This story—as real as it is painful—has two people at the center of the stage. Two people who, depending on the point of view, occupy the roles of protagonist and antagonist. Or of victim and perpetrator.

If we only look at the form of case file number 165.085-3 of the Seventh Criminal Court of Santiago, Felipe Agüero Piwonka appears as the perpetrator who offended Emilio Meneses Ciuffardi, causing the latter to file a complaint for serious libel.

If we look at the substance of the matter, Felipe Agüero turns out to be the victim of the torture inflicted upon him by Emilio Meneses in 1973, while the former was a political prisoner and the latter was a reserve officer in the Navy.

Their lives had a first point of encounter at the Estadio Nacional, when the facility served as a concentration camp for political prisoners. Almost two decades later, when Chile had begun its transition, they met again.

By then, both were academics specializing in Defense matters. Professor Meneses focused on strategy, and Professor Agüero focused on the relationship between militarism and democracy.

Another decade passed for what we could number as their third and definitive encounter. Both were protagonists in a high-profile case before the courts and, sitting in front of a judge, they finally faced each other in a cross-examination. By then, it was the year 2002.

Paper Missiles

Once the transition began, the voice of Emilio Juan Meneses Ciuffardi as a “defense expert” gained increasing importance in the press. As a tenured professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), he taught undergraduate and master’s courses at the Institute of Political Science. He eventually held the Zenteno Chair of Defense Studies at the same institute.

Everything was going smoothly—professionally speaking—for Professor Emilio Meneses Ciuffardi as he approached his fiftieth year. His goals were being met.

Until the year 2001 arrived, and two letters determined his downfall.

The first reached the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Air Force and was signed by Colonel Mark Meyer, former United States military attaché in Chile. In summary, Meyer maintained that in January 1997, Professor Meneses told him he still had significant influence in the Air Force—due to his former ties as an advisor—and that his help could be key to resolving the purchase of aircraft.

He added—according to the former U.S. military attaché—that he had no preference for any of the four possible models and was willing to consider “significant” offers since his time was valuable. What concerned the United States were the Boeing McDonnell-Douglas F-18 and the Lockheed Martin F-16 models.

The other two were European: the Swedish JAS Gripen and the French Mirage. There was no deal with Professor Meneses—Meyer clarified in his letter—because the companies were not interested in his services.

Faced with the scandal, Meneses clarified to El Mostrador that “an attempt has been made here to create a criminal act out of a commercial operation.” He told the newspaper El Mercurio that Colonel Meyer’s letter was “a collection of inaccuracies, exaggerations, and untruths.”

The Chilean Air Force filed a formal complaint with the PUC regarding the allegations affecting one of its academics, and an investigation was initiated by the rector’s office.

Almost in parallel, another letter arrived at the PUC’s Institute of Political Science from the United States. A copy was sent by email at the end of February 2001, and the director, Alfredo Rehren, could not see it immediately because his computer was out of service.

The institute was moving from the PUC’s central house to the San Joaquín Campus, and the academics were “disconnected” for a few days. The original letter was sent by regular mail. The letter was signed by Professor Felipe Agüero Piwonka and dated February 21, 2001.

That is how simple sheets of paper became missiles that buried the academic career and public prestige of a man who—until then—appeared in the local press as a respectable analyst and expert in Defense.

Nothing, up to that moment, betrayed that Professor Emilio Meneses had any fear regarding his actions at the Estadio Nacional concentration camp in 1973.

Face to Face with Meneses

Felipe Agüero Piwonka did not perform military service and has no record of any connection to violent actions during his youth, as is the case with Professor Meneses. Agüero Piwonka was 21 years old when the coup d’état occurred; he was studying at the PUC School of Sociology and was a member of the MAPU, which was part of the governing political alliance.

He also worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Five days after the military coup, he was arrested by a military patrol on the street. He was accompanied by his friend Fernando Villagrán. Both had been with the top leader of the MAPU—current Senator Jaime Gazmuri—and were carrying the party’s first communiqué to its militants.

After a severe beating, they were taken to the El Bosque Air Base, where they were interrogated and mistreated. They were then transferred to the concentration camp improvised at the Estadio Nacional, where they were separated.

