On May 29, 1977, the Chilean married couple Matilde PESSA MOIS and Jacobo STOULMAN BORTNIK, who had no political affiliation or ties, were detained upon the arrival of the flight on which they were traveling between Santiago and Buenos Aires, before passing through International Police control.

Following their detention, the couple was found to be registered at the Hotel Winston Palace in Buenos Aires, which at that time was used by the security services of Argentina.

The Commission is convinced that they are victims of human rights violations. The case, however, does not fall within the context described above, given that the victims lacked political affiliation. The Commission verified that the DINA was aware of this case, but lacks the grounds to attribute this disappearance to agents of the State of Chile.

(Note: A correction has been made for the publication of this interactive. In the report of the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (1991), the surname of Jacobo Stoulman Bortnik appears as "STULMAN BORTNICK"; the correct form is "STOULMAN BORTNIK".)

On May 29, 1977, the Chilean couple Matilde PESSA MOIS and Jacobo STOULMAN BOERTNIK, who had no political militancy or affiliations, were detained upon the arrival of the flight they were traveling on between Santiago and Buenos Aires, before passing through International Police control.

Following their detention, the couple was found registered at the Winston Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, which at that time was used by the Argentine security services. The Commission is convinced that they are victims of human rights violations.

The case, however, does not fall within the context described above, given that the victims lacked militancy. The Commission verified that the DINA was aware of this case, but lacks the grounds to attribute this disappearance to agents of the State of Chile.

Source: Report of the Corporation

Nelson Caucoto on the Condor case ruling: “It is the harshest sentence ever applied in Chile for crimes against humanity”

According to the sentence, the heaviest penalties were imposed on the heads of the DINA’s foreign apparatus, Cristoph Willike, Raúl Iturriaga, Pedro Espinoza, and Juan Morales, for aggravated kidnapping and aggravated homicide.

Human rights lawyer Nelson Caucoto described the sentence handed down by the Santiago Court of Appeals in the Condor Case as extraordinary. The court modified the first-instance ruling and increased the sentences for 22 agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for the kidnapping and aggravated homicide of 12 victims, 10 of whom were kidnapped abroad within the framework of the repressive plan articulated in the 1970s in coordination with the dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Uruguay.

Caucoto, who represents the families of seven of the 12 victims, pointed out that this is a tremendously important sentence since, in his view, it applies the highest penalties in a human rights case. “It is a ruling that greatly vindicates the administration of justice.

It is certainly the harshest sentence with the most severe penalties ever applied in Chile for crimes against humanity. Sentences ranging from 40 to 36 years for human rights violators are unusual in our country, and they correspond to the gravity of the crimes and the immense extent of the damage caused.” According to the sentence, the heaviest penalties were imposed on the heads of the DINA’s foreign apparatus, Cristoph Willike, Raúl Iturriaga, Pedro Espinoza, and Juan Morales, who were sentenced to 20 years as authors of the crime of aggravated kidnapping and another 20 years for the crime of aggravated homicide. Meanwhile, three other agents must serve sentences of 36, 25, and 15 years for the same crimes, among them Miguel Krassnoff, Gerardo Godoy, and agent Gladys Calderón. This case has been under investigation for more than two decades, and for that reason, as Caucoto explains, “we are talking about a process where there are two great absentees among those convicted. First, Augusto Pinochet, who was stripped of his immunity in 2004 for this case, and Manuel Contreras, the great ideologue of Operation Condor. In addition to 18 other agents who died during the course of the proceedings and whose cases were dismissed.” The lawyer also valued that the sentence not only highlights and sets a precedent in the criminal sphere, but also innovates in civil matters, since in addition to the compensation granted by the Court of Appeals, symbolic reparations were established, ordering the creation of a Human Rights Award in the name of the forcibly disappeared Alexei Jaccard, a task that must be carried out by the University of Concepción. Likewise, the court ordered the Treasury to finance the purchase of books dedicated to the subject of human rights to be distributed in the public schools of Chiguayante. “These are reparation measures that are different from the conventional ones, and for that reason, the ruling is tremendously relevant,” the lawyer emphasized.

Source: eldinamo.cl 7/26/2022

Date: 07-26-2022

22 former DINA agents convicted for crimes of kidnapping and homicide in Operation Condor

The Santiago Court of Appeals increased the sentences of former DINA agents for their responsibility in the aggravated kidnappings and homicides of victims of Operation Condor. The Eleventh Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals modified the first-instance sentence and convicted a total of 22 former DINA agents for their responsibility in the crimes of aggravated kidnapping and homicide committed in Chile and abroad.

