An LND team traveled 2,500 kilometers across three regions in southern Chile to scrutinize the secrets of the most ferocious massacres of peasants that occurred during the dictatorship. Behind these crimes were landowners, merchants, and neighbors who waged a dirty war in alliance with the military and the Carabineros.

Thirty-five years after these crimes, and despite the fact that justice has been served in some cases, the majority remain free and still roam the country’s fields, towns, and hamlets like masters and lords.

It was a vengeance that terrorized entire villages, sheltered each time by the darkness of night. The perpetrators of the crimes against peasants and workers of other trades were civilians, masters of the area, who, after the military coup and in alliance with the military and the uniformed police, decided the life and death of the victims they chose.

Some acted disguised in war attire, prepared and determined to exterminate those who had defended their rights against the exploitation that had always been established in the fields. Sometimes, even before the coup, they carried out paramilitary tasks alongside the far-right movement Patria y Libertad.

Others acted in connection with various fascist-style groups organized to oppose the workers' achievements during the years of the socialist dream through violence. But all responded with the hatred of witnessing how their eternal subjects and servants of their fortune-reproducing desires were gaining ground, countering humiliations and abuses against their dignity and that of their families.

Especially within the fundos (estates) where the law was the boss.

These are dramatic stories where, on some occasions, the parents or relatives themselves blamed their own for getting involved in union struggles for labor improvements, justifying their bosses, these civilian activists, and the military for having hunted them down and forcibly disappeared them.

In every city, in every town or hamlet in the Andean foothills where death arrived dressed in civilian clothes or disguised in olive green, the terror instilled by the hand of these powerful men remains to this day.

The inhabitants are hostile to questions about those times. They invoke oblivion due to the passage of time, or simply confess, looking around, that they still fear the return of the scourge that filled the streets and rural paths with blood.

Some of these civilian perpetrators of the massacres still walk the same paths frequented by the relatives of the fallen to buy their daily bread. Sometimes they spit on them as they pass, insulting them for having brought them to sit on the defendants' benches in a courtroom.

The mothers or siblings who dared early on to overcome the fear of constant threats by judicially pursuing these perpetrators suffered the double punishment of losing their loved ones and receiving the contempt of their neighbors.

And even from the very comrades-in-arms of their relatives, who crossed to the other side of the street to avoid those sad and helpless eyes that, to this day, have never stopped searching for their disappeared.

La Nación Domingo compiled a list of the 51 civilians prosecuted or convicted for the kidnapping and disappearance, or for the homicides, of field workers and others who practiced multiple trades. Of the total, 15 correspond to Germans from Colonia Dignidad, who are not addressed in this report because their movements are well known.

However, for the vast majority of the other 36, their identities and actions remain publicly unknown.

The team of three LND journalists traveled 2,500 kilometers and crossed three regions between Osorno and Los Ángeles, including Andean foothill zones, to retrace the route of vengeance. Everything happened in the midst of the biggest storm of the last 30 years, which left 17,000 people affected, navigating their vehicle through flooded highways and interior roads.

Miguel Ángel Fuentealba was five years old when, on October 10, 1973, the black of night was stained red in the hamlet of Liquiñe, 150 kilometers east of Valdivia, near the border with Argentina. They took his father along with ten other peasants to the bridge over the Toltén River in Villarrica, shot him several times, and opened his belly with a corvo (curved knife) so that his body would not float and would disappear into the current.

Miguel, now in his forties, did not know for many years what happened to his father, Isaías. In the afternoons, he would comb his hair well, put on his best clothes, "and all polished up, I would sit in an armchair outside the house to wait for my old man to return on the estate bus he always arrived on." He stutters a little, which has afflicted him since then; he looks you in the eyes, and suddenly his voice becomes softer due to the emotion of the memory.

Outside, in the streets of Villarrica, where we met him in a café, the rain is imposing.

Luis García Guzmán was the son of Julián, owner of the Termas de Liquiñe; both were rabid anti-communists. The inn and cabins of the complex served as headquarters for the hunt. There, Luis García and his father, now deceased, made the list of who had to be hunted for Captain Hugo Guerra Jonquera, who arrived with military forces from Valdivia.

The Garcías also provided the vehicles to transport the detainees to their final destination.

Eleven peasants from the Paimún, Trafún, and Carranco fundos suffered the sentence imposed on them by these masters and lords of the small town.

The Panguipulli Forestry and Lumber Complex, to which the three properties belonged—the largest timber area in hectares and peasant power in the history of Chile, strengthened during the Allende government with José Liendo Vera, "Commander Pepe," as its main leader—was feared then by the landowners of the Andean foothills of the X Region.

Now it was time for the reversal, when it was time to collect in lives.

But that night, Luis García's wife, María Hernández Calderón, saw everything. Twenty years later, García abandoned her and their two children for another woman, and it was she who now took revenge and denounced what she witnessed that October night: the eleven peasants tied up and blindfolded in the Garcías' vehicles, and her husband driving, one of them dressed in military uniform.

She saw the death convoy leave the inn destined for the Toltén River.

Refugees from the rain under the eaves of the building where she lives in Villarrica, María spoke with LND to tell of her misfortune. But after her confession to the justice system in 2005, García visited her and, with threats, forced her to sign a letter retracting her statements where she recounted what happened.

"I signed the letter so he would leave me alone, because he was arrogant; nobody likes him anymore because of that." But months later, the woman struck back and again ratified her statements in the process being instructed for this episode. Her integrity and courage, and her clear ideas, are surprising. We fled the cold and rain, and she joined us for hot chocolate to warm up the bitter memories.

As a trick of fate, Luis García, who was also a "constable" for the Carabineros, baptized his current native wood business with the name of one of the fundos of the tragedy: "Maderas Nativas Paimún S.A.," on the highway between Villarrica and Lican Ray. We looked for him there without luck. His wife says he is in Santiago.

Miguel Ángel, one of the five children his father, Isaías, left behind, does not hide that for a long time he thought about killing the Garcías when he learned the truth years later. As a teenager, he had to work at the hot springs because they were the only ones in the village who provided work.

His mother, Honorinda, also served the masters. And the Garcías, with their military cronies, continued to come to celebrate and sing with the guitar at his grandmother's tavern in Liquiñe.

"There is still a hope that he will return, although I know it is irrational. My daughter sometimes says to me: 'What if Grandpa is alive in another country?' The mind is just so strange," Miguel Ángel muses, looking out the café window at the wet street.

In October 1994, the Garcías sold the tourist complex to the Navy, which acquired it for 196 million pesos, under the scrutiny of Panguipulli notary Leonardo Calderara.

When asked, the commander-in-chief, Admiral Rodolfo Codina, stated he was unaware of the tragic past of what is now a recreation site for officers and seafarers. "I am unaware if these hot springs had any connection to human rights violations," the admiral replied to LND.

In Liquiñe, Miguel Ángel's aunts, Gloria and Marta, are surprised by our arrival to ask about that past that they and the whole town would like to bury forever.

Expressions of affection for "Grandpa Julián" and "Don Lucho," the Garcías who helped kill their brother-in-law Isaías, sound violent. Marta is direct: "He brought it on himself, why did he get involved in nonsense?" she sentences in defense of the masters of the hamlet.

And she completes the sentiment by warning that it was Isaías who was the true culprit of his own death and not the Garcías. The woman's words seem like her own sentence in the store where we found her. Her daughter also speaks familiarly of "Grandpa Julián" as if he were her own.

A couple of years ago, the small town of Liquiñe took to the streets with flags and banners to support Luis García, after he was sentenced in the first instance to five years and one day as the perpetrator of the kidnapping and disappearance of the peasants. "Don Lucho" arrived asking for signatures of support in his favor, and almost all of the 1,200 inhabitants of the place backed and hugged him.

It is the real and contradictory life of these villages where sometimes it seems that not even Christ himself has arrived yet. As contradictory as the stormy sky that suddenly opens in a break from the deluge, and in the midst of the darkness, the loneliness, and the most complete silence, reveals its mantle of stars and constellations that are overwhelming and that we contemplate, numb, with respect for the immensity and mystery of that southern universe.

Heading north, in the VIII Region, is Santa Bárbara. From there, more than 30 kilometers toward the mountain range, an endless winding road, full of mud and plagued by forest plantations, ends at the imposing El Huachi fundo.

It is preceded only by the hamlet of the same name, humble in its surroundings, which seems like a haphazard extension of the field owned by the Barrueto Barting family. It is no coincidence that everyone knows them, since many of the locals work their lands and settled there looking for a way to survive.