The young Agüero remained there for almost a month and was a victim of various forms of torture, including the application of electricity. He was then transferred to the Santiago Public Jail. Charges were never brought against him, nor was he subjected to trial.

He regained his freedom in February 1974, after his family managed to have lawyer Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz intercede with the military authority.

Between 1978 and 1982, Felipe Agüero was a researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Santiago, Chile, and published two books that—due to their academic nature—managed to pass the barriers of military censorship.

In 1982, Agüero left for the United States to pursue his doctorate at Duke University. He was later a fellow at The Helen Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame (1989), at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1993-94), and at the North-South Center at the University of Miami (1994-95).

It would be long to list the university boards, committees, and editorial boards to which Dr. Agüero belongs in the United States. All of this speaks to his excellence as an academic and the prestige achieved in his field.

Nothing in his extensive curriculum vitae betrays that other space of reality that underlay his life. Because the torture he suffered in 1973 was followed by others, as has been the case for all victims.

While he remained in Chile for the following nine years, until 1982, there was the fear that the experience would be repeated. Each new piece of information about the dictatorship’s repression activated his memory, with an aggravating factor: he recognized one of his torturers in a photograph published on the social pages of El Mercurio.

It was a former reserve officer of the Navy. The fear of running into him on the street—which happened twice—reactivated the painful episode.

It was at the beginning of the transition, when a seminar convened by FLACSO gave way to a third stage of the aftermath of torture. There, he recognized in Professor Emilio Meneses—who maintains a physical appearance very similar to that of his youth—another of his torturers from the Estadio Nacional.

He was alive and was one of his peers in the academic world! The memory of the past found a space in the present, merging pains and anxieties. All this in the greatest secrecy, under the appearance that nothing strange was happening.

One day, while in Buenos Aires, he shared his secret with the journalist Rodrigo Atria, his friend, who had also been detained at the Estadio Nacional. Later, he told the journalist Fernando Villagrán, with whom he had shared the experience of arrest and imprisonment. He also spoke with his brothers, Guillermo and Ignacio Agüero.

What to do? The question became a painful lash for many years. Having survived the dictatorship’s repression—after remaining in concentration camps and clandestine prisons—became a sort of privilege that demanded silence on the part of the “beneficiaries” or survivors. A demand that was implicit in the official and social “discourse” of the transition.

When Pinochet left the position of commander-in-chief, the change began. The year was 1998. The first lawsuit against him was filed (by Gladys Marín, general secretary of the Communist Party), a special judge (ministro de fuero) was appointed (Juan Guzmán), and a judicial process began to which hundreds of complaints were added.

A political and social phenomenon that grew when Pinochet was arrested in London in October 1998.

That change also affected the citizen Felipe Agüero Piwonka, and in 1998 he decided to tell his secret to political scientist Tomás Chuaqui, of the Catholic University, with whom he had established a deep friendship at Princeton University.

Dr. Chuaqui recalls: “The impact was such that my knees buckled and I fell to the floor. He was talking to me about Emilio Meneses, with whom I spent a lot of time at the Institute of Political Science. We had lunch together almost every day. I finally asked Felipe what he was going to do. ‘I’m going to have to face him at some point,’ he replied.”

As the keeper of the secret, Dr. Chuaqui had no choice but to wait for Dr. Agüero to decide to “face” the matter one day. “I thought it would be soon. But time kept passing. I altered my entire relationship with Emilio Meneses, who continued to have his office across from mine. I eliminated all meetings with him that were not strictly mandatory,” recalls Dr. Chuaqui.

• Did Meneses notice?
• Of course he noticed, but he must have attributed it to internal problems at the Institute, as a change in leadership was approaching.

The Context

In parallel, another Chilean family was living through its own process of change: the family of the murdered Eugenio Ruiz-Tagle Orrego, a victim of the “Caravan of Death” in Antofagasta. Let us remember that this case reached the hands of Judge Juan Guzmán in May 1998 and, because it was a mass crime that affected at least 75 political prisoners and where Pinochet’s “fingerprint” was clearly stamped, it became the most forceful judicial process against the former dictator.