Among those sentenced are: Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, as well as Pedro Espinoza Bravo and Miguel Krasnoff Martchenko. According to the investigation of this case known as Operation Condor, it was in Santiago that a plan for the coordination of actions and mutual support was established between the leaders of the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chile, intended to destabilize opponents of the regimes assumed by the Armed Forces and Order.

In the sentence, the Eleventh Chamber of the appellate court, composed of ministers Jessica González, Loreto Gutiérrez, and Jaime Balmaceda, modified the convictions of the first-instance court and increased the criminal sanctions for the former agents involved in the crimes committed both in Chile and abroad.

One of the plaintiff lawyers in the case, Francisco Bustos, valued the increase in penalties and stated that this large-scale plan must reflect that there is NO impunity. Sentences of the 22 former DINA agents Agents Cristoph Willike Floel and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann must serve a sentence of 20 years in prison as authors of the aggravated kidnappings of Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, Julio Valladares Caroca, Juan Hernández Zazpe, Manuel Tamayo Martínez, Luis Muñoz Velásquez, Alexei Jaccard Siegler, and Héctor Velásquez Mardones.

They also received a 20-year sentence as authors of the aggravated homicides of Ricardo Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bartnik, Matilde Pessa Mois, Hernán Soto González, and Ruiter Correa Arce. Meanwhile, agent Juan Morales Salgado was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the aggravated kidnappings of Alexei Jaccard Siegler and Héctor Velásquez Mardones, and 20 years in prison for the aggravated homicides of Ricardo Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bartnik, and Matilde Pessa Mois.

On the other hand, agent Pedro Espinoza Bravo must serve a 20-year prison sentence for the aggravated kidnappings of Julio Valladares Caroca, Manuel Tamayo Martínez, Alexei Jaccard Siegler, and Héctor Velásquez Mardones; and a 20-year prison sentence for the aggravated homicides of Ricardo Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bartnik, Matilde Pessa Mois, Hernán Soto González, and Ruiter Correa Arce.

While Jorge Escobar Fuentes, Federico Chaigneau Sepúlveda, and Miguel Riveros Valderrama will serve 18 years in prison for the kidnappings of Alexei Jaccard Siegler and Héctor Velásquez Mardones; and 18 years in prison for the aggravated homicides of Ricardo Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bartnik, Matilde Pessa Mois, Hernán Soto González, and Ruiter Correa Arce.

Agent Gladys Calderón Carreño was sanctioned with a sentence of 10 years and one day in prison for the aggravated kidnappings of Alexei Jaccard Siegler and Héctor Velásquez Mardones; and 15 years and one day in prison for the aggravated homicides of Ricardo Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bartnik, Matilde Pessa Mois, Hernán Soto González, and Ruiter Correa Arce.

Agents Jaime Ojeda Obando and Eduardo Oyarce Riquelme will serve a sentence of 5 years and one day in prison for the aggravated kidnappings of Alexei Jaccard Siegler and Héctor Velásquez Mardones; and a sentence of 10 years and one day in prison for the aggravated homicides of Ricardo Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bartnik, and Matilde Pessa Mois.

Miguel Krasnoff Martchenko and Gerardo Godoy García will serve 15 years and one day in prison for the aggravated kidnapping of Jorge Fuentes Alarcón. Agent Hermon Alfaro Mundaca was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the aggravated kidnapping of Jorge Fuentes Alarcón.

Sentenced to the same penalty and for the same crime were José Fuentes Torres, Jorge Andrade Gómez, José Aravena Ruiz, Luis Torres Méndez, María Gabriela Órdenes Montecinos, Osvaldo Pulgar Gallardo, and Rodolfo Concha Rodríguez, who had been acquitted in the first-instance ruling.

Finally, Jerónimo Neira Méndez and Manuel Rivas Díaz must serve a sentence of 3 years and one day in prison for the aggravated kidnapping of Jorge Fuentes Alarcón. The Court shared the first-instance criterion regarding the participation of those convicted in the case.

This is because there were real and proven facts regarding their participation in the events, whether as inducing authors or direct authors of the crimes attributed to each one.