To reach the fundo where brothers Manuel and Ricardo Barrueto live, it is enough to just pronounce their surname, and arms are always raised in the same direction, deep into the forests. Once inside the property, one of the house employees, with an impressive view of the Huequecura River, tells us that "the boss" went out in the morning, as he has another residence in Los Ángeles and alternates his stay between both places. "He is somewhat ill, he left to have some tests done, it is most likely that he will arrive tomorrow or the day after," she says kindly.

After the discouraging response, the return to Santa Bárbara became inevitable. After advancing through steep hills, the road indicating the exit of the fundo appeared. But the gate is blocked by an all-terrain motorcycle that is lying across it, as if it were just another pine tree among the thousands that the Barruetos have on their property ready for logging.

To the side of the vehicle, a tall man waits in a threatening stance. He has gray hair, dry eyes, and a face wrapped in a pair of pale cheeks. He wears a red jockey cap and, with his gaze lowered, approaches inquisitively.

In one hand he carries a digital camera; the other rests on a bulge located at his waist. After scrutinizing the car and its occupants, his small mouth states briefly that he is Ricardo Barrueto Barting.

He does not recognize it, but he is one of the two brothers who are currently being prosecuted for the kidnapping of six peasants, which occurred just after the coup, all of them employees on his fundo.

Without further ado, he expels us from the property; there are no more questions. "One does not enter here without my permission," he sentences. He takes a photograph of our car and the license plate, while we immortalize him back with our camera.

Twenty-four hours later, we would learn that a supposed detective from the Investigative Police called the Seellmann Rent a Car company, where the vehicle was rented, to ask for the renters' data, arguing that it had been used "by Mapuche activists to cause disturbances."

Mrs. Norma Panes knows Ricardo Barrueto's tricks well. In 2006, after the minister of the Concepción Court of Appeals, Carlos Aldana, took on several human rights cases in the Biobío area, she had a confrontation with him.

It took place in the midst of the reconstruction of the scene for the 20 kidnappings of workers and peasants that the town of Santa Bárbara suffered between September and October 1973, and which to this day have left many families without knowing the whereabouts of their fathers, husbands, sons, or brothers.

There, facing his face, Ricardo pointed out that on the night her husband, Miguel Cuevas Pincheira, "was taken from the house in his underwear by uniformed men," he was not there.

But she asserts that the Barruetos were part of the group of civilians who, disguised as military personnel, took her husband in the middle of the night on September 20. Norma Panes says she saw them clearly, and so did her daughter.

Upon showing her the updated photo (see image) that we obtained of Ricardo Barrueto, Norma does not hesitate: "It's him." His face, like Manuel's, remained engraved in her memory with as much force as those years when her husband was just another worker at the El Huachi fundo, a job he alternated with his trade as a shoemaker.

The testimonies of the families of six more peasants who worked at El Huachi, kidnapped on the same day and at similar hours, allowed for the prosecution in 2002 of the Barruetos and the civilians Sergio Fuentes Valenzuela, Jorge Domínguez Larenas, and the brothers Jorge and José Valdivia Dames, who formed a true mini-Caravan of Death.

Norma illustrates it in the following way: "That day, what the group of civilians, all of them members of Patria y Libertad, did together with the Carabineros was, literally, to clean the field for the Barruetos."

Then, a memory of the years following her husband's disappearance comes to her mind: "They were all friends with each other. On one occasion, in the middle of the dictatorship, I ran into a pair on a corner. Since they knew I was still looking for my husband, they spat in my face," she says.

The attitude of the Barruetos, apparently, is not very different. After moving the motorcycle to clear the way, minutes later, one of the peasants hitched a ride with us to get to the road that connects Ralco with Los Ángeles.

On the way, he said that Barrueto had asked him if he knew whose white vehicle had entered the fundo without permission. And he warned us about Ricardo: "When he saw you enter, he said that you weren't leaving here." The young man, a simple forestry worker, added with lucidity that "he is a bad man, arrogant, a jerk as a boss, who pays just enough to survive.

He takes advantage of the suffering and the need of the worker."

Currently, the civilians responsible for the massacre remain prosecuted.

After executing them, most were thrown into the Biobío River from the Santa Bárbara bridge.

A few kilometers south of Santa Bárbara, in Mulchén, another wave of kidnappings was carried out thanks to the coordinated work of civilians and Carabineros. Organized in the same way, but on this occasion dressed in their own clothes, they arrived at night to seek their vengeance.

One of them fell upon the worker and leader of a peasant union, José Orellana Gatica. His captors: Rolf During Pohler and Samuel Arriagada Domínguez, plus the police contingent at their service. The motive was clear: the worker worked inside the Verdún fundo (a name that alludes to the bloody battle of the First World War fought by Germans and French), whose owners were During's parents.

José Orellana's wife, Sara Mendoza, remembers that on the night of September 28, '73, the picket arrived outside the house they had inside the employer's property. Without asking, they opened fire, and after a few moments, they kicked down the door.

They took her husband and dragged him out by force. It was not difficult for her to recognize During and Arriagada, since she always saw them together inside the fundo. Desperate, she went out with a candelabra, but a gunshot blew it from her hand.

José's father, who also lived there and worked for the Durings, did not get up. His wife begged him to intercede in favor of her son, but the man, faithful to his boss, told her to shut up and keep sleeping. A few days later, the man kicked Sara out of the fundo and continued working for the Durings for his entire life. At that moment, she was 21 years old and six months pregnant.

For the LND team, it was impossible to find Rolf During, as he moves between several properties he maintains between the VIII, IX, and X Regions. However, we found his until-now inseparable friend, Samuel Arriagada, with whom he traveled in the same vehicle to testify for this case at the Concepción Court of Appeals.

Also the son of latifundistas, but today fallen on hard times, Arriagada does not appear in any public registry. Only the house in his sister's name alerts us to his possible presence. It is an old wooden mansion located on the corner of Soto and Villagrán streets.

In a small store located to the side, they confirm that Samuel Arriagada lives in that house and that, although he is an unfriendly character, they do not know that he is involved in crimes committed during the dictatorship.

In the presence of a camera, of all the people who passed by the place, the only one who gave a suspicious look and was annoyed when they were photographing the front of the house was a guy about 65 years old, wearing a jacket and blue jeans. A few seconds later, he enters the house, and there is no doubt: it is Samuel Arriagada.

When asked about his procedural situation, at first he denied being involved in any trial. Upon reminding him that he was detained for several weeks in 2003, he says he has nothing to do with it and that he does not trust the press. He did not accept any more questions; he only kept his gaze fixed until we disappeared from his corner.

His silent hermeticism contrasts with the image Sara took with her when she confronted him. "He only lacked hitting me," she remembers. But she never backed down. "Every time I found them at the bank or somewhere, I would arrive with my son in my arms and say to him, especially to Rolf: 'Kill me too.' He always limited himself to lowering his face.

His mother even offered me money so that I would stop accusing them. That didn't interest me. I didn't accept a single peso from them," says the woman with black eyes and a tender smile.

Sara's combative attitude is isolated. José's siblings, for example, refused to undergo DNA tests at the Legal Medical Service to determine if any of the bone remains found in various parts of Chile could match. "They are afraid that the coup will return and they will raze everything again," warns Sara.

In any case, for her, the longing to find her husband again was always stronger. Although she lived for 20 years with another man and had a son with him, she does not hesitate to show her cards. "I choose José a hundred times.

My best moments are when I dream of him. I am by his side and he tells me to stop looking for him. Then I listen to him and I am happy. When I wake up, everything changes," she says.

Although neither of the two confessed to the kidnapping, Samuel Arriagada is currently sentenced in the first instance to five years and one day in prison for the qualified kidnapping of José Orellana.

Rolf During, meanwhile, was imposed 10 years. The reason is that the descendant of Germans keeps another dead man under the table. In this last case, he does recognize that he was one of those who pulled the trigger.

In his judicial statement before the minister with exclusive dedication, Carlos Aldana, Rolf During recognized that on September 28, while he was on guard duty supporting the Carabineros, he received Jorge Narváez Salamanca, who arrived detained in the company of "a group of people." He does not remember who they were. Subsequently...

During got into a car and sat next to Narváez until they reached the Quilaco police station, a small town located a few kilometers from Mulchén. Waiting for them there was Carabineros Lieutenant Jorge Maturana (also convicted). After an hour of waiting, they took him to the Quilaco bridge, located over the Biobío River, sat him on one of the railings, and then proceeded to execute him.

The other civilian who was present at the crime scene, José Horacio Pacheco Padilla, also testified that During was one of the three who fired. Regarding his own participation, he stated that he took part in the detention and that, as he was not armed, he was only an eyewitness.

