Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara, married, father of 8, merchant, and Socialist militant, was detained on November 17, 1975, at approximately 10:30 a.m. at his home on Calle San Pablo 5470, Santiago, by 3 agents—two men and one woman—dressed in civilian clothes, in the presence of his wife, Mrs. María Virginia Medel Vega, and other family members.

Mrs. María Virginia Medel recounts that on November 17, 1975, these agents arrived at the aforementioned address and provided a description of them: the one acting as the leader was a short, heavy-set, dark-complexioned individual, clean-shaven, approximately 32 years old, wearing a suit; the other subject was thin, with a mustache, dark-complexioned, wearing dark glasses, and also wearing a suit; the woman was dark-complexioned, tall, thin, with black curly hair, a round face, and was dressed in sportswear.

Upon being asked, they identified themselves as Military Intelligence, quickly showed an ID card, and proceeded to enter, stating they were going to raid the house. One of them went to the back of the property and encountered Miguel Rodríguez Vergara, who was watering plants; he asked him to identify himself, which the victim did, and he then left with them.

The witness, Mrs. María Virginia Medel, her mother Mrs. María Vega Aravena, her sister Regina Medel Vega, and the children present were made to sit in a hallway while the house was raided, a process that lasted nearly an hour.

In response to Mrs. María Virginia Medel's insistence, they told her they were looking for pamphlets they had allegedly found in the house's storage area and, without further explanation, they left.

To this date, the fate or whereabouts of Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara remain unknown.

Since that occasion, the family has not heard anything further regarding Miguel E. Rodríguez Vergara.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On November 20, 1975, Mrs. María Virginia Medel Vega filed a writ of amparo (habeas corpus), case file 1563-75, before the Santiago Court of Appeals.

On March 2, 1976, the petitioner informed the Court that on November 25, 1975, the Court had sent official letters to the Minister of the Interior and the Chief of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), and that no response had been obtained.

For this reason, in December, a request was made twice to reiterate said letters, and in January 1976, it was requested that the Court demand an explanation from the aforementioned services regarding the silence, which, among other effects, paralyzed the processing of the amparo.

Finally, she requested that the Court demand an explanation, in the most personal and direct manner possible, for the reasons behind the lack of response from the Ministry of the Interior and the DINA.

On March 3, 1976, the Court informed the Minister of the Interior that it had requested a report from the Chief of the "Cuatro Alamos" camp regarding the potential detention of the victim in that facility on four occasions, without having received a response to date, urging urgent compliance.

Finally, more than 3 months after the filing of the writ, the Ministry replied on March 4, 1976, stating that this person had no records in their files.

Based on this report, the writ of amparo in favor of the victim was rejected on March 13, 1976.

On September 27, 1976, Mrs. María Virginia Medel Vega filed a complaint for alleged kidnapping of Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara before the 9th Criminal Court of Santiago, under case file 17.184. In it, she recounted the details of the victim's detention—which she witnessed—and also mentioned to the Court the name of Hernán Villegas Rozas, a friend of Miguel Rodríguez V. who had been detained a few days before the victim and remained deprived of liberty.

The initial investigative steps were all negative in terms of locating Miguel Rodríguez. On November 17, 1977, Mrs. Virginia Medel filed a criminal complaint for kidnapping and illegal arrest before the same court, requesting that it be joined to the case for "presumed misfortune" (presunta desgracia).

However, this complaint was not accepted for processing by the judge, who argued that the descriptions of the perpetrators were imprecise and could apply to an indeterminate number of people with the same characteristics, thus failing to meet the requirement demanded by Article 94, No. 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

On January 13, 1978, the plaintiff requested that the resolution be revoked and, in the event of a negative response, filed an appeal. Both requests were denied by the judge. Finally, after an appeal of fact (recurso de hecho) was filed, the Santiago Court of Appeals ordered the revocation of the judge's resolution on April 18, 1978, and ruled that the complaint should be processed directly.

The case then began to be processed, with investigative steps ordered that also yielded no response regarding the detention and whereabouts of the victim.

On March 21, 1979, the Supreme Court appointed Judge Servando Jordán López as a Special Visiting Judge (Ministro en Visita) to investigate complaints regarding forcibly disappeared persons within the jurisdiction of Santiago. Thus, on June 6, 1979, the case was transferred to Judge Jordán.

