III); by Renzo Eugenio Gattavara Ghillino from page 1183 to page 1184 (Volume III); Death certificate of Julio César Riffo on page 12 (Volume I), page 658 (Volume II), 1273 (Volume IV). Report on page 624 (Volume II). Death record of Julio César Riffo on page 26 (Volume I). Autopsy report of Julio César Riffo on page 674 (Volume II); Official Letter No. B-4 2114 of September 22, 1981, on pages 684 to 685 (Volume II), which reports the death of Julio César Riffo and René Bravo; Decree 3336 of September 8, 1981, records arrest in CNI facilities of Riffo and Bravo on page 798 (Volume II); Decree 3370 of September 12, 1981, extends detention of Riffo and Bravo on page 799 (Volume II); Death certificate of René Eduardo Bravo Aguilera on page 12 (Volume I), page 662 (Volume II), and page 1272 (Volume IV); death record of René Eduardo Bravo Aguilera on page 26 (Volume I); Autopsy report of René Eduardo Bravo Aguilera on page 673 (Volume II))

2) That Pedro Juan Yáñez Palacios, in the course of his journey, suffered gangrene in his feet, so he had to be left by his companions in the hollow of a trunk with a rifle; however, due to the strong smell of medicine he was emitting, he was detected by the group of soldiers from the No. 8 Llancahue Commando—also integrated by Conrado García Giaier, who was monitoring the area—who killed him, his precise cause of death being a craniocerebral gunshot wound. (according to death certificate page 188 (Volume I) and page 666 (Volume II); on page 624 (Volume II), death report; Autopsy report page 670 (Volume II); Declaration of Erasmo Sandoval on page 1941 (Volume IV), among other evidence)

3) That as a result of the information provided by the detainees Julio Riffo Figueroa and René Bravo Aguilera regarding the meeting place and the password, a group of soldiers, including Jerez Prussing and Enrique Sandoval Arancibia—already indicted in this case—and others from the No. 8 Llancahue Commando under the command of Rosauro Martínez Labbé, managed to find and kill Raúl Rodrigo Obregón Torres on September 13, 1981, when he was going to meet his companions, his precise cause of death being a cervicothoracic gunshot wound. (according to death certificate page 187 (Volume I) and page 654 (Volume II); report page 624 (Volume II); autopsy report page 671 (Volume II) and 1074 (Volume III); Declaration of Enrique Sandoval on page 1863 (Volume IV); page 2055 (Volume V); page 2118 (Volume V); Declaration of Aquiles González on page 3887 (Volume VII), among other evidence)

4) That around mid-1981, one of the young men, Juan Ángel Ojeda Aguayo, arrived at the house of a relative named Isaías Aguayo Márquez, located in the “Quebrada Honda” sector, in the vicinity of the town of Neltume, Panguipulli, staying overnight in that place on repeated and discontinuous occasions, where he went to look for food on different occasions, when specifically on November 28, 1981, a group of Army and Carabinero personnel stationed in the Neltume sector approached the mentioned house, where, after urging the residents to leave their home, Juan Ángel Ojeda Aguayo left the place, where he was shot down by a group of soldiers who fired multiple shots at him, resulting in a craniocerebral-facial gunshot wound, in addition to multiple cervicothoracic gunshot wounds with rupture and bursting of organs and gunshot wounds to the lower extremities, which caused his death. (according to page 848 (Volume II), report accounting for the death; page 872 (Volume II) autopsy report; page 874, 919 (Volume II), page 1274 (Volume IV), death certificate; declaration of Jorge Farías Silva on page 880 (Volume II); declaration of Rita Yolanda Jaramillo on page 988 (Volume II) and 1592 (Volume IV); of Isaías Aguayo Márquez on page 2.029 (Volume V); Carabinero official letter of January 1982, page 918 (Volume II), among other evidence)