However, Pacheco Padilla was a schoolmate of Jorge Narváez at the Liceo de Hombres in the city (he was one grade ahead), belonged to the Patria y Libertad group, and also to the civilian support group for the Carabineros. On the other hand, Narváez was 15 years old at the time and was a member of the MIR. Hence, judicial evidence points to him as the one who provided his classmate's name.

When asking about José Pacheco in Mulchén, his name sounds familiar. "He drives one of those yellow-sign taxis," a neighbor comments. The description adds that he works for "line number 2," which has its dispatch shack at the end of Calle Victoria, almost at the urban limit of the small city.

It is a small green wooden shack, surrounded by the classic black vehicles that arrive and depart. The rest of the taxi drivers say that Pacheco drives a Chevrolet Corsa, the only one in the line. Furthermore, they all say he is an affable and friendly guy. None of them admit to knowing that he has any kind of trouble with the law. They consider him a quiet man who lives with his family.

After a few minutes of waiting, the vehicle appears. A man of about 52 years old, robust, pot-bellied, gray-haired, and mustachioed, gets out. He rushes to inquire about the reason for our presence. "A short ride to Los Ángeles," we answer as an excuse to see how he handles himself despite his past. He decides to pose next to his vehicle, completely relaxed.

In more than 32 years, no one, except for one or two relatives of the victims, reminded him of his crime: having been part of a group of volunteers who illegally detained Jorge Narváez Salamanca and participated in his execution.

Like Rolf During, for years Pacheco denied his participation in the death of Narváez. Only in recent years has his memory been refreshed. He is currently sentenced to five years and one day. If his first-instance sentence is confirmed, he will have to go to prison. During as well.

The shrapnel and the buzzing of bullets broke the silence of the southern night. Today, at midnight, in the corners of the X Region, one can still hear the beating of the trees resisting the wind, the drops of water falling from the branches, and the murmur of the nocturnal fauna.

The night of September 16, 1973, was one of those where it was not the thunder that tore through nature, but the bursts of weapons from uniformed men and civilians discharged against peasants, who were a generational part of that nature.

On that same date, at the same time, the Valderas family was preparing to sleep. Although they had heard about the coup in Santiago, they did not think that the caravans of death unleashed in the country could reach them. Moreover, the 16 siblings who made up the family were beginning to arrive to gather for the Fiestas Patrias.

All this until the footsteps of several men were heard coming toward the humble dwelling, located 200 meters from the road bordering Lake Puyehue. Flavio, the eldest son, accidentally ran into the group halfway when he was heading to the latrine. "Stop right there, we are looking for Flavio Heriberto Valderas, don't move, you son of a bitch; we're going to kill you, asshole," said a Carabineros officer.

A blow with a rifle butt broke the young man's right supraorbital arch and detached part of the skin. "My mother said that his eye had popped out from the blow," recounts his sister Luz Marina.

In her simple house, located on Calle Diego de Almagro, she told LND that "my brother was a quiet, hardworking boy, who a couple of weeks earlier had fought with a Carabineros officer, and he had threatened him.

That night, Barrientos accompanied the Carabineros patrol, guided them, and provided them with vehicles. He also indicated where 'Cantarito' lived and entered with the detachment to point him out, because he also thought that my brother had locked his door to annoy him."

It is on record in the case file that Flavio Heriberto never had any political activity and that his death, rather, corresponded to a personal vendetta.

But Luz Marina Valderas has not forgotten any of the numerous occasions she has had to encounter Jorge Barrientos Camadro in Osorno. Justice says he was one of those responsible for the kidnapping and subsequent disappearance of her brother Flavio Heriberto, nicknamed "Cantarito."

Currently, Barrientos is a guy who always wears a jacket, blue jeans, and boots. He wears a huaso hat and gets around in an all-terrain vehicle. He has two estates: one in Puerto Octay and another in Puyehue.

His life, in the last 35 years, has been quiet, except for his constant violent outbursts and his well-known bad temper. The former owner of Radio Sago, Pedro Burgos, told those close to him about a meeting at the local hunting and fishing club, which the subject attended.

The elderly man recounted how Barrientos pulled a pistol from his waistband to fire into the air because he did not agree with a decision. That is how he has spent his life, between the estates, the Tattersall livestock fair, and, recently, parading through courts and spending some time in jail.

Luz Marina has worked for Senator Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle for many years. She takes care of the apartment that the legislator maintains in a downtown building. But she has also worked for years as a waitress at events.

"Once I was at the inauguration cocktail party for a Soprole drying plant. I was serving from a tray and had to pass by his side. He recognized me and knocked the tray out of my hand with a swipe," the woman recalled.

She also says she cannot forget the hatred with which he looked at her the morning when, again by chance, she was passing by to leave her truck keys at a flower stand, before leaving for Concepción, where several days of pretrial detention awaited him—the only time he has been deprived of liberty for the forced disappearance of the peasant.

After the tour, we confirmed that 35 years after the massacres, these "gentlemen" remain the masters of their small kingdoms, whose subjects continue to fear them, as if that same fateful night that many would have preferred not to live through were today.

Source: La Nación, September 7, 2008

Five retired Carabineros officers and non-commissioned officers, who were part of a patrol of approximately 30 people, composed of Carabineros, military personnel, and civilians from Mulchén, and who detained, tortured, and subsequently executed and/or forcibly disappeared 20 people in Mulchén and its surroundings, were prosecuted for the disappearance of three peasants in 1973 in the rural area of Mulchén.

This was determined by the head of the Mulchén Court of Letters, Rosa Gyacamán, who charged the former police officials for the kidnapping and subsequent execution of the Rubilar Gutiérrez brothers (José Roberto, José Liborio, and Manuel).

The case regarding the disappearance of the three peasants had been closed a few years ago, but a ruling by the Chillán Court of Appeals ordered the magistrate to reopen the investigation.

Source: PrimeraLinea, July 31, 2002

Mulchén: Former Carabineros captain prosecuted for kidnapping

The Mulchén Criminal Court prosecuted Carabineros Captain Jorge Maturana for the kidnapping of a student in that city on September 22, 1973.

This is the case of Gabriel Lara Espinoza, a third-year high school student and member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), who was detained by a group of Carabineros.

In addition, the court prosecuted civilians Samuel Arriagada and Roll Müiren for the kidnapping of José Orellana, son of a worker at the "Berdún" estate in the same commune, as reported by Radio Bío Bío.

The Mulchén Criminal Court is handling five human rights cases, four for alleged disappearance and one for illegal burial.

Source: elmostrador.cl, April 28, 2003

Cruelty has a name: Mulchén

For three days, a detachment of Carabineros, military personnel, and farmers detained, tortured, and murdered 18 peasants in the Biobío province in October 1973. Nine brothers, from three different families, were forced to fight each other to save themselves. The horror experienced by innocent people marked by the vengeance of their bosses.

It was already past two in the morning. They had been tied with ropes and wires for several hours. They had no water, food, or warmth. That night, October 6, 1973, sleet fell on the tile roofs of the paddock where they had been placed.

The cold was almost unbearable for the 12 people, all workers from the Carmen y Maitenes estate, detained during the day by the patrol of Carabineros, military personnel, and agricultural entrepreneurs that was sent from the Los Ángeles Regiment.

Alejandro Albornoz González (48) tried to throw himself over his brothers Daniel (28) and José (32) to mitigate the cold that made them shiver. Their cousins, Miguel (20), Ramón, Germán, and José Albornoz Acuña, a little further away, prayed in unison.

On the other side of the earthen building, José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez (33) tried to do the same with his brothers José Liborio (28) and Manuel (25). Stuck to them, the last prisoner, Luis Godoy Sandoval (23), was silent.

Three Carabineros watched them, aiming SIG rifles at them. At that same hour, after eating a "ration" at the main house of Carlos Lehman, the estate administrator, the rest of the civil-military party arrived at the covered paddock.

The Carabineros officer in charge began to insult and kick the peasants again. The other five uniformed men, four from the Carabineros and one from the Army, did the same. They were annoyed by the moans from the cold. The civilian present knew them. He knew that the Albornoz and Rubilar families were the best known and most numerous in the sector.

They had interrogated them about a certain Carlos Altamirano and about guerrilla schools, but the only thing they admitted was that they had worked their whole lives on the estate most of the time and, sometimes, on the lands that an entity called Cora (Agrarian Reform Corporation) had taken from their bosses.

The answers did not prevent them from having their ribs broken by blows, kicks, and whip lashes, in addition to the jaw of one of them and the head of the youngest Albornoz González. The cold and hunger increased the pain.

None of them had finished school. In those places, they say, one starts working at 14, among animals, summer pastures, the sawmill, and wheat crops. The only radio, which was in the main house, barely picked up signals.