Source: modal.am 7/22/2022

Date: 07-22-2022

Commemorating Chileans forcibly disappeared in Operation Condor

Operation Condor was a criminal pact, a coordination of extermination by the civil-military dictatorships of: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia. In the 1970s, an international clandestine band was formed for the practice of state terrorism.

There are more than seventy Chileans kidnapped or murdered who were in Argentina. Several were brought to Chile by the DINA. On November 28, 1975, in Chile, at a meeting coordinated by Manuel Contreras of the DINA, to kidnap, torture, persecute, and murder social fighters, left-wing militants, and social, union, and student leaders from the six aforementioned countries, extending to Italy and the United States.

Details of the Plan began to appear from 1992 with the archives of the Paraguayan military, as well as documents from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. In Argentina, in the oral trial for crimes against humanity and transnational illicit association for the kidnapping and murder of left-wing militants, fifteen former Argentine generals and colonels and one Uruguayan (alive) were tried and convicted, guilty of genocide.

Others, including former dictator Rafael Videla, died in common prisons. Unlike in Chile, Pinochet was not convicted; in April 2000, in less than 24 hours, the Government and Parliament approved Law 19.662 to grant him amnesty through immunity, despite the fact that he did not hold public office.

Furthermore, criminals convicted in Punta Peuco are in a 4-star prison. Argentine courts verified that two DINA networks operated; one in Buenos Aires, the other in Mendoza. In Chile, the Extraordinary Visiting Minister, Mario Carroza, prosecuted, along with 53 hitmen, the retired general and head of the DINA, Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, for crimes in seven kidnappings and five homicides within the framework of Operation Condor.

As authors of the aggravated kidnappings of Luis Muñoz Velásquez, Juan Hernández Zaspe, Manuel Tamayo Martínez, Julio Valladares Caroca (the four of them socialists), Héctor Velásquez Mardones, Alexei Jaccard Siegler (both communists), and Jorge Fuentes Alarcón (of the MIR).

Likewise, they were also prosecuted for the aggravated homicides of Ricardo Ramírez Herrera, Ruiter Correa Arce, and Hernán Soto Gálvez (the three of them communists), and of Matilde Pessa Mois and Jacobo Stoulman Bortnik (a married couple and independent leftists).

Ten days after the coup d'état in Argentina, April 3 marks 45 years since the kidnapping in Mendoza of three young men: Luis Muñoz Velásquez, former president of the Student Center of the Liceo Consolidada in Puente Alto in 1968; councilor candidate and leader of the PS (Socialist Party) of San Bernardo, clandestine leader of the PS Consensus Commission sector since the 1973 coup.

Juan Hernández Zaspe, president of the Federation of Industrial and Technical Students of Chile (FEITECh), who militated in the clandestine PS Consensus Commission sector. Manuel Tamayo Martínez, former leader of industrial students, student of sociology and engineering at the University of Concepción, who militated in the clandestine PS as a liaison for national leader Ricardo Lagos Salinas.

They worked for a transformative social political project, in the clandestine reorganization of Chilean socialism, and never renounced their ideological convictions. The DINA, led by Lieutenant Fernando Laureani Maturana, and the Argentine Federal Police kidnapped the three young men on Av.

Belgrano, Mendoza, according to eyewitnesses José Cerda and Alex Muñoz. The kidnappers took them to the Maipo regiment in Mendoza to begin a long road of unspeakable hardships; at night they transferred them to Chile, through the Los Libertadores border crossing in a covered pickup truck, and handed them over to the Cuatro Álamos torture camp.

The next morning they were transferred to the Villa Grimaldi torture and extermination center, until the end of April 1976. The surviving former prisoner, Juan Feres, was a witness at Villa Grimaldi.

Source: cronicadigital.cl 4/3/2021

Date: 04-03-2021

Operation Condor: remains of three forcibly disappeared persons kidnapped in Argentina found in Chile (excerpt)

In May, the remains of three Chilean victims of Operation Condor were identified: Ricardo Ramírez, Jacobo Stoulman, and his wife Matilde Pessa, kidnapped in Buenos Aires in May 1977 and then disappeared without a trace. 38 years later, laboratory tests concluded that their remains were among the bone fragments found in 2001 in Cuesta Barriga, Chile.

The discovery opens a new angle in the investigation by Minister Mario Carroza: it corroborates the transfer and exchange of detainees used by the DINA and the Argentine SIDE in the 70s and 80s to eliminate dissidents.