Thus, it was this case that paved the way for the stripping of Pinochet’s immunity in 2000 and his indictment in 2001 as the author of the kidnappings and homicides.

The fact is that the family of the murdered Ruiz-Tagle decided to move his remains from Antofagasta to Santiago and hold a massive funeral rite toward the end of 2000. The victim, Eugenio, had been a close friend and compadre of the eldest Agüero brother, Guillermo.

To the remembrance of the murder of Ruiz-Tagle, another macabre fact was added in January 2001. The Armed Forces acknowledged the participation of uniformed personnel in two hundred crimes, explaining several disappearances of prisoners by stating that their bodies had been thrown into the sea.

This acknowledgment was made upon concluding the “roundtable” (mesa de diálogo) between the Armed Forces and some prominent human rights defense lawyers, an instance that was convened by the Frei government and concluded under the Lagos government.

It was in this context that former political prisoner Carlos Bau accused General Hernán Gabrielli, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, of having been one of those who tortured the murdered Eugenio Ruiz-Tagle at the Cerro Moreno air base in Antofagasta.

Bau’s accusation was published by the electronic newspaper El Mostrador on February 8, 2001. The scandal was enormous. Two other former prisoners corroborated the accusation. Obviously, General Gabrielli denied it (he filed a libel suit, it was rejected, and he later had to leave the Air Force).

The set of data caused a stir. Because the murdered Eugenio Ruiz-Tagle Orrego belonged to a family of the local “aristocracy” and his widow was married to an influential politician, former minister José Joaquín Brunner.

Because the former prisoner Bau, with his denunciation, put the second man in the FACH chain of command in check. And, in that climate, the newspaper El Mercurio decided to intervene to keep the honor of lawyer Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz safe.

Thus, without Dr. Agüero intending it, his 1973 detention was recalled by the main right-wing newspaper. El Mercurio, both in its Sunday reportage section and in its magazine El Sábado, mentioned it this way: “But there was one case that Guzmán was willing to defend personally in the courts: that of Felipe Agüero, detained on September 16 when he was a university student.”

How did the powerful Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz know, in 1973, about Felipe Agüero’s case? He found out after attending a mass held in memory of the murdered Eugenio Ruiz-Tagle. This was declared by Guillermo Agüero in the judicial process.

The fact is that the remembrance of the torture suffered by Eugenio Ruiz-Tagle triggered the process. On February 21, 2001, Dr. Agüero wrote a private letter to Dr. Alfredo Rehren, director of the Institute of Political Science, with a copy to the rector of the PUC, Pedro Pablo Rosso.

Likewise, what was published by El Mercurio aroused the curiosity of Cosas magazine, which decided to publish an interview conducted at the beginning of March 2001. For the first time, Dr. Agüero was able to speak publicly about his torture, although he decided to keep the name of the torturer a secret.

Several pages and three large photographs of Agüero Piwonka. The magazine titled in large letters: “I know the person who tortured me.” In the text, Dr. Agüero identifies his perpetrator as “an academic” and relates that he has already sent a letter to the authorities of the academic center where he works.

The newspaper La Segunda managed to obtain the letter and published, on March 23, a good part of the text in which Felipe Agüero identified Emilio Meneses as his torturer.

The Outcome

To the publication of the letter, the newspaper La Segunda annexed two pieces of information. First, a brief statement from the Navy in defense of reserve officer Emilio Meneses: “The institution feels an obligation to express its most absolute support and confidence in the aforementioned officer, in the conviction that these represent unsustainable slanders that only seek to affect and destroy the personal image of the affected party.” Second, the denial by Emilio Meneses: “I, Mr.

Felipe Agüero, did not interrogate him, I did not see him at any time at the Estadio Nacional. I was even unaware of his presence there.” And he asserted that “always, all my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues knew, and I never hid, that I was in service in the Chilean Navy and the Navy assigned me to be an interrogator at the Estadio Nacional.

Never, while I fulfilled that service, at any time, did I subject anyone to illegitimate duress.”

Some of his colleagues and friends do not agree with Meneses. The historian Cristián Gazmuri was his friend for more than 30 years and did his military service in the Navy with him, both being university students.