That is why, since the 1970 elections, they knew nothing about Allende and the UP, except for the lands that, as they had heard with interest, were being assigned to the peasants, even though the boss, Lehman, said they were stolen by the Government.

The challenge

The few Chilean movie theaters had already premiered, during the sixties, "Spartacus," the famous adaptation that director Stanley Kubrick made of Howard Fast's novel. It is the story of the greatest slave uprising that occurred in the Roman Empire and its leader, Spartacus, who traveled the Italian peninsula freeing slaves from exploitation and putting the infamous system that sustained the fortune of the Roman nobility in check.

Once defeated, the patricians execute a fierce vengeance against the rebels who wanted freedom: they pursue them, detain them, torture them, and crucify them.

But the sadism of this story, which was real, concludes when Crassus, the Roman general who defeated him, forces Spartacus to fight a sword duel with his friend Antoninus. The fight was intended to spare one of them from the most ignominious death of the era: crucifixion on the Appian Way.

The young Carabineros lieutenant who commanded the patrol, and more than one of those who accompanied him that October night in 1973, must have seen or heard about the film when they were in front of the peasants of Mulchén.

The savage patrol

Jorge Maturana Concha had not yet turned 29. He was always among the lowest grades at the Carabineros School. He started in Ñuñoa, but was later assigned to Los Ángeles and from there to Mulchén. In October 1973, he was 28 years old and was still a lieutenant.

Two nights earlier, the major of the Second Police Station of Mulchén, Sergio Neira (now deceased), met with him and local businessmen. From that meeting emerged a list of people that Maturana Concha was to detain and execute. Without process, without trial, without shame.

The harangues that had been heard since September 11 had the moss-green-clad officer enthusiastic. It was his chance to show his virtues. Without hesitation, he took four Carabineros and a non-commissioned officer from the Los Ángeles Regiment, assigned especially.

The party was completed by seven civilians, mostly owners of estates and the largest properties in the sector, who guided the uniformed men with precision.

First by truck and then on horseback, they traveled more than 40 kilometers to the east of the city. They stopped at the El Morro estate. That October 5, they detained the peasants Juan de Dios Laubra, Domingo Sepúlveda, José Vidal, Celsio Vivanco, and José Yáñez. All of them were taken to the sector's police station, which was abandoned.

Only in December 2007 did Maturana Concha confess these facts to the detectives of the Investigative Brigade of Crimes against Human Rights and, later, to the minister of the Concepción Court of Appeals, Carlos Aldana. Until that date, in all his previous statements, he had lied.

"We transported the detainees on foot to the edge of the Renaico River, where I gave the order to put them in a line, blindfolded, while the personnel took a frontal position to the detainees, giving the order to fire with a hand movement; an instruction that the subordinates followed, killing the detainees, their bodies remaining on the riverbank, then we continued our way," he acknowledged.

On horseback, and in the form of a caravan of death, the Carabineros, military personnel, and businessmen continued their way toward the Carmen y Maitenes estate. The next day they made more arrests. The members of the detachment who have acknowledged some participation admit that none of the detainees offered resistance.

After the long day, Maturana ordered the uniformed men and civilians to settle into the main house, offered by the owner. Around two in the morning, Maturana and the rest of the party ran through the sleet that was falling to head to the covered paddock, where three Carabineros were guarding the 12 detainees.

Spartacus and Antoninus

The peasants were in bad shape and were complaining. It was the moment when Maturana Concha adopted the posture of the victorious Roman general and informed them that the next day some would be executed, but that others could be saved.

A few minutes later, the Albornoz González brothers, the Albornoz Acuña brothers, and the Rubilar Gutiérrez brothers took turns in the center of the room to fight each other with punches until leaving the opponent unconscious. According to the Carabineros lieutenant, the winners could survive.

After an hour, the prisoners turned into gladiators were panting on the floor, bloodied, with teary eyes and aware of the sadism of the game. Maturana and the rest of the patrol laughed. During what remained of the night, two of them were released. Another, José Guillermo González Albornoz, was tied to the wheel of a tractor.

To the rest, Maturana Concha recounted, "we moved them about 40 meters, ordering them to start making a pit two meters deep and about four to six meters long, demanding that the detainees lie face down and that all personnel proceed to fire, causing the death of all the people. Then the officials proceeded to cover the pit with the same earth and grass."

During last April 2, Judge Aldana carried out several reconstructions of the scene in the sector. Accompanied by detectives and 23 people, including the accused (seven) and witnesses, he recreated the route and events that occurred during those days in 1973.

After so many years of silence and repressed anguish, the pain could not be contained and was on the verge of generating a delicate situation that day.

The survivors of that macabre game, brothers Germán and José Nieves Albornoz Acuña, confronted the former Carabineros who, 34 years later, appeared forced to tell the truth by a judge who listened to them.

The outbursts were mainly directed at Maturana Concha, who, in a comment outside his statement, complained to the detectives: "How long are you going to continue with this farce." Minister Aldana himself had to ask the police personnel to intervene to avoid a fistfight between former uniformed men and the former prisoners whose lives, they feel, cost the lives of others.

According to the same account, the patrol, which had murdered 12 peasants in 48 hours, continued on its way to the southeast. On the slopes of the Pemehue hill, the arrests continued. The violence increased. The houses were raided with extreme violence; children and women were beaten with kicks and rifle butts.

Maturana himself acknowledges that in one of the houses they forced the family to provide them with lodging and food for three days, while they held other peasants detained. Some of them were taken walking, pulled by a rope tied to the non-commissioned officers' horses.

With the same cold hand demonstrated at Carmen y Maitenes, the slaughter continued. Alberto and Felidor Albornoz González, the other brothers who worked there, were also forced to dig their anonymous grave, along with José Gutiérrez and Jerónimo Sandoval.

Without questioning the orders or showing a hint of rebellion, they got into the pit, lay face down, and were riddled with bullets. Another detainee, Juan de Dios Roa, was executed and half-buried very close by.

The horror before their eyes

During the night, the members of the patrol ate and slept peacefully. At daybreak on October 8, the only military man in the patrol, Luis Díaz Quintana, noticed that the prisoner they had detained at Carmen y Maitenes three days earlier, José Guillermo Albornoz González, was still tied to the tractor wheel, out in the open, without food or water, with a fractured jaw, wrists bleeding from the wires, defecated and urinated.

It is still not clear why this peasant, the last surviving male son of the family, was taken there. The soldier who found him declared: "I accompanied Ortiz, we crossed the river and Ortiz told me to kill him. But I was not armed, so he took out his weapon and killed him."

In four days, 18 peasants were illegally detained, tortured, subjected to sadistic games, brutally murdered, some thrown into the river, and others buried in pits.

The relatives, who remained inside their houses, threatened by a curfew, began the search for their loved ones two days after the patrol left. The Roas found their father. His son Pedro Roa Castillo, now 44, was a child when his father was detained.

In 2003, he recounted the horror he had to live through: "There they found my father, he was being eaten by dogs, the head was separate from the body, and we proceeded to make a hole in the same place to bury him. The same was done with four other bodies, the latter being buried on the banks of the Renaico River. All were left with a cross. We made a wooden fence for my father's grave, unpainted."

Source: La Nación, May 4, 2008

The “Retiro de Televisores” (Television Removal) operation was the solution provided by Augusto Pinochet to cover up the massacres that occurred throughout Chile following the coup d'état. This cruel decision was made by him and the Military Junta after the discovery of the bodies of 11 peasants and 4 youths from Isla de Maipo in the lime kilns of Lonquén.

It was the second-to-last day of November 1978, when horror emerged from abandoned lime kilns in the town of Lonquén, a few kilometers from Santiago. The report had reached the Vicaría de la Solidaridad from a peasant who was digging in the earth in search of his forcibly disappeared son.

At first, it was a secret known only to Cardinal Silva Enríquez, the Vicar of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad Cristián Precht, and a small group of collaborators from the Vicaría de la Solidaridad; later, it became a stark reality regarding the fate of 15 detained individuals who had been missing until that moment.

The news of this discovery unsettled Pinochet; it was not on his agenda. He was clear that the disappeared had not escaped the country, nor were they wandering the world discrediting the military dictatorship.

He knew that behind every forcibly disappeared person was his own hand, so he called an emergency meeting of the Military Junta to seek a quick solution and prevent possible accidental discoveries of burials throughout the country.

It was a hot summer for the dictatorship. The discovery of clandestinely buried bodies and their rapid dissemination in the international press was added to the strong pressures from the U.S. government to extradite Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza for the terrorist attack in Washington against Orlando Letelier, further weakening his position on the international stage at a time when he was facing a serious border crisis with Argentina.