Ricardo Ignacio Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bortnick, and the latter's wife, Matilde Pessa Mois: all three were on the list of 25 people about whom Judge Juan Guzmán asked General (r) Augusto Pinochet on Saturday, September 25, 2004.

It had been only two months since the Santiago Court of Appeals had stripped the former dictator of his immunity for his responsibility in Operation Condor, an international plan of cooperation and joint action implemented in the 70s and 80s by the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone to identify, monitor, capture, kidnap, torture, eliminate, and forcibly disappear political opponents, the so-called “subversives.” It was in the context of that judicial investigation that Guzmán was interrogating Pinochet.

The record of that statement, which lasted barely 25 minutes and which El Mercurio published three days later, shows that Pinochet claimed not to remember anything about that plan, that it was an intelligence matter, and therefore, one for mid-level commanders, and that “neither Condor nor anything like that was my problem.” Regarding the dead and disappeared left by that extermination plan, he stated: -I was President, they were not going to inform me of small things.

Guzmán asked him again

“Did you give orders related to the detention, interrogation, torture, transfer, or forced disappearance of the following people?” and he read one by one the 25 names from a list of Chilean victims of Operation Condor.

There were Ricardo Ramírez and the Stoulman-Pessa couple. The first was a communist and was in charge of the organization and finances of the party in the underground. The other two had no political militancy, but were supposedly part of a plan to bring funds into the country for the opposition to the dictatorship.

All three were detained in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on different dates in May 1977. Ramírez fell first, kidnapped on the 16th along with two other Chileans and five Argentines. Thirteen days later, on the 29th, Jacobo Stoulman and Matilde Pessa arrived in that city and as soon as they got off the plane they were detained.

They simply vanished: all three were forcibly disappeared. Regarding them, Pinochet said: -I was at the top. I did not give orders related to the mentioned people. I do not know any of those people about whom I am being asked.

Time passed. Pinochet died in December 2006, in his home and without a conviction. Regarding the disappeared, there were versions about their fate, but no news. Although that changed just a few weeks ago.

On May 18, 2015, 38 years after Ramírez disappeared in Argentina, Valentina, his daughter, received a call from the office of Court of Appeals Minister Mario Carroza. Her father had been identified. Or at least, what remained of him.

They were small bone fragments that were found in 2001 in Cuesta Barriga, in Talagante. In the same grave were also part of the remains of Jacobo Stoulman and Matilde Pessa. Their daughters also received the call from Carroza. -They didn't tell us anything over the phone, but they summoned us to the minister's office.

We were with my two sisters when he gave us the news: “You will be able to bury your parents,” Judge Carroza told us. We looked at each other and didn't know what to say. We were left speechless –says Alejandra Stoulman, who was 15 years old when her parents disappeared.

The identification of Ramírez and the Stoulman-Pessas is key to proving the veracity of the macabre account that three DINA agents who operated in the Simón Bolívar barracks in La Reina gave to justice in 2007.

Before the latter spoke, at least regarding Ramírez and the other two people who were kidnapped with him on Monday, May 16, 1977, the version given by the head of the dictatorship's repressive organ, General (r) Manuel Contreras, was that they had been arrested by Argentine intelligence and that they had made them disappear by throwing their bodies into the Río de La Plata (see report in La Nación).

The agents contradicted their former boss and revealed a completely different story, but one that still ended in death: once kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Ramírez and his two companions were brought to Chile covertly to then end up in the torture center operated by the Lautaro Brigade, one of the most bloodthirsty groups of the DINA.

That they tortured them there and eliminated them with sarin gas. That they buried them in a grave in Peldehue and that two years later, in 1978, they exhumed their bodies with a backhoe and took them to Cuesta Barriga, in the midst of the so-called Operation Retiro de Televisores.

Little was known about the Stoulman-Pessas: only that they had disappeared in Buenos Aires. But the recent and surprising identification of their remains constructs a different narrative: that of a route that brought them back to Chile and that ended with an illegal burial at the same spot as Ramírez and his companions.

At the same time that a chapter is beginning to close for the families, a completely new one is opening for the investigation led by Minister Carroza; one that confirms that there was a transfer and exchange of detainees between the repressive organs of the dictatorships that made up Operation Condor, only to then make them disappear.

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE MONEY CHANGER

The last time Jacobo Stoulman and Matilde Pessa were seen alive was on Sunday, May 29, 1977, at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires. The Braniff airline plane they boarded in Santiago was awaited by a group of Chilean and Argentine security agents.