• Did he tell you that he had been an interrogator at the Estadio Nacional?
• No, he only told me that he had taken people to the Stadium. We were both Navy reservists and he told me that he had been called to the ranks after the coup. And they gave him the mission of taking prisoners to the Stadium. That’s what he told me.

For his part, political scientist Tomás Chuaqui also had no information.

• Meneses says that everyone around him knew about his role as an interrogator…
• False. Maybe his closest friends knew, but most of the academics at the Institute knew nothing. There were rumors that he was a hardline Pinochet supporter, but nothing more.

The fact was that, at the end of March 2001, the storm broke over the Institute of Political Science of the Catholic University of Santiago. Between students who refused to enter Meneses’s classes, a massive “funa” (protest) activity to denounce the presence of a torturer on campus, and the debate among academics, the PUC opted to suspend the activities of the academic Meneses.

But it kept his salary. The academic council of the Institute of Political Science declared itself in a process of “reflection,” calling Emilio Meneses to testify twice and inviting Felipe Agüero to give his version during 2001.

Dr. Chuaqui, then deputy director of the Institute, today its director, explains the role played by the academic council: “It was not our place to hear what Meneses had done in 1973. We were not in a position to determine the actual facts.

The important thing was to know who Meneses was at that moment. Because we had to know if he met the moral and ethical-academic conditions to belong to the Institute. We asked him many times. Because if he acknowledged his role as an interrogator at the Estadio Nacional, we had to know what he thought about that almost thirty years later.”

• And what did Meneses think?
• He said, in summary: “I was forced to be in a bad position, I did good from a bad position, I did nothing wrong.” I asked him: Were you a cog in the machine of evil? And he replied: “You can always do good in any situation. I entered with clean hands and I left with clean hands.” A more finished ethical reflection was expected. Because one is deeply stained when one participates in a machine of evil. He never acknowledged that, he never acknowledged any degree of culpability.

• An amoral stance?
• I would say he had moral blindness regarding part of his actions. Through the press, he said he had found out about the torture at the Estadio Nacional afterward. I told him that he had acted in a concentration camp, without any protection for the prisoners, where habeas corpus did not function. He pointed out to me: “At that time, no one thought in those terms.” I asked him what he felt for his superiors: He indicated to me: “Resentment, because they threw us to the lions, they sent us to do a job for which we were not prepared.” He also pointed out that he had resigned, but that they rejected the request.

The academic council of the Institute of Political Science was the only body that learned of the case in its “reflection” process. The rector’s office did not order any summary investigation, as acknowledged to the court by the secretary general of the PUC, Raúl Madrid Ramírez.

In response to official letter 160-2002, he said that the rector’s office instructed a summary investigation that was not related to Meneses’s performance at the Estadio Nacional, but rather “contains a formal inquiry for an alleged infringement of the Academic Regulations: based on information received by this General Secretariat, the suspicion arose that Mr.

Meneses had carried out actions intended to pressure the respective instances of the Chilean Armed Forces (what is called ‘lobbying’) so that they would orient their decision in favor of a specific alternative (Gripen) regarding the purchase of combat aircraft; the action would have been remunerated and, in it, Mr. Meneses would have taken advantage of his influence from the Defense Chair.”

“By Rector’s Resolution No. 01-2002, dated January 3, 2002, the formal inquiry was temporarily dismissed; on the 31st of the same month, Mr. Meneses presented his voluntary resignation from the position he held at the Institute of Political Science; and by Rector’s Resolution No. 09-2002, of April 16 last, the aforementioned formal inquiry was definitively dismissed.” The official text of the PUC that—having been sent to the court in mid-2002—accounted for the end of Emilio Meneses’s academic career at that university.

The decision was made taking into account what was resolved by the academic council of the Institute of Political Science and what was resolved by the secret summary investigation of the rector’s office regarding lobbying activities in the state purchase of aircraft. To “soften” the decision, the figure of “voluntary resignation” for Meneses was allowed.

In parallel with the academic process, the judicial case took place. It began by the decision of Emilio Meneses, who filed a complaint against Felipe Agüero for the crime of serious libel on May 22, 2001.

There was no other path but to prove the facts, and the defenders of Dr. Agüero—lawyers Ciro Colombara and Juan Pablo Olmedo—invoked the exceptio veritatis. Because Agüero had no doubt that Meneses was the man who...