That year, pressures from the White House regarding the Washington attack had forced Pinochet to make the decision to end the DINA, but he could not be left without an intelligence service that responded to his interests.

Thus, on August 12, he promulgated two Decree Laws: 1876, which ended the DINA, and 1878, which created the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). To ensure everything was in order, he promoted Manuel Contreras to General of the Republic, completing the requirements demanded by the position of director of the nascent CNI.

The U.S. pressures continued, as did the investigations, which is why Pinochet decided to retire his loyal servant and look for a general who would provide guarantees to him and the Americans. The chosen one was retired General Odlanier Mena.

Odlanier Mena was a man of Military Intelligence who had retired after intense fights with the director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda. Pinochet, to reassure him, had given him the position of ambassador to Uruguay, a not insignificant post for a retired general, since it was close to home and there were no conflicts or shocks with the civil-military dictatorship of José María Bordaberry, an ally of the Chilean military dictatorship.

On November 3, 1977, Contreras was called to retirement and replaced by General Odlanier Mena. The change was not easy. Contreras had accumulated much power and influence over his people, who, thanks to the prevailing impunity, had earned a reputation for being unscrupulous among their peers.

Mena was reluctant when he was requested for the position and expressed this to Pinochet. The most compelling argument was that he could not assume it because he was a retired general, and the law created expressly stated that its director must be an active-duty general.

Pinochet, demonstrating his power, replied that there were no problems, that he would immediately order a change stating that the director could be an active-duty or retired general.

He was in the midst of this in December 1978, when he went to Pinochet's office to have several documents signed. At the entrance, he came face to face with General Mendoza, who was leaving the office very disturbed.

They did not have time to greet each other; he only heard, "Odlanier, we are discussing the Lonquén discovery and the enormous public commotion this fact produced in the country. I have been ordered to present a detailed report because I myself was unaware of this situation."

Surprised, he opened the door slightly and saw Admiral Merino, General Leigh, and Pinochet arguing. At that moment, an aide-de-camp had him enter. They greeted him without paying much attention to his presence and continued making comments, analyzing possible scenarios, and looking for ways to cover up the crimes.

Mena listened attentively in a corner of the table. At some point, the idea arose of using the institutions to carry out "the search for clandestine cemeteries throughout the country" in order to erase all traces of criminal activity. The idea contained a terrifying vision; it was a double crime: after death, disappearance.

The Operation Despite the detailed description that Mena gave to the justice system of that meeting, he replied that he had no further information regarding the fate of the idea of searching for "clandestine cemeteries." It was Minister Juan Guzmán who managed to clarify the course that meeting took and how the removal of graves had been ordered through "Operation Retiro de Televisores."

In 2004, Judge Guzmán and the Fifth Department of the Investigative Police received the testimony of an intelligence non-commissioned officer who indicated that he had received an A-1 category cryptogram—a nomenclature that determines the level of urgency and secrecy of the mission—while he was at the Húsares Regiment of Angol in 1979.

The non-stop account detailed data and situations that spoke of the context of the time and began to give substance to a series of gaps that had remained after the opening of graves in Liquiñe and other parts of the country.

According to his statement, due to the category of the cryptogram, he had run to the decoding machine to decipher it. When he was able to read it, upon seeing that it came from General Pinochet himself, he took it immediately to the office of the regiment commander.

He was so impressed that he did not forget its text, and as if he were reading it for the first time, he told the Judge that it "ordered the exhumation of all the bodies of political prisoners executed in the regiment's jurisdiction and to make them disappear."

The text of the cryptogram added that if any body were found after that cleanup operation in the area, the officers in charge of the mission would be retired.

Mulchén Massacre

The order began to be executed in the Húsares Regiment, but its commander remembered that the massacre of 18 peasants near the Termas de Pemehue was not in his jurisdiction and called the 17th Reinforced Mountain Infantry Regiment of Los Ángeles to communicate the order they had received.

The next day, three non-commissioned officers from the Department II of the III Army Division, based in Concepción, arrived at the 17th Mountain Infantry Regiment. All had taken courses at the School of the Americas and had specialties in counterinsurgency warfare.

They organized a team of eight people consisting of officers and non-commissioned officers who headed to the Termas de Pemehue area. They went in two vehicles, equipped with pickaxes, shovels, crowbars, and black bags. They had previously established contact with a relative of a soldier to guide them to the place where the bodies were supposed to be.

The task was easy; the damp earth allowed them to reach the bodies, which were only 50 centimeters deep. Some still had the remains of their humble clothes, which were destroyed as they were pulled out, leaving small traces of the crime in the pieces of fabric and buttons that remained in the earth.

In total, 12 bodies were exhumed. The bags were loaded into the vehicles and they headed toward Concepción. The place chosen to put an end to the task was a brick kiln of Department II. One by one, they threw the bodies in to be incinerated, just as the Nazis had done during World War II.

Among the accounts is the reference to an officer who commented to them, while they were digging in the earth in search of the bodies, that he had learned to incinerate corpses in a course he had taken in Germany.

He gave them gruesome details, such as that a large grill had to be prepared to deposit the bodies and abundant firewood lit under it, adding petroleum permanently. He advised them that they had to burn them until they turned to ashes.

The Mulchén massacre occurred between October 5, 6, and 7, 1973, at the El Morro, Carmen y Maitenes, and Pemehue estates. At dusk on October 5, 1973, the patrol arrived at the Los Morros estate. They brought a list with the names of peasants.

They called them out loud, and they surrendered without complaint: Juan de Dios Laubra Brevis, 26 years old; Domingo Antonio Sepúlveda Castillo, 29 years old; José Edmundo Vidal Aedo, 20 years old; Celsio Nicasio Vivanco Carrasco, 26 years old; and José Florencio Yáñez Durán, 34 years old. All were tied with wire, beaten, tortured, and taken to the banks of the Renaico River to be executed.

The next day, they went up to the Carmen y Maitenes estate looking for 8 peasants: Miguel del Carmen Albornoz Acuña, 20 years old; Daniel Alfonso Albornoz González, 28 years old; Alejandro Albornoz González, 48 years old; José Guillermo Albornoz González, 32 years old; Luis Alberto Godoy Sandoval, 23 years old; Manuel Florencio Rubilar Gutiérrez, 25 years old; José Liborio Rubilar Gutiérrez, 28 years old; and José Lorenzo Rubilar Gutiérrez, 33 years old.

All were taken to the main house. There, they were subjected to violent beatings until, amidst mockery and laughter, Lieutenant Concha Maturana made them play the Roman circus, where they would beat each other and the losers would fall under the bullets.

Seven were coldly executed, making them dig their own graves and forcing them to lie face down inside them to shoot them in the back. The only one who was not executed that day was José Guillermo Albornoz González, whom they tied to a farm wagon.

The last stop was at the Pemehue estate. There, they took Felidor Exequiel Albornoz González, 33 years old; Alberto Albornoz González, 41 years old; José Fernando Gutiérrez Ascencio, 25 years old; Jerónimo Humberto Sandoval Medina, 22 years old; and Juan de Dios Roa Riquelme, 35 years old, from their homes. Here, they repeated the same sadism they had displayed at the Carmen y Maitenes estate.

The next morning, Army Sergeant Luis Díaz Quintana realized that José Guillermo Albornoz González was still tied to the wagon. He approached and saw that he was alive, despite his bleeding wounds, fractured jaw, having not eaten for two days, swollen from the sleet that had fallen, and without water.

Together with Carabineros officer Jacobo del Carmen Ortiz Palma, they took him to the banks of the Renaico River and murdered him.

As in all the massacres that occurred in rural areas, terror took hold of the community; the law of the strongest was imposed, and the relatives of the victims were left exposed to arbitrariness. Some managed to bury their dead; others did not dare to look for the bodies for fear.

Hindered by the fear inspired by the estate owners, they did not dare to rescue the bodies, nor did they think that the evil would reach the point of eliminating any vestige of their relatives' lives.

The people responsible for these atrocious crimes are the Carabineros Lieutenant of Mulchén, Jorge Maturana Concha, and Carabineros officers Osvaldo Díaz Díaz, alias "Alicate," and Héctor Guzmán Saldaña.

Along with them, several civilians participated, among whom are Romualdo Guzmán Saavedra, Francisco Urrizola Elías, Ramón Elías Abella, Aquiles Guzmán Fritz, Carlos Lehman, and a sergeant from the 17th Reinforced Mountain Regiment.

Buin Regiment Just as in the Húsares Regiment of Angol, in December 1978, Department II of the Buin Regiment received an encrypted message from the Commander-in-Chief. More than 20 years later, Lieutenant Pedro Andrés Rodríguez Bustos declared before Judge Juan Guzmán that the message was signed by Augusto Pinochet and had precise orders "to gather the officers and non-commissioned officers who had been serving in those units between the years 1973 and 1974.