As soon as it touched ground, the aircraft was diverted to a side runway. The passengers had to go down the stairs with their documentation in hand for review. When it was the couple's turn, they were taken to the side and then put into a vehicle that immediately set off.

He was 43 years old; she was 42. They left behind three teenage daughters: Jenny, Sara, and Alejandra. Neither of them had political militancy. Stoulman's business history started at the end of 1963, when he created the company Agrícola y Avícola Las Rosas, with Eº20,000, of which he put up half.

Three years later, he established a second company dedicated to the agro-poultry sector with two partners, and in 1970 he ventured into a book distribution company. His investments were increasingly larger and diversified, and he carried them out at the same time he worked as an executive at the Banco Israelita.

The following year he emigrated with his family to Israel, but only stayed for a while. He returned to Chile shortly before the coup d'état and, already under the dictatorship, in mid-1974, he partnered with architect Mario Paredes and choreographer Samuel Winer to create Paredes, Stoulman y Winer Ltda., or “La Escalera,” a company dedicated to the sale of clothing and household items.

Each partner contributed Eº500,000 to the initial capital. But his takeoff came later, when in 1975 he entered the tourism sector and, a year later, the currency market.

Source: elmuertoquehabla.blogspot.com 7/25/2015

Date: 07-25-2015

Judge Guzmán requests to strip former dictator Pinochet of immunity for the 'Operation Condor' case

The magistrate prosecutes the DINA leadership for the disappearance of nine people

SANTIAGO DE CHILE.- Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia has requested to strip former dictator Augusto Pinochet of his immunity for the case in which he is investigating the so-called 'Operation Condor'. The magistrate has also ordered the prosecution of three former military officers who were members of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).

The judge has accepted for processing a lawsuit filed before the Santiago Court of Appeals by Eduardo Contreras, Francisco Bravo, and Sergio Concha, the plaintiff lawyers, so that Pinochet loses the immunity he possesses as a de facto former president between 1973 and 1990. "In the file, the participation of Augusto Pinochet in what was 'Operation Condor' is fully accredited; he is the mastermind of this international of crime, as head of the Chilean military dictatorship," stated lawyer Contreras. 'Operation Condor' is the name given to the intelligence and coordination plan between the security services of the Southern Cone dictatorships in the 1970s that was set in motion to eliminate the opposition. The decision of whether or not Pinochet will have to face the Chilean courts is now in the hands of the Santiago Court of Appeals, which must rule on the request of the accusing lawyers, who consider that in the interview the former Chilean dictator granted last November 24 to an anti-Castro television station in Miami, he showed "lucidity and sanity," and that he does not suffer from the mild dementia that has saved him from being prosecuted. Prosecution of three military officers Juan Guzmán Tapia has also ordered the prosecution of three former military officers who were members of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the repressive organ of the de facto regime. The judge charges them for their responsibility in the kidnapping and disappearance of nine Chileans within the framework of 'Operation Condor'. The magistrate thus issued the first prosecutions in the case, which began in 1998 and is investigating the detention and disappearance of at least one hundred Chilean citizens at the hands of the Pinochet dictatorship. The magistrate's decision affects the former head of the dissolved National Intelligence Directorate, retired General Manuel Contreras (previously prosecuted for the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington and charged in dozens of cases for human rights violations); retired Brigadier Pedro Espinoza, second-in-command of the repressive organization; and the former head of its foreign department, retired Colonel Christoph Willikie. The prosecution issued by Minister Guzmán is related to the disappearance of Juan Hernández Zazpe, Luis Muñoz Velásquez, Manuel Tamayo Martínez, Edgardo Enríquez Espinoza, Alexei Jaccard Siegler, Jacobo Stoulman Bortnik, Matilde Pessa Mois, Julio Valladares Caroca, and Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, who were detained between 1975 and 1977 outside of Chile by intelligence agents from Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia, and subsequently handed over to Chilean DINA agents, who transferred them to a torture camp in Santiago, from where they disappeared.

Source: elmundo.es 12/23/2003

Date: 12-23-2003

Operation Condor: remains of three forcibly disappeared persons kidnapped in Argentina found in Chile

Ricardo Ignacio Ramírez Herrera, Jacobo Stoulman Bortnick, and the latter's wife, Matilde Pessa Mois: all three were on the list of 25 people about whom Judge Juan Guzmán asked General (r) Augusto Pinochet on Saturday, September 25, 2004.