He saw—during a torture session—when they made him undress and, in the course of the maneuver, the blindfold covering his eyes slipped.

“When Meneses began to trivialize what happened at the Estadio Nacional, I became very angry. Through the press, in the mouth of Meneses, the stadium became a kind of little Holiday Inn hotel, where people went to spend a vacation.

That was when I felt that I could not allow history to be distorted and that our children must know what happened there, so that it is not forgotten and is not repeated,” said Dr. Agüero.

The judicial case lasted eighteen months. Judge María Teresa Letelier interrogated four prisoners from the Estadio Nacional, in addition to Dr. Agüero. Former Air Force officer Jorge Silva Ortiz also testified.

The ruling sided with Dr. Agüero: he did not commit libel, because he did not stray from the truth. Thus, the so-called Agüero-Meneses case became a key judicial process that—by way of a criminal complaint for libel—investigated the torture carried out by the military dictatorship and led to social and academic sanctions. Professor Meneses lost his professorship at the prestigious PUC.

Only one procedural detail remained pending: the appeal filed by Meneses when the judge rejected his request to arrest Dr. Agüero.

In June 2004, Meneses attempted to return to his role as an analyst, publishing a prominent opinion column in the newspaper La Tercera.

Dr. Meneses did not have to wait long. His appeal before the Court of Appeals—for Dr. Agüero to be arrested—was obviously rejected in September 2004. No press outlet reported the fact.

On October 15, 2004, Meneses returned to the fray with a prominent column in La Tercera, titled “The inconvenience of making changes to the Copper Law.” The analyst had reappeared. Dr. Agüero, from the United States, sent a letter to the newspaper that was published on October 20, 2004, under the title “Meneses and justice.” On Saturday, October 30, 2004, under the title “Assassination of image,” the newspaper La Tercera published the following letter from Emilio Meneses in which he insisted that “the case followed against him (Felipe Agüero) for libel is currently in process.

Consequently, it is entirely factual that the case is pending and to date there is no judicial ruling, neither partial nor definitive.” What was this about? What case was Meneses talking about? Felipe Agüero’s lawyers managed to find the answer.

Meneses had filed a motion to reopen the process with new evidence. The Court denied it and he, of course, appealed. Lawyers Ciro Colombara and Juan Pablo Olmedo filed a motion to declare the appeal request inadmissible. That is to say, by stretching the limits of procedural appeals, Meneses could say that “the case is pending.”

Finally, the Court of Appeals rejected Meneses’ appeal. And the case was closed. The press said nothing.

Dr. Felipe Agüero sent one last letter to the director of La Tercera, Cristián Bofill. In it, he concluded: “Evidently, it is unbearable for Meneses to accept that justice, on the basis of copious evidence, has identified him as a torturer at the Estadio Nacional.

Even if all paths are now closed to him to maintain the fiction of a case that does not conclude, readers will have to get used to what will be his permanent version: that the case will always remain open. The truth is that the only thing that remains pending is for Meneses to finally accept what justice has already resolved and what he himself has known since 1973.”

That was how this story ended. For Dr. Agüero, “it was a great relief, a feeling of duty fulfilled, and that the anguish of the initial decision and the uncertainty of the process were worth it.”

He was one of the more than 35,000 political prisoners who provided testimony before the Valech Commission. Upon the conclusion of the process, in November 2004, from the University of Miami, he perceived the official Torture Report as “the great act of recognition, the one that was missing since the Rettig Report.

It is a gag for those who always insisted on keeping this hidden and in silence. And also a great gag for those who always wanted to limit themselves only to what they called ‘emblematic cases.’ Each of the thousands of cases is emblematic. All torture, as a generalized practice, was emblematic.”

There are stories that, in turn, make History. The case of Dr. Felipe Agüero is one of them.

Source: January 9, 2004 La Nacion

"I have realized that my silence ends, in truth, by becoming complicit in the deception to which this individual subjects everyone around him daily," relates the political scientist in the controversial document, to which El Mostrador had access.