Said meeting should try to obtain from that personnel the information they had regarding the whereabouts of the bodies of people executed and buried inside military units or, in this specific case, in the Peldehue military camp, given that said camp was going to transfer part of its land to the Compañía Minera Andina and, for the same reason, it had to be known if there were clandestine burials on said land, since if so, the exactness of the locations was required to proceed with the exhumation and elimination of the corpses."

Later, he would ratify his statements, noting that the order came from the Second Army Division, in charge of General Enrique Morel Donoso, and that it was sent to all garrisons in the country. He detailed the way in which the information was delivered by those who knew about the burials of political executions and emphasized the secret nature of the entire process, mentioning two officers who came forward to provide information to Commander Mario Navarrete Barriga: Juan Ibáñez and Jorge Aguilar.

Despite the conclusiveness of his statement, it was dismissed at the time because it was considered that it could be an intelligence operation. Only in 2004 would it be concluded that "Operation Retiro de Televisores" was a decision thought out and decided at the highest levels in order to hide the massacres after the 1973 coup d'état.

Fuerte Arteaga In 1999, while Augusto Pinochet was detained in London, the government of Eduardo Frei called on different sectors to participate in a Dialogue Table that would allow for the collection of information on the fate of the victims of the military regime who were forcibly disappeared.

Human rights lawyers, representatives of the Armed Forces and Order, representatives of the different religions existing in the country, academics, and government representatives participated in it. The organizations of relatives of the forcibly disappeared and human rights organizations refused to participate, considering that this instance was a lifeline for Augusto Pinochet.

The work ended on June 13, 2000, with the delivery of the document of the agreements reached to President Ricardo Lagos. In it, the human rights violations that occurred during the military dictatorship were recognized by all those who participated in the Table; an absolute rejection of the use of violence as a method of political action was established, as well as a commitment as a society to generate the conditions that would lead to reconciliation, thereby facilitating the delivery of information on the fate of the forcibly disappeared.

In January 2001, the Armed Forces delivered a report that provided data on the fate of 200 forcibly disappeared persons supposedly thrown into the sea, rivers, or high mountain ranges. Of these, 180 appeared with names, surnames, and the date of their death.

President Lagos was given a report containing 45 cases of forcibly disappeared persons whose data contained coordinates and maps of their location, which led to the presumption that those remains would be found quickly.

This complex situation caused public commotion, as it was the recognition of the existence of information on the fate of the forcibly disappeared within the Armed Forces; to this was added the anxiety of many relatives who hoped to have answers about their loved ones.

Faced with this situation, the president of the Supreme Court, Hernán Álvarez, decided to appoint visiting ministers to clarify the fate of the forcibly disappeared.

In this framework, Judge Amanda Valdovinos was designated to investigate the information on the existence of a cave with 20 skulls of forcibly disappeared persons in Fuerte Arteaga and areas adjacent to the property surrounding this military facility.

The accounts that emerged spoke of exhumations and transfers of remains to the slopes of the El Talhuenal mountain range. There, the minister focused her investigative work, together with a team of forensic anthropologists.

The information that repeatedly mentioned the "corner of the deceased" to refer to a specific area of the military facility, where remains taken from other places had been buried, led her to determine that not all the exhumed remains had been thrown into the sea, and she reported this to the Supreme Court.

In March of that same year, the investigations on the grounds of the Fuerte Arteaga of Peldehue yielded results. In the Quebrada de los Ratones, the remains of Luis Rivera Matus were found, a communist union leader detained at the exit of the Chilectra building on November 6, 1975, by men in civilian clothes who belonged to the Comando Conjunto Antisubversivo.

His name appeared in the Armed Forces report as thrown into the sea off the coast of the central zone.

This meant a new discredit for the Armed Forces; they were accused of delivering a list loaded with inaccuracies, causing new wounds among the relatives of the forcibly disappeared.

The minister's findings gave rise to more information that ended with the prosecution of Air Force Generals (ret.) Freddy Ruiz Bunger and Carlos Madrid Hayden, Army Major (ret.) Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, and DINE (Army Intelligence Directorate) officer (ret.) Sergio López Díaz.

In 2004, the Minister of the Court of Appeals with special dedication for human rights cases, Joaquín Billard, sentenced General (ret.) Freddy Ruiz Bunger and Carlos Madrid Hayden to 600 days in prison as accessories to the qualified kidnapping of Luis Rivera Matus.

He sentenced Army Major (ret.) Álvaro Corbalán Castilla and Army Intelligence officer (ret.) Sergio López Díaz to 10 years in prison as perpetrators of the qualified kidnapping of Luis Rivera Matus. Three years later, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences, leaving only Álvaro Corbalán Castilla with an effective prison sentence.

La Moneda Four months after the search began at Fuerte Arteaga, the investigations began to reveal what had happened more than twenty-five years earlier with those detained on September 11, 1973, at La Moneda.

A large pit was excavated in the northern area of the field zone, and more than 500 bone pieces were recovered, which corresponded to fragments of limbs, teeth, pieces of skulls, and other parts of human bodies, in addition to war material and pieces of clothing. Among these remains was the last piece of history of 12 of the 20 people detained on September 11, 1973, at La Moneda.

Judge Valdovinos issued a conclusive report to the Supreme Court. In it, she spoke of the violence and irrationality that had dominated these deaths. She indicated that, upon observing the remains found in the pit area, one could "categorically conclude the use of grenade-type explosives to destroy the bodies," due to the encrustations of bone remains that had remained on the walls of the pit.

She also referred to the tracks of heavy machinery in the exhumation of bodies.

In June 2002, the Supreme Court decided to restructure the investigations of cases of human rights violations and appointed Judge Juan Carlos Urrutia, of the Fifth Criminal Court, to be in charge of the Fuerte Arteaga case. Based on the bone fragments, the investigation for illegal exhumation began.

One of the fundamental witnesses in this investigation was non-commissioned officer Eliseo Cornejo Escobar, who participated in the executions of those detained at La Moneda and five years later guided the search in the excavations to exhume the remains, within the framework of "Operation Retiro de Televisores."

That December 23, 1978, the supervision of the work was in charge of the commander of the Tacna Regiment, Hernán Canales Varas. According to the accounts, it was around 10:00 a.m. when Eliseo Cornejo marked the exact place where those detained on September 13, 1973, had been buried.

A mechanical shovel began to dig the dry pit until it reached six meters deep; there, an iron bar appeared that Cornejo immediately identified. The shovel began to work slowly until the first body appeared.

The bodies were almost intact, thanks to the clay soil that prevented the penetration of oxygen and the subsequent process of organic decomposition. The bodies were removed manually so that they would not fall apart; despite this, small fragments remained in the earth, as if refusing to disappear completely.

Then they took out the remains and loaded them onto a Unimog truck. In total, there were 12 bags, and all were transported to some parking lots in front of the San Martín highway.

Around 10:00 p.m., the Army Aviation Command helicopter arrived, in charge of the then-colonel Fernando Darrigrandi. It was piloted by Emilio de la Mahotiere González, Luis Felipe Polanco, and Antonio Palomo Contreras, the same trio that took the Puma helicopter in the Caravan of Death. The aircraft landed near where the bags were.

quickly, they were loaded on board and the helicopter took off. As in the previous cases, “Operation Television Removal” had been carried out silently and in a timely manner. The order from the Commander-in-Chief of the Army was being fulfilled.

It was the execution of one crime to cover up another, which had begun on September 12, 1973, with the arrival of Pedro Espinoza at the Tacna Regiment. The intelligence officer carried an envelope containing precise orders from the Army General Command to the commander of the Tacna Regiment, Luis Ramírez Pineda.

In them, the people detained at La Moneda were sentenced to death, and it was ordered that they be transferred to Peldehue to carry out the order. Ramírez Pineda had given orders to apply maximum brutality against the detainees who arrived that afternoon of September 11.

In those bound and exhausted men, he deposited all his hatred against the Marxists. There were 49 detainees; the following day, it was ordered to release 17 officials from the Investigations police, and others were separated, reducing the La Moneda group to 21 people.

On the 13th, first thing in the morning, a truck was parked in front of the barracks where the prisoners were held. List in hand, they were taken out of the stables, tied with wire, and violently thrown into the truck.