It had been only two months since the Santiago Court of Appeals had stripped the former dictator of his immunity for his responsibility in Operation Condor, an international plan of cooperation and joint action implemented in the 70s and 80s by the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone to identify, monitor, capture, kidnap, torture, eliminate, and forcibly disappear political opponents, the so-called “subversives.” It was in the context of that judicial investigation that Guzmán was interrogating Pinochet.

The record of that statement, which lasted barely 25 minutes and which El Mercurio published three days later, shows that Pinochet claimed not to remember anything about that plan, that it was an intelligence matter, and therefore, one for mid-level commanders, and that “neither Condor nor anything like that was my problem.” Regarding the dead and disappeared left by that extermination plan, he stated: -I was President, they were not going to inform me of small things.

Guzmán asked him again

“Did you give orders related to the detention, interrogation, torture, transfer, or forced disappearance of the following people?” and he read one by one the 25 names from a list of Chilean victims of Operation Condor.

There were Ricardo Ramírez and the Stoulman-Pessa couple. The first was a communist and was in charge of the organization and finances of the party in the underground. The other two had no political militancy, but were supposedly part of a plan to bring funds into the country for the opposition to the dictatorship.

All three were detained in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on different dates in May 1977. Ramírez fell first, kidnapped on the 16th along with two other Chileans and five Argentines. Thirteen days later, on the 29th, Jacobo Stoulman and Matilde Pessa arrived in that city and as soon as they got off the plane they were detained.

They simply vanished: all three were forcibly disappeared. Regarding them, Pinochet said: -I was at the top. I did not give orders related to the mentioned people. I do not know any of those people about whom I am being asked.

Time passed. Pinochet died in December 2006, in his home and without a conviction. Regarding the disappeared, there were versions about their fate, but no news. Although that changed just a few weeks ago.

On May 18, 2015, 38 years after Ramírez disappeared in Argentina, Valentina, his daughter, received a call from the office of Court of Appeals Minister Mario Carroza. Her father had been identified. Or at least, what remained of him.

They were small bone fragments that were found in 2001 in Cuesta Barriga, in Talagante. In the same grave were also part of the remains of Jacobo Stoulman and Matilde Pessa. Their daughters also received the call from Carroza. -They didn't tell us anything over the phone, but they summoned us to the minister's office.

We were with my two sisters when he gave us the news: “You will be able to bury your parents,” Judge Carroza told us. We looked at each other and didn't know what to say. We were left speechless –says Alejandra Stoulman, who was 15 years old when her parents disappeared.

The identification of Ramírez and the Stoulman-Pessas is key to proving the veracity of the macabre account that three DINA agents who operated in the Simón Bolívar barracks in La Reina gave to justice in 2007.

Before the latter spoke, at least regarding Ramírez and the other two people who were kidnapped with him on Monday, May 16, 1977, the version given by the head of the dictatorship's repressive organ, General (r) Manuel Contreras, was that they had been arrested by Argentine intelligence and that they had made them disappear by throwing their bodies into the Río de La Plata (see report in La Nación).

The agents contradicted their former boss and revealed a completely different story, but one that still ended in death: once kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Ramírez and his two companions were brought to Chile covertly to then end up in the torture center operated by the Lautaro Brigade, one of the most bloodthirsty groups of the DINA.

That they tortured them there and eliminated them with sarin gas. That they buried them in a grave in Peldehue and that two years later, in 1978, they exhumed their bodies with a backhoe and took them to Cuesta Barriga, in the midst of the so-called Operation Retiro de Televisores.

Little was known about the Stoulman-Pessas: only that they had disappeared in Buenos Aires. But the recent and surprising identification of their remains constructs a different narrative: that of a route that brought them back to Chile and that ended with an illegal burial at the same spot as Ramírez and his companions.

At the same time that a chapter is beginning to close for the families, a completely new one is opening for the investigation led by Minister Carroza; one that confirms that there was a transfer and exchange of detainees between the repressive organs of the dictatorships that made up Operation Condor, only to then make them disappear.

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE MONEY CHANGER

The last time Jacobo Stoulman and Matilde Pessa were seen alive was on Sunday, May 29, 1977, at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires. The Braniff airline plane they boarded in Santiago was awaited by a group of Chilean and Argentine security agents.

As soon as it touched ground, the aircraft was diverted to a side runway. The passengers had to go down the stairs with their documentation in hand for review. When it was the couple's turn, they were taken to the side and then put into a vehicle that immediately set off.