This harsh recognition is made by political scientist Felipe Agüero in the controversial letter he sent to the Institute of Political Science of the Universidad Católica. El Mostrador had access to that document, in which Agüero reveals the story of the torture he received while he was detained at the Estadio Nacional in 1973.

Agüero writes in the letter addressed to Alfredo Rehren, director of the institute, that the current defense specialist Emilio Meneses "participated in the team that tortured me personally repeatedly at the Estadio Nacional in 1973, and in front of whom hundreds of detainees must have passed. Regarding his participation, I have no doubt whatsoever."

Source: EL Mostrador - March 27, 2001

Emilio Meneses was confronted with five victims of torture

At least five witnesses provided by the defense of political scientist Felipe Agüero have testified before the Seventh Criminal Court of Santiago and have been confronted with former Universidad Católica professor Emilio Meneses in the libel and slander case that he initiated after being identified as part of the Navy’s torture team at the Estadio Nacional.

The most intense round of confrontations took place yesterday, Thursday, an occasion in which chemical engineer Vicente Aguayo Ábalos (a naturalized German) and América Zorrilla, among other witnesses, faced Meneses.

Agüero was also confronted with Meneses, who on this occasion testified before the judge that his actions at the Estadio Nacional were limited to taking statements from detainees and that such registration was carried out outside the detention facility.

Meneses also asserted that the Navy interrogators who were located in that area were unarmed and that the objective of the action was to verify if the detention had been carried out correctly. In this way, he said, the interrogations he conducted were a help to the detainees.

“I would like to find the detainee who had that friendly interrogation,” noted Vicente Aguayo upon leaving the proceeding.

The libel and slander case against Felipe Agüero is currently in the appeal stage before the capital’s appellate court.

The political scientist’s defense is betting on a quick closure of the summary proceedings because it considers that the witnesses provided prove Meneses’ participation in torture activities inside the Estadio Nacional, since they have recognized the former Navy officer.

For its part, the plaintiff party believes that what has been proven so far is that Agüero effectively libeled and slandered Meneses.

“The confrontations do not add anything to the substance of the process. I also have witnesses; the thing is that for judicial strategy we have not presented them. Now, since the defendant provided his, it is most likely that we will present ours,” indicated Emilio Meneses.

Source: Friday, July 19, 2002 El Mostrador

Patricia Verdugo: "All Chileans paid for the electricity that was used to torture during the dictatorship"

A new text has been added to the bibliography on Human Rights. “De la tortura NO se habla, Agüero versus Meneses” [We do NOT talk about torture, Agüero versus Meneses], presented yesterday, is a work that structures a series of reflective articles around these human rights violations as a massive phenomenon during the Pinochet dictatorship.

The authors, among whom are names such as Patricia Verdugo—editor of the text—, Tomás Moulián, and Paz Rojas, analyze the social perspective regarding the acceptance of torture as an institutionalized phenomenon and its status as a “taboo subject for fifteen years,” taking as a particular example the encounter between a victim and his victimizer, Felipe Agüero, a former political prisoner who, years after his imprisonment, recognizes his torturer, Emilio Meneses Ciuffardi.

For the author of “Los Zarpazos del Puma” (1984) and “Quemados vivos” (1985), the veil that kept torture out of political and public discussion was only “lifted” at the end of 2004 with the Valech Report, motivated, according to the journalist, ironically by a political maneuver by the UDI.

“In June of last year, Pablo Longueira announced that his party was preparing a human rights initiative and it was at that moment that the UDI gave permission to the Concertación to talk about torture,” she asserted.

Agüero versus Meneses

In “De la Tortura NO se habla,” the reader is invited to think from the perspectives of law, sociology, psychiatry, history, and communications about a story “as real as it is painful.” The path of the encounters between two men who have many things in common: both Chilean, belonging to the same generation, university students during the days when the Armed Forces carried out the Military Coup in 1973, and subsequently both academics at the Universidad Católica in the transition period.

“Their lives had a first point of encounter at the Estadio Nacional, when the facility served as a concentration camp for political prisoners. Almost two decades later, when Chile had begun the transition, they met again.

By then, both were academics specializing in Defense matters. Professor Meneses focused on strategy and Professor Agüero did so on the militarism-democracy relationship,” the book relates.