5) That Patricio Alejandro Calfuquir Henríquez, Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, and José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval arrived at the house of Mrs. Floridema Jaramillo, in Remeco Alto, who provided them with food and immediately took actions to report them to the Carabineros, which was ultimately achieved by sending her son Juan Carlos Henríquez Jaramillo, who went on horseback to the Neltume Station reporting this fact; together with Carabineros, they headed back to her home, and upon passing in front of the Remeco school, they notified soldiers who were in a camp in the place, who in turn gave notice by radio: that upon returning to the house, there were Carabineros stationed in various places, around four, but at the same time Captain Rosauro Martínez Labbé arrived accompanied by at least two lower-ranking soldiers—among them Corporal 2nd Julio Araki Tepano—who, after urging the guerrillas to leave the house, fired against the property until it was practically unusable, as a result of which Patricio Calfuquir Henríquez, Próspero Guzmán Soto, and José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval were killed; subsequently, a large military contingent arrived that continued with the operation and transfer of the deceased guerrillas, with the following being indicated as the cause of death in the autopsy protocols: according to page 1075, Patricio Calfuquir, as the precise cause of death, five thoraco-abdominal gunshot wounds in a grazing manner, complicated by rupture and bursting of organs and viscera, and the shots present characteristics of having been fired from a long distance with automatic and large-caliber weapons; on page 1076 regarding Próspero del Carmen Guzmán Soto, the precise cause of death is twenty-eight thoraco-abdominal and extremity gunshot wounds in a grazing manner, complicated by rupture and bursting of organs, viscera, and comminuted fractures, and the shots with characteristics of having been fired from a long distance with automatic and large-caliber weapons; on page 1079 and in relation to José Eugenio Monsalve Sandoval, the precise, necessary, and immediate cause of death: (4) craniocerebral and thoraco-abdominal gunshot wounds, in a grazing manner, complicated, with rupture of organs and viscera, from long-distance shots, with automatic and large-caliber weapons.

6) Miguel Cabrera Fernández, known as “El Paine” and who was the leader of the group, died in the town of Choshuenco on October 15, 1981, in an alleged confrontation with Carabineros belonging to the staff of the Station of that town.

His precise, necessary, and immediate cause of death indicates “Cervicothoracic gunshot wound, anteroposterior, grazing, complicated by rupture of blood vessels and left lung.” (Official letter sending corpse to the morgue page 751 (Volume II); Carabinero report on death page 749 (Volume II); Declaration in the prosecutor’s office by Paulino Flores Rivas page 753 (Volume II); declaration in the prosecutor’s office by Hernando Jara Valenzuela on page 753 (Volume II); background on Miguel Cabrera from page 830 to 841 (Volume II); Autopsy report page 755 (Volume II); death certificate on page 919 (Volume II); declaration of Héctor Rivas Bravo on page 842 (Volume II); declaration of Dagoberto Pineda Troncoso from page 1055 to 1584 (Volume IV)).

G) That in events 1 through 4, Rosauro Martínez Labbé participated in his capacity as Captain, who at the time of the events held the position of Commander of the No. 8 Commando Company, of the “Llancahue” Battalion, dependent on the IV Army Division, a Company that was directing the operation in Neltume during the entire period it lasted.

The aforementioned Captain Martínez was in charge of organizing the different groups that moved through the sector, providing weaponry and giving instructions, among which it was highlighted that “They were at war” and that “upon seeing any man with the characteristics of guerrillas, one should shoot to kill” (according to declarations on page 3153, page 3155, page 3180, page 3182, page 3219, page 3185, page 3350, page 3355, page 3368, page 3385, page 3400, page 3478 (Volume VI), page 3616 (Volume VII) among many others; documents on page 1085 (Volume III) and following, 1286 (Volume IV) and following, 2338 (Volume V) and following).

H) That among the members of the No. 8 Commando Company that was collaborating with the operations commanded by Captain Martínez was Corporal 2nd Julio Araki Tepano, who was part of the reconnaissance group and, among his participation in the search and detention tasks of the guerrillas, was in charge of giving notice to the group leader, Lieutenant Ivan Fuentes Sotomayor, that they had discovered a guerrilla base. (page 2488 (Volume V), page 2583 (Volume VI), page 3605 (Volume VII), page 3350 (Volume VI), page 3353 (Volume VI), page 3355 (Volume VI) among other evidence).