Among the 21 were Jaime Barrios Meza, Sergio Contreras, Daniel Escobar Cruz, Enrique Huerta Corvalán, Claudio Jimeno Grendi, Jorge Klein Pipper, Oscar Lagos Ríos, Juan Montiglio Murúa, Enrique Paris Roa, Eduardo Paredes Barrientos, Julio Moreno Pulgar, Héctor Pincheira Núñez, Arsenio Poupin Oissel, Julio Tapia Martínez, Héctor Urrutia Molina, Oscar Valladares Caroca, Juan Vargas Contreras, Luis Rodríguez Riquelme, José Freire Medina, and Luis Avilés Jofré, who had arrived at the La Moneda Palace to support the government.

The truck headed north, guarded by military vehicles and followed by the watchful gaze of the then-Colonel Pedro Espinoza Bravo, who was traveling in one of the column's vehicles. Espinoza was a high-ranking Army intelligence officer whose role in the post-coup repression was decisive.

He was in charge of supervising the main extermination operations committed throughout the country, by order of the Intelligence General Staff. Upon arrival, they went immediately to a dry well that was next to a building.

There, they set up a machine gun operated by Lieutenant Jorge Herrera López and began to bring the detainees down, calling them by their names. Without complaint and looking straight ahead, the 21 men faced death standing on the edge of the well.

They faced the muffled sounds of the bullets that echoed in the solitude of the hills alone. When the last detainee fell, the order was given to throw grenades so that the walls of the well would collapse, thus covering up the crime.

The Legal Process

The case has had a long journey through the justice system. From the time Judge Amanda Valdovinos began the investigation into illegal burials to the present, the investigation has been in the hands of the judge of the Fifth Criminal Court, Juan Carlos Urrutia; Court of Appeals Minister Alejandro Madrid Crohare; Special Minister for human rights cases Juan Fuentes Belmar; and it is currently in the hands of Court of Appeals Minister Miguel Vásquez Plaza.

Of the 21 victims, only 11 forcibly disappeared persons have been identified through the work of identifying remains and genetic analyses carried out by the University of North Texas laboratory in the United States, which included forensic examinations of the victims' bone samples and comparative tests on blood samples donated by their families.

Currently, retired General Luis Ramírez Pineda is being prosecuted as the perpetrator of the qualified homicide of 11 people detained at La Moneda on September 11, 1973, and transferred to the Tacna Regiment, where he was the commander.

The expansion of the extradition is also being processed in the Argentine justice system, because it was initially requested for the charges of qualified kidnapping of 11 people, and he is currently being prosecuted for qualified homicide; since the legal classification has changed, it is necessary to request a change of extradition from the country that granted it.

The resolution affected eight other retired members of the Army who confessed to having participated in the kidnappings of Jaime Barrios Meza, Daniel Escobar Cruz, Enrique Huerta Corvalán, Claudio Jimeno Grendi, Oscar Lagos Ríos, Juan Montiglio Murúa, Julio Moreno Pulgar, Arsenio Poupin Oissel, Julio Tapia Martínez, Oscar Valladares Caroca, and Juan Vargas Contreras.

The eight prosecuted as perpetrators of the crime of qualified kidnapping were retired Army Colonel Servando Maureira Roa, retired Army Major Jorge Iván Herrera López, retired Army Brigadier Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, and retired Army non-commissioned officers Eliseo Antonio Cornejo Escobedo, Jorge Ismael Gamboa Álvarez, Teobaldo Segundo Mendoza Vicencio, Juan de la Cruz Riquelme Silva, and Bernardo Eusebio Soto Segura.

Linares Artillery School

The same secret document that circulated through the barracks at the beginning of 1979 arrived at the Linares Artillery School. Without hesitation, the director of the Linares Artillery School, Lieutenant Colonel Patricio Gualda Tiffani, ordered the formation of a special team to exhume the bodies and placed Captain Mario Gianotti Hidalgo in charge of this mission.

He chose two officers, among whom was Lieutenant Hernán Véjar Sinning, and two non-commissioned officers to carry out the mission. They were joined by an intelligence non-commissioned officer from the III Army Division who had arrived along with two other members of that department to supervise the fulfillment of the order.

Equipped with shovels and pickaxes, they dug in different places inside the Regiment, finally finding two bodies that were without clothes. After putting them in bags, they kept them safe inside the Regiment and left for the city of Constitución to look for a clandestine burial site that was in a cave at the mouth of the Maule River.

The constant rising of the river and the tides had changed the appearance of the terrain slightly, so it was difficult for them to find the exact spot. Finally, they found three skulls, concluding that it was the place they were looking for.

They dug them up, put them in bags, and returned to the Artillery School. With the first stage of the mission accomplished, they went to look for a metal drum, put oil in it, then put the five bodies in, poured more oil over them, and set them on fire.

The remains of five forcibly disappeared persons were turned into ashes, and the double crime was completed. In April 2003, Minister Alejandro Solís had begun investigations in the area of the General Bari Polygon, where, according to data provided by a former conscript, there had been a mass grave with the bodies of the forcibly disappeared persons from the area.

The proceedings did not yield results, and only some traces of possible burials were found at the site. In 2008, Santiago Court of Appeals Minister Alejandro Solís handed down a sentence and set prison terms of 15 years and one day for five defendants, and 10 years and one day for a sixth defendant for the disappearances of María Isabel Beltrán Sánchez, José Gabriel Campos Morales, Anselmo Cancino Aravena, Héctor Hernán Contreras Cabrera, Alejandro Róbinson Mella Flores, Arturo Enrique Riveros Blanco, Jaime Bernardo Torres Salazar, José Alfonso Saavedra Betancourt, and Jorge Bernabé Yáñez Olave, detained between September 1973 and February 1974. On April 27, 2011, the Supreme Court reduced the sentences handed down by Minister Solís, acquitting retired General Gabriel del Río Espinoza, who had been convicted for the disappearance of five people, and sentencing retired Army Colonel Juan Hernán Morales Salgado and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Claudio Abdón Lecaros Carrasco to five years and one day in prison with the benefit of supervised release for the disappearance of María Isabel Beltrán, José Gabriel Campos, Anselmo Antonio Cancino, and Alejandro Róbinson Mella. Retired Army non-commissioned officer Antonio Aguilar Barrientos was sentenced to five years and one day in prison with the benefit of supervised release for four counts of qualified kidnapping, and retired Army Colonel Antonio Cabezas Salazar was sentenced to five years and one day for three counts of qualified kidnapping. Retired General Humberto Lautaro Julio Reyes, who was Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs during the military dictatorship, was sentenced to three years in prison with the benefit of conditional remission, remaining on supervised release. This was one of the most compelling pieces of evidence available to demonstrate that Pinochet knew about the atrocities that occurred during his mandate. No one creates such a perverse mechanism to hide crimes if they are not directly involved.

Chihuío On October 9, 1973, the locals of Chihuío thought the worst of the period had passed. News of the detention of workers in Neltume and the violence that the Llifén Carabineros had unleashed among the peasants of Chabranco, Arquilme, and Curriñe had spread like wildfire.

That day, a patrol consisting of 90 well-armed and equipped soldiers in seven vehicles set off for the Andean foothills area, where only poor workers from the Panguipulli Timber Company lived. They were from the No. 2 Cazadores Armored Cavalry Regiment of Valdivia, commanded by retired General Santiago Sinclair, who was subsequently a member of the Military Junta and a designated senator at the beginning of the transition to democracy.

In charge was squadron commander Luis Osorio Gardasanich, and officers Patricio Keller, Lautaro Ortega, Marcos Rodríguez Olivares, and Luis Rodríguez Rogorrichi. In charge of the special unit was Lieutenant Cristián Labbé Galilea.

The patrol toured the towns and hamlets of the area, read lists of names, and proceeded to detain them. The owner of the Chihuío estate, Américo González Torres, participated actively and enthusiastically in this journey of death.

Without any shame, they asked the locals for wire and ox yokes to drag the vehicles that had gotten stuck in the mud. In the Curriñe administration office of the Panguipulli Timber Complex, they tortured some detainees, while a patrol went up to detain workers at the Folilco sawmill.

Their last stop was in Chabranco, where they detained the last workers. With their cargo, they left for the main house of the Chihuío estate, where they brutalized the workers. According to testimony received by the Rettig Report, at first glance, there were no bullet impacts, but rather signs of cuts, throat-slitting, dismemberment of limbs, and other traces of torture impossible to describe.

The next morning, a local saw that there were some bodies covered with branches and logs, recognizing some of the victims as workers from the area. The corpses remained in the open for about 15 days and were then buried.