The investigative steps ordered by the judge, like the previous ones, yielded no positive results regarding what happened to Miguel Rodríguez Vergara. Among these was an attempt to locate Hernán Villegas Rozas; however, when consulted, the Minister of the Interior at the time, Sergio Fernández Fernández, replied on June 28, 1979, that there was no record of the aforementioned Villegas Rozas in the files of the Confidential Department of the Ministry of the Interior, nor had any order or resolution been issued against him.

The National Intelligence Center (CNI) stated, for its part, that it lacked records of Rodríguez Vergara and that he had not been detained on November 17, 1975, or subsequently.

On June 5, 1980, Judge Servando Jordán declared the summary investigation closed. That same day, the plaintiff requested the reconsideration of the resolution, providing the judge with the name, address, date, and place of detention of the potential witness Hernán Villegas Rozas so that he could be interrogated, noting that in the alternative, she was filing an appeal.

The reconsideration was not granted, and the case was sent for review to the Court of Appeals, which, in a ruling on July 8, 1980, confirmed Judge Jordán's resolution.

On July 22, 1980, the case was temporarily dismissed (sobreseimiento temporal). This new resolution was appealed by the plaintiff; however, the resolution was confirmed on February 20, 1981, by the Court of Appeals.

Given this, a complaint (recurso de queja) was filed on April 3, 1981, against the judges who made up the chamber of said Court. On this occasion, the Supreme Court ruled in September 1981 that the temporary dismissal was appropriate, thereby confirming the decision of the Court of Appeals. To this day, Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara remains in the status of a forcibly disappeared person.

Source: Corporation report

The Supreme Court rejected the appeal filed against the sentence that convicted Sylvia Teresa Oyarce Pinto, a former Carabineros officer and former agent of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), to 5 years and one day in prison as the perpetrator of the qualified kidnapping of Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara, committed in November 1975 in the commune of Pudahuel.

The disappeared person, Miguel Rodríguez Vergara, was a 42-year-old Socialist militant. He was detained at his home on Calle San Pablo, in Pudahuel, by a group of agents composed of Gerardo Meza Acuña, Sylvia Oyarce, and the now-deceased Orlando Mora López and Enrique Cartes Isla.

After the detention, they transferred Rodríguez Vergara to the secret Villa Grimaldi barracks, and at a later date, agents of the "Tucán" group murdered him and then illegally buried him in a rural area west of Santiago, making him disappear forever.

In a unanimous ruling (case file 94.891-2020), the Second Chamber of the high court—composed of ministers Haroldo Brito, Manuel Antonio Valderrama, Jorge Dahm, Leopoldo Llanos, and minister María Teresa Letelier—ruled out any legal error in the sentence challenged by the convicted woman.

In the first-instance ruling, issued by Judge Mario Carroza in July 2017, he had decreed the acquittal of agent Sylvia Oyarce Pinto and convicted the other agents involved in the crime. The Ninth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals, in July 2020, confirmed those convictions and revoked the woman's acquittal, also sentencing her to five years and one day in prison.

In both the first and second instances, four other former DINA agents were convicted: former Army officer Rolf Arnold Gonzalo Wenderoth Pozo and former Carabineros officer Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García were sentenced to 5 years and one day in prison as perpetrators of the crime; former agent Gerardo Meza Acuña was sentenced to 3 years and one day in prison, with the benefit of supervised release, as a perpetrator of the crime; and José Alfonso Ojeda Obando was sentenced to 541 days in prison, with the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence, as an accessory.

The defense teams for the other convicted individuals did not appeal to the Supreme Court, so the sentences remain final. However, in the time elapsed between the previous resolutions and the current Supreme Court resolution, the criminal Gerardo Meza Acuña passed away. Other individuals involved had already passed away by the date of the first-instance ruling.

Wenderoth Pozo acted as the second-in-command of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade (BIM) and was responsible for the general staff that operated in Villa Grimaldi. Meanwhile, Godoy García acted as the head of the "Tucán" Group, dedicated to persecuting Socialist militants.

The convicted agents were members of that repressive group. The convicted Sylvia Teresa Oyarce Pinto was an operational agent of the DINA-CNI from 1974 onwards, participating in several repressive operations, including "Operation Alfa Carbón" in August 1984 in cities in the south.