I) Likewise, regarding the events indicated in point 1, that is, Julio César Riffo and René Bravo Aguilera, Army Lieutenant Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross participated in them, dependent on the No. 8 Commando Company, who was one of the Officers in charge of one of the sections that was sent to the Neltume area (according to declarations on page 1849, page 2.366, page 3.183, page 5.671, among other evidence).

Thus, according to declarations of conscript soldiers who were members of the squad that was in charge of Lieutenant Sanhueza Ross, they have indicated their knowledge regarding detained persons who were in the charge of CNI personnel, describing that they were guerrillas, with their hands tied and a stick crossing their backs that was tied with wires at each end of this at the height of their wrists, recounting how they were ordered to guard them and that subsequently, about fifty meters from where they were together with Lieutenant Sanhueza Ross, these detainees were executed, and then the same conscripts were ordered to wrap the bodies in polyethylene and load them into a helicopter that transported them to the Company in Valdivia. (according to declaration on page 3.353 and page 3.473 (Volume VI), page 5.711, page 6.856 (Volume XIV), among other evidence). In the same way, regarding the events indicated in number 4, that is, Juan Ángel Ojeda Aguayo, Lieutenant Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross participated in them, insofar as he commanded the patrol that was in the vicinity of the town of Choshuenco and, upon receiving a notice from Carabineros of that town, he went together with the patrol that was under his charge to the house where Ojeda Aguayo was, setting up a security operation around the dwelling and participating in the events that resulted in the death of Juan Ángel Ojeda Aguayo. (according to declarations on page 880 (Volume II), page 8.443 and page 8.580 (Volume XVIII)).

J) That the Anti-Terrorist Unit of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (UAT), directed by Captain Conrado García Giaier, also formed a fundamental part of this operation, who participated actively in the search, detention, and subsequent death of some of the mentioned victims, which is also accredited in the indictment orders on pages 2.046, 2.050, and 2.052 (Volume V) (confirmed by the Illustrious Court of Appeals of Valdivia according to page 2.169 (Volume V)) (declarations of Luis Bascur Gaete on page 1500 (Volume IV); of Carlos Leonardo Ruiz Iturra on page 2.398 and page 2.431 (Volume V); of Carlos Cesar Cisternas Cofré on page 2.401 (Volume V); service record from page 2324 to 2330 (Volume V); police report page 2.387 (Volume V), among other evidence).

K) That in the same way, Army Major Sergio Canals Baldwin fulfilled active participation in the events described in numbers 1 and 3, that is, Julio Riffo Figueroa, René Bravo Aguilera, and Raúl Obregón Torres.

Major Canals Baldwin was part of the “Plomo Group” of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) and was sent to the Neltume area, stationing himself together with his group and together with the other members of the CNI, in the Termas de Liquiñe, occupying the entirety of the cabins during the entire time they remained in said town, facilities in which Julio Riffo Figueroa and René Bravo Aguilera were detained, and that as a result of the information provided by these detainees, it was possible to find and kill Raúl Obregón Torres, as detailed in point 3 of this indictment order.

This Officer performed operational and information-gathering tasks regarding the activities of the zone and was the Army Officer with the highest rank in the group of people who integrated the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) and who were sent from Santiago to support the tasks of other branches of the Armed Forces that were in the zone (according to declarations on page 3.653, page 3.656, page 5.550, and page 8.534, among other evidence).

That in all the reports that account for the death of the members of the “Toqui Lautaro Detachment,” it is mentioned that they died as a result of confrontations, which is implausible, since one cannot ignore the unequal and deteriorated condition in which the members of the “Toqui Lautaro” group were, not only in terms of weaponry and preparation, but mostly in their physical conditions, remembering that the victims were in a state of malnutrition and one of them even with part of his foot amputated.

The disproportion in the use of force by the State agents was evident, since they could simply have apprehended the members of the group without the need to go so far as to execute them.”

Source: diarioelranco.cl, August 30, 2024