There were 17 workers from the area: Carlos Maximiliano Acuña Inostroza, José Orlando Barriga Soto, José Rosamel Cortés Díaz, Rubén Neftalí Durán Zúñiga, Luis Arnaldo Ferrada Sandoval, Eliecer Sigisfredo Freire Caamaño, Narciso Segundo García Cancino, Juan Walter González Delgado, Daniel Méndez Méndez, Sebastián Mora Osses, Pedro Segundo Pedreros Ferreira, Rosendo Rebolledo Méndez, Ricardo Segundo Ruiz Rodríguez, Carlos Vicente Salinas Flores, Manuel Jesús Sepúlveda Rebolledo, Rubén Vargas Quezada, and the minor Fernando Adrián Mora Gutiérrez, who, upon helping to pull a military vehicle out of the mud, saw that his father was among the detainees and asked the soldiers where they were taking him. They replied that if he wanted to go with his father, he should get into the vehicle, and he did so. At the end of 1978, a military operation returned to Chihuío and exhumed the bodies of the 17 peasants to throw them into the sea. The grave with the skeletal remains from the exhumation was found on June 17, 1990, by a group of relatives and friends of forcibly disappeared persons. In the first days of July 2011, the director of the Legal Medical Institute, Patricio Bustos, announced the names of the first five people identified: Carlos Maximiliano Acuña Inostroza, 46 years old at the time of his death, agricultural worker; Luis Arnaldo Ferrada Sandoval, 42 years old at the time of his death, agricultural worker; Daniel Méndez Méndez, 42 years old, agricultural worker and peasant leader; Ricardo Segundo Ruiz Rodríguez, 24 years old, factory manager and member of the Socialist Party; and Manuel Jesús Sepúlveda Rebolledo, 28 years old, timber worker. On July 15, the director of the Valdivia Legal Medical Service, Patricia Benhe, handed over the few skeletal remains to the families so they could bury them. The identifications were carried out with the fragments found in the clandestine grave where the bodies were thrown and later removed to be thrown into the sea, within the framework of the so-called “Operation Television Removal.” In January 2011, the Supreme Court sentenced retired Army Colonel Luis Osorio Gardasanich to 10 years and one day as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide of 17 people, including a minor. Retired Carabineros officer Luis Eduardo Osses Chavarría was sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison for his role as an accomplice to 4 kidnappings. The civilian Bruno Esteban Obando Cárdenas was acquitted for having no participation in the events. General Santiago Sinclair, who gave the orders, was acquitted. Meanwhile, retired Colonel Jerónimo Pantoja Henríquez died before the Supreme Court's sentence. The 17 workers belonged to the Esperanza del Obrero Peasant Union of the Panguipulli Timber Complex. Most of them were evangelical believers who had organized to participate in the construction of a more just life.

Cuesta Barriga Enrique Erasmo Sandoval Arancibia was an Army lieutenant when he was called to the DINA in 1976. Although he does not say much about his role in the repressive organization that year, he hints at his time at the Intelligence School in Rinconada de Maipú, which served to instruct Argentine, Uruguayan, and Chilean agents.

He also claims to have been part of the security for the VI OAS General Assembly held in Santiago, which Henry Kissinger attended. Disjointedly, he says that at the end of 1976 he became part of the Caupolicán Brigade, which was under the command of Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, assigned to the Cóndor group.

He claims not to remember names, nor the activity he carried out; he only remembers that he spoke a lot with the former MIR member who collaborated with the DINA, named “Joel,” Emilio Iribarren. But “Pete el Negro,” as he was known in the DINA, had a whole criminal history behind his apparent innocence before the courts.

After the coup d'état and the indiscriminate repression, this man murdered the boy Carlos Fariña with a shot in the back and burned the corpse. In the 80s, he participated in the murder of Lisandro Sandoval.

In 1978, he joined the Red Brigade of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), in charge of the repression against the MIR. During his time there, he reported directly to Álvaro Corbalán. He remembers that at the beginning of 1979, Jerónimo Pantoja, deputy director of the CNI, received information that a rabbit hunter had discovered an abandoned mine with bodies in Cuesta Barriga, and the information had been delivered to the Vicariate of Solidarity.

Faced with the alarm, Pantoja sent him to check the place, “which was a mine shaft, and I verified that it was true. It was full of rodents, bats, putrid remains, and there was a smell consistent with the remains.

This smell would have alerted and disturbed the hunter's dogs, and that is how he would have arrived at the place.” With a photograph in hand, Lieutenant Sandoval arrived before Pantoja, who ordered him not to dynamite the mine and ordered him to use acid.

Given the difficulty he had due to his ignorance of the use of chemicals, he called General Odlanier Mena at his vacation home in Mehuín to inform him of the situation. The delicate information caused Mena to suspend his vacation, return to Santiago, and take charge of the removal of the bodies.

For this, he entrusted Sandoval with removing the bodies with a trusted team. “My team was made up of 9 people and we went to the mine for three days.” He claims to have no idea how many bodies there were, but calculates that there were about 20, which were put into 50 potato sacks.

Some of the bodies were skeletonized, others still retained soft tissue. When they finished removing the bodies, they took some dogs, killed them, and threw them inside to justify the presence of bones.

Then they loaded the sacks onto a truck and took them to the Malloco plot that had belonged to the Political Commission of the MIR. Finally, the remains were transferred to Peldehue and possibly thrown into the sea.

Operation Television Removal covered the entire national territory and is the clearest example of the policy of concealment of human rights violations that prevailed during the military dictatorship.

Source: elmostrador.cl, September 2013

Human Rights: Minister Carlos Aldana carries out proceedings for kidnapping investigation in Mulchén

The minister on special assignment for human rights violation cases, Carlos Aldana, carried out a series of proceedings in the investigation into the qualified kidnapping of Guillermo José Albornoz González, a victim of the so-called Mulchén episode.

An event in which 18 peasants were executed by Carabineros and Army officials, in a crime perpetrated on October 6, 1973. Accompanied by a witness who stated he knew the site where the victim was buried, Aldana carried out an ocular inspection and located the land where his remains had allegedly been deposited, ordering the Legal Medical Service and the Criminalistics Laboratory (Lacrim) of the Investigative Police to carry out forensic examinations at the site.

According to the information gathered by the minister in the case, between October 5 and 7, 1973, Carabineros and Army officials, commanded by the city's uniformed police lieutenant, Jorge Maturana Concha, went to the Andean foothills sector of Mulchén, detaining a total of 18 people at the “El Morro,” “Carmen y Maitenes,” and “Pemehue” estates, whom they executed with firearms.

Then, they threw their remains into the Renaico River or buried them in the vicinity, being subsequently extracted by Army officials to prevent their discovery, in the so-called “Television Removal” operation. by Manuel Cabrera, Esteban Sepúlveda

Source: biobiochile.cl, August 22, 2019

Minister Aldana leads proceedings in investigation for qualified kidnapping in Mulchén.

The minister carried out a series of proceedings in the investigation he is conducting for the crime of qualified kidnapping of Guillermo José Albornoz González, a victim of the so-called Mulchén episode, in which 18 peasants were executed by Carabineros and Army personnel.

The minister on special assignment for human rights violation cases for the jurisdictions of Concepción and Chillán, Carlos Aldana, carried out a series of proceedings in the investigation he is conducting for the crime of qualified kidnapping of Guillermo José Albornoz González, a victim of the so-called Mulchén episode, in which 18 peasants were executed by Carabineros and Army personnel in October 1973 in the commune.

The visiting minister—accompanied by a witness who, in recent weeks, stated he knew the site where the victim was buried—carried out an ocular inspection of the terrain and ordered the Legal Medical Service (SML) and the Criminalistics Laboratory (Lacrim) of the Investigative Police to carry out forensic examinations at the site. “This case is one of the mass executions that took place in October 1973, in which 18 people died.

This case has been ruled on in the first instance and is in the appeal stage at the Court of Concepción; in it, Albornoz González appears as a victim of qualified kidnapping. We have information that we consider valuable to locate his skeletal remains.

For this reason, a special case has been opened to make all the pertinent inquiries,” explained Minister Aldana. He added that “the place was located, according to the witness. After inspecting the site where he was executed and fell into the Renaico River, it has been possible to determine that in this sector, the Carmen y Maitenes estate, next to the river, his body had been buried.

The SML and the PDI Criminalistics Laboratory have carried out planimetric and photographic examinations, fixing the trench to carry out the excavations for the exhumation, which will continue until Thursday if necessary, led by personnel from the Legal Medical Service.” According to the information gathered by Minister Aldana in the process, between October 5 and 7, 1973, Carabineros and Army officials, commanded by the Mulchén Carabineros lieutenant Jorge Maturana Concha, went to the Andean foothills sector of Mulchén, detaining a total of 18 peasants at the “El Morro,” “Carmen y Maitenes,” and “Pemehue” estates, who were executed with firearms, with their bodies thrown into the Renaico River or buried in the vicinity.

Source: pjud.cl, August 23, 2019