The political scientist from the Universidad Católica, Tomás Chuaqui, heard Felipe Agüero’s perverse account, as noted in the text: “I fell to the ground; the impact was such that my knees buckled and I fell to the ground.

I continued talking with him; he spoke to me about Emilio Meneses, with whom I spent a lot of time at the Institute of Political Science of the Universidad Católica, we had lunch together. I had no other path but to wait for Dr. Agüero to decide to face the matter one day.”

But the public denunciation came when Felipe Agüero dared to expose Meneses. The rejection by students and academics of his presence at the university forced his departure. “Here there was a form of social sanction, because it is society that has to assume its history,” affirmed the writer.

Two-page controversy

Among acknowledgments and speeches, Tomás Chuaqui pointed out his disagreement with the publication of “two pages” in the article “Los Protagonistas,” by Patricia Verdugo. This text refers to the relationship of the person who served as director of the Institute of Political Science of the PUC, Alfredo Rehren, and his father, who was a high-ranking Army officer and commander of the Los Ángeles regiment, to whom Agüero addressed a letter denouncing having been tortured by his “colleague” from the PUC.

The current director of the institution, Tomás Chuaqui, said that he only found out at the last minute about the publication of this background information in the two pages that “were incorporated without consulting me” and added that, “had I known that this was going to be published in the book, I would not have participated.”

Chuaqui’s annoyance met with a reply from the book’s editor. Patricia Verdugo responded that “last weekend we discussed this matter with Chuaqui, he got very angry, and here we are sitting at this table.

In any case, for those who have not read the book, I must clarify that it is not a reference to Dr. Rehren because he is his father, but to a judicial case in the Second Criminal Court of Los Ángeles, where there are at least seven testimonies from uniformed personnel and former political prisoners, who say that Rehren the son served in this regiment, which was the worst concentration camp in Chile.”

Source: January 14, 2004 La Nacion

Former Estadio Nacional interrogator attends official act

Former UC academic was ''accredited as press'' at the ceremony for the delivery of Dutch frigates in Valparaíso. Political scientist Felipe Agüero, who denounced him publicly, says that the judge’s ruling in his favor ''is unappealable and makes it clear that he was a torturer,'' while Fernando Villagrán points out that ''it surprises me and I find it hard to believe that the naval command invited him.''

Surprise was caused among some of the guests at the official ceremony for the delivery of the Dutch frigates to the Navy, which took place in Valparaíso on March 6, by the presence of analyst and Navy reserve officer Emilio Meneses Ciuffardi, who was one of the interrogators at the Estadio Nacional after the 1973 coup d'état, as accused publicly by one of his victims, the academic Felipe Agüero, who currently resides in the United States.

After that denunciation, the then-political scientist of the Universidad Católica and defense analyst filed a libel complaint against Agüero, in which, after several proceedings and confrontations, Judge María Teresa Letelier dismissed the case in December 2002 and managed to establish that the accusations against Meneses of applying torture were truthful.

The judge applied in this case the principle of exceptio veritatis (exception of truth), which is used on certain occasions, depending on the judge’s criteria and the strength of the evidence proving that the assertions against the “libeled” party are factual.

This, in any case, is invoked only when it concerns people who impute facts to public officials committed in the exercise of their functions, as it is understood that this is done to defend a real public interest.

Indeed, Meneses, as a Navy reserve officer, could enter the Estadio Nacional in the exceptional situation that occurred there after the coup, when it became a detention center where hundreds of citizens were held, most of whom were subjected to mistreatment inflicted by personnel of the Armed Forces and Carabineros.

Navy sources indicated that indeed the former academic of the Universidad Católica, who was dismissed from his position in 2001 once the public controversy with Agüero broke out and after having also been questioned for his role in the purchase of fighter jets (in 1997 he acted as a lobbyist for foreign companies), was invited as a defense analyst to the ceremony and entered as accredited press. “The Navy has nothing against Emilio Meneses, who attended the act in the capacity of a Defense expert,” they commented.

Meneses was contacted by the Navy’s operations command, which was the entity organizing the event, and it was the one that invited the analysts who attended the act.