Source: resumen.cl 26/1/2023 Date: 01-26-2023

MARIO CARROZA ISSUES INDICTMENT OF FORMER DINA AGENTS FOR THE KIDNAPPING OF MIGUEL RODRÍGUEZ VERGARA

The special visiting judge for human rights violation cases, Mario Carroza, issued an indictment in the investigation he is conducting into the qualified kidnapping of Miguel Rodríguez Vergara, a crime perpetrated starting on November 17, 1975, in the commune of Pudahuel.

In the resolution, Judge Carroza indicted the following agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA): Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Marcelo Moren Brito, Gerardo Meza Acuña, and José Ojeda Obando, for their responsibility in the crime.

According to the information gathered during the investigation stage, the magistrate was able to determine the following facts: "On November 17, 1975, at the home located at Calle San Pablo No. 5.470 in the commune of Pudahuel, in the presence of his partner and children, Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara was illegally detained by order of the head of the Caupolicán group, Marcelo Moren Brito, whose mandate was carried out by a team composed of four DINA agents: Gerardo Meza Acuña, Enrique Cartes Isla, Orlando Mora López, and an unidentified woman, all belonging to the 'Tucán' group, which was commanded at that time by Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García.

Once the agents detained Rodríguez Vergara, they transferred him to the Villa Grimaldi or Terranova barracks, where he was taken into a room to be interrogated. Upon leaving the interrogation, he was placed in a chair, and according to the version of the apprehending agents, this is the moment when the victim allegedly suffered a heart attack and died on the spot.

His body, by order of the group leader, was apparently buried illegally in the vicinity of the Mapocho River, which was the last news heard of him, a task in which agent José Ojeda Obando also participated."

Source: cronicadigital.cl 21/7/2015 Date: 07-21-2015

Search for clandestine grave of PS militant in Mapocho

The information that made this search possible was provided by two former agents of the DINA's Lautaro Brigade to Judge Víctor Montiglio in his investigation into the "Calle Conferencia" case and the clandestine barracks of Simón Bolívar.

The Human Rights Brigade of the Investigative Police (PDI) has been working since this week in an area near the Mapocho Bridge located on Route 68 on the way to Valparaíso, in the area of the Lomas de Lo Aguirre housing complex, in an attempt to locate the site where Socialist militant Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara is allegedly buried clandestinely.

The police are working with two anthropologists acting as experts appointed by the court investigating the disappearance of this forcibly disappeared person. The case is in the hands of Judge Joaquín Billard.

The information that made this search possible was provided by two former agents of the DINA's Lautaro Brigade to Judge Víctor Montiglio in his investigation into the "Calle Conferencia" case and the clandestine barracks of Simón Bolívar, where two clandestine leaderships of the Communist Party were exterminated in 1976.

The Socialist merchant, a father of eight, was detained by two male agents and one woman on November 17, 1975, at his home on Calle San Pablo 5470, and taken to Villa Grimaldi.

According to the account of the two agents, Rodríguez died under torture, and they received the order to remove the body and bury it clandestinely in some location, choosing, according to them, the site where the remains are now being sought. This time, the body was not thrown into the sea, the fate of the vast majority of detainees whose bodies disappeared forever at the bottom of the ocean.

Lawyers from the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior are also participating in the search.

Source: Friday, August 29, 2008, La Nación Date: 08-29-2008

Former Army officer indicted for kidnapping of PS militant

Special judge Joaquín Billard indicted former Army officer Germán Barriga Muñoz as the perpetrator of the qualified kidnapping of Miguel Enrique Rodríguez Vergara, an event that occurred on November 17, 1975.

Rodríguez, who was 42 years old at the time of his detention, was a merchant and a militant of the Socialist Party, and was apprehended at his home on Calle San Pablo by two men and a woman.

The former Army officer, who was the head of one of the "Purén" brigades of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), was identified as the perpetrator of the kidnapping of Miguel Rodríguez Vergara by the victim's family members.

Currently, Barriga works as a security instructor for guards at the Líder supermarket chain.

The plaintiff's lawyer in the case, Nelson Caucoto, expressed his satisfaction with the resolution, as in his view, "progress has been made in clarifying this event and that Rodríguez was indeed a victim of the Purén Brigade. This shows that all crimes can be uncovered."

Source: November 16, 2004, El Mostrador Date: 11-16-2004