He was 43 years old; she was 42. They left behind three teenage daughters: Jenny, Sara, and Alejandra. Neither of them had political militancy. Stoulman's business history started at the end of 1963, when he created the company Agrícola y Avícola Las Rosas, with Eº20,000, of which he put up half.

Three years later, he established a second company dedicated to the agro-poultry sector with two partners, and in 1970 he ventured into a book distribution company. His investments were increasingly larger and diversified, and he carried them out at the same time he worked as an executive at the Banco Israelita.

The following year he emigrated with his family to Israel, but only stayed for a while. He returned to Chile shortly before the coup d'état and, already under the dictatorship, in mid-1974, he partnered with architect Mario Paredes and choreographer Samuel Winer to create Paredes, Stoulman y Winer Ltda., or “La Escalera,” a company dedicated to the sale of clothing and household items.

Each partner contributed Eº500,000 to the initial capital. But his takeoff came later, when in 1975 he entered the tourism sector and, a year later, the currency market. At the end of '75, he established the Toptour Travel Agency, together with Mónica Fuenzalida.

Months later, in July '76, the Central Bank authorized him to operate a currency exchange house together with four partners: Alfredo Barra, Enrique Chamorro, Juan Garnham, and León Dobry. A month later, Cambios Andes was born.

It would be the movements through that company that would have turned Stoulman into a hunting target for the DINA. A report published in Página/12 points out that Stoulman's exchange house had attracted important investors in the months that followed its establishment.

Among them, the Hungarian-born mining entrepreneur José Klein, uncle of businessman Leonardo Farkas, who supposedly had been sending funds through Cambios Andes to the Christian Democracy and former President Eduardo Frei Montalva.

According to the article, that same route was the one the PC (Communist Party) had devised to bring into Chile the US$ 20,000 that Jaccard was carrying. True or not, Stoulman's movements were closely followed. His daughter Alejandra would declare years later that before traveling to Buenos Aires, the businessman had already realized that they were recording and following him.

THE DISAPPEARED RETURN

When Alejandra, Sara, and Jenny Stoulman arrived at the office of Minister Mario Carroza, in addition to the magistrate, there were also social worker Isabel Maturana and lawyer Rodrigo Lledó, both from the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior.

Shortly before, the first two had received the call summoning them to a meeting. Alejandra told CIPER that they did not know what it was about, but that Jenny, the eldest, the only one who had not provided DNA samples for comparison at the Legal Medical Service (SML) and the only one who did not receive the call, understood almost immediately: her parents had appeared.

After Carroza told them that finally, after 38 years, they would be able to bury their parents, he informed them that the identification of their remains -among those that were found in Cuesta Barriga in 2001- had been something completely unexpected.

No information from the investigation pointed to Jacobo Stoulman and Matilde Pessa having returned to Chile after their kidnapping. The information was that they had disappeared in Buenos Aires, and nothing more.

For that reason, Carroza was clear in pointing out the importance of the discovery. Alejandra remembers that he told them: “This ratifies the existence of Operation Condor.” The appearance of the Stoulman-Pessa couple, in addition to Ricardo Ramírez, corroborates the existence of a mechanism of international transfer and exchange of detainees between the repressive organisms of the Southern Cone dictatorships during the 70s and 80s.

A door that did not exist before is thus opened to determine what really happened to them after their detention and possibly to dozens of people who disappeared as victims of Operation Condor and about whom nothing is known to this day.

That is why Alejandra Stoulman asserts that, although the reunion with her parents' remains is the closing of a chapter that has marked her family's history over the last four decades, it is also the opening of another in the search for the truth. -It has been very strong and painful, but it reassures us to see that the investigation remains open and advancing –she says.

On Friday, May 29, 2015, when exactly 38 years had passed since the Stoulman-Pessas were kidnapped and disappeared in Buenos Aires, their daughters received two urns at the SML, and in each one, small bone remains.

They did not see them. Alejandra explains that it is a tradition of the Jewish religion not to see the dead and to remember them as they were in life. The whole family was there. There were also friends and people who have been linked to the case.

Paulina Veloso, among them, who still has no news of the whereabouts of her husband, Alexei Jaccard. Upon leaving, everyone headed to the Jewish Cemetery. That day they gave them the burial they so longed for.

Source: ciper.cl 6/16/2015