Naval sources added that they understand that there may be aggrieved persons, but that they were unaware of the past of the former UC teacher and insisted that “the Navy has no problems with Mr. Meneses.”

This is not the only time that Meneses has been invited to official acts, because two years ago he was invited to one of the seminars held during Fidae, where experts in the defense area attended, which caused evident annoyance among the authorities.

Added to this is that in recent times several letters from Meneses have appeared in the reader’s mail of the newspaper El Mercurio, defending the foreign policy of the United States, especially in the case of Iraq, which is a sign that the former academic might be trying to "clean up his image" with the aim of returning to have a presence as an analyst in the area.

”He was a torturer”

Today, regarding his participation in the Valparaíso act, the former prisoners of the Estadio Nacional and La Esmeralda cannot understand why he was invited. They only want to think that it was a mistake by the Navy, although they repudiate the fact.

Agüero himself points out that “I would like to believe that it is due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the people in charge of issuing the invitations. The press did not give sufficient publicity at the time to the ruling of the judge in charge, who in a final and unappealable ruling dismissed his criminal complaint against me and it was considered that I had told the truth.”

That is to say, Agüero emphasizes, that “I was not responsible for libel because what was said was true. That was the meaning of the ruling. Meneses always tried to give the impression that there was a pending appeal that could favor him, but that is not the case. The final and unappealable ruling makes it clear that Meneses was a torturer.”

He asserts that “it seems wrong to me” that he was invited to the act and even believes it is a fact “contradictory to the new policy in this regard” that the Navy has had.

Journalist Fernando Villagrán, who was detained with Agüero, says, for his part, that “it surprises me and I find it hard to believe that the naval command has invited a character who, like few among those who formed the ranks of the Navy, is recognized for his participation in torture, in this specific case at the Estadio Nacional.”

He expresses that “I really don’t know the reasons; I find it hard to understand how a character like Emilio Meneses appears as an official guest at an act of one of the branches of the Armed Forces, at a time when all the uniformed commands have signaled and made gestures to overcome the violation of human rights through transparency and respect for what the courts of justice are resolving.”

He indicates that “there are no new elements, of any kind, that justify the presence of Emilio Meneses at an official act. It seems to me in very poor taste that in these circumstances that the country is living, he appears as a guest of the Navy. I hope it is just a misunderstanding.”

He recalls that “the judge acquitted Agüero, demonstrating the falsehood of Meneses’ statements, a matter that was ratified during the process by several prisoners, who recognized him as a participant in the torture.

There was a very concrete case that the Navy should know about: in a confrontation with América Zorrilla, the former academic ends up recognizing that he saw her lying on the ground, naked and tied up. This was after he had denied having witnessed any torture session, with which his credibility before the judge fell to the ground and that influenced the final ruling.”

"Meneses collapsed"

América Zorrilla emphasizes that Meneses “is part of the team of people who tortured me; he was very young.” She recalls and points out that she was summoned to testify in the complaint against Agüero because the former UC teacher had said, at the time, that “the only one who could have denounced me is América Zorrilla.”

Meneses, in the confrontations with the former prisoners, denied having seen them, “but when I arrived, as I was the last one, this man collapsed.”

Zorrilla believes that “it is not from the heart that the Navy has a democratic attitude because they should not have invited this gentleman. There is a trial and he lost the complaint; I think it is not appropriate, we are in a democratic period and the Navy should have more judgment.”

"It is a provocation"

For the former prisoner of La Esmeralda and socialist militant Juan Azúa, it is not surprising that a former torturer went to the act of delivery of the frigates, which was presided over by the then Minister of Defense, Jaime Ravinet. “That is part of the arrogance of the Navy; they do not want to recognize anything, they protect themselves.

If they say that they have no problems with Meneses, they don’t have them with their own torturers either. That invitation is a provocation.”

Another former detainee of the Dama Blanca [La Esmeralda], María Eliana Comené, assures that “it seems to me that it is a very important contradiction regarding what they want to do. If they want us to participate in an act of reparation, they cannot continue dealing with the torturers; besides, if they are dealing with them, who have nothing to do with the Navy, imagine how they must be protecting their own.

They are playing on two sides. There is no clarity.”

Source: March 29, 2006 El Mostrador