On October 4, 1973, José Andrés MELIQUEN AGUILERA, 45, an agricultural worker, was detained before witnesses at the "Manuel Levinao" settlement by personnel from the Lautaro Police Station. His family members state that their inquiries regarding his detention were subsequently denied.

On that same day, October 4, Sergio del Carmen NAVARRO SCHIFFERLI, 37, a farmer, was detained by Carabineros from the Yuyinco Police Post and transferred to the Lautaro Police Station. His family was reportedly told that he had been released; however, he has remained forcibly disappeared since that date.

On October 15, 1973, José Ignacio BELTRAN MELIQUEO, 46, a farmer from the "Manuel Levinao" community, was detained before witnesses in the Plaza de Lautaro by Carabineros personnel and taken to the local police station.

His family asserts that his detention was denied to them, and he has remained forcibly disappeared since that date. The following day, October 16, 1973, Julio Manuel PAINE LIPIN, 27, a peasant farmer from the "Tres Luces" settlement in the town of Muco Bajo, was detained.

He was arrested by Carabineros when he voluntarily presented himself at the Pillanlelbún Police Post. From there, he was transferred to the Lautaro Police Station, a facility from which, according to witness accounts, he was removed at the end of October.

He has remained forcibly disappeared since that date. On November 8, 1973, Juan MILLA MONTUY, 40, a farmer, was detained in Lautaro. Carabineros reportedly denied the detention to his family members. To this date, he remains forcibly disappeared.

Also apprehended on this date by Carabineros and transferred to the Pillanlelbún Police Post was Manuel LIZAMA CARIQUEO, 29, Secretary of the Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT) of Temuco and President of the El Cardal settlement in the aforementioned town.

To this date, he remains forcibly disappeared. Finally, in the month of November 1973, José Bernardino CUEVAS CIFUENTES, a married farmer, was detained along with his son by Carabineros personnel at the Lautaro Animal Fair and taken to the local police station.

He remained detained at that facility, and all traces of José Cuevas were lost, while his son was released. Having verified their detentions before this Commission and noting that none of them returned to contact their families nor carried out any official action before the State of Chile, the Commission has formed the conviction that José Andrés Meliquén, José Ignacio Beltrán, Juan Milla, Julio Paine, Manuel Lizama, Sergio Navarro, and José Cuevas were victims of grave human rights violations, having been detained and forcibly disappeared by State agents.

Source: (Rettig Report)

Chile: The Lautaro Patrol, the secret police that disappeared Mapuche people during the dictatorship.

Retired Carabinero Domingo Campos Collao is the latest individual convicted in La Araucanía to enter the Punta Peuco prison. Last August, he left the Temuco Court of Appeals, guarded by gendarmes and accompanied by his son, to serve a sentence of five years and one day for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the kidnapping of Gervasio Huaiquil Calviqueo, a Mapuche man with no political affiliation who was detained by the Lautaro Patrol.

This group was composed of military personnel and Carabineros who, under the guise of a "rustler cleanup," detained and forcibly disappeared Mapuche people in the Cautín province during the dictatorship.

Manuela (43) was the one who suggested to the family that they commemorate her father at the end of this month with a mass at the chapel in Lautaro, in La Araucanía. When the priest asked her for the reason, if it was in memory of a deceased person, the only thing she could answer was: "It’s just that, we don't know, Father.

But if that is not the case, I would like to think that by now, he would have remembered his family, but we don't know," she told him. Gervasio Héctor Huaiquil Calviqueo would be 69 years old today. After the Patrol detained him on October 26, 1975, his mother, Mercedes Huaiquilao (75), tried not to alter their routines too much.

She would tell her children not to be late coming home from school, that their father would arrive in the afternoon, and she would leave a place set for him for tea time. Over time, that wait became unsustainable, and it was better not to talk so much about what had happened to their father.

They had to carry on. At that time, Manuela was only six months old, and everything she knows about Gervasio has been through the accounts of others. Since she arrived in Santiago to work, she says that she has inevitably continued to look for him.

And although she has no photographic references, not even a photo of his ID card, she imagines him as one of her brothers who, according to what Mercedes has told her, looks a lot like him. "I always look at the faces of the people sleeping in the plazas, on the streets.

Could it be that they beat him so much that he forgot about us? Could it be my old man who is there?" Manuela thinks, sometimes. On August 29, retired Carabinero Domingo Campos Collao, one of the members of the Lautaro Patrol, left the Temuco Court of Appeals, guarded by gendarmes and accompanied by his son, bound for the Punta Peuco prison.

The court sentenced him to five years and one day for his responsibility as the perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Gervasio Huaiquil, a Mapuche farmer with no political affiliation. Manuela says that after his detention, the Carabineros and military personnel who made up this secret police locked them inside and set fire to the community ruka where they lived.

If it hadn't been for the help of their neighbors, she, her mother, and her siblings would have burned to death inside. From that moment, the voice of one of the Carabineros remained etched in the memory of Mercedes, her mother: "Let's set fire to these damn Indians." That Wednesday in August, the family's lawyer told Manuela to tune into the regional channel because Collao was appearing live as he left the court.

She was not able to watch it; nor did she want to meet him in person at the trial hearings. She says that what her mother told her about the confrontation they had a few years ago was enough. The rage and the pain are transmitted.

A rustler cleanup On the very day of the Coup, the military quartered themselves in the La Concepción Regiment, and the Carabineros also remained confined to the first police station of Lautaro. Some declared that for months they were performing administrative duties; they slept in the Carabineros' archive offices without leaving the barracks.

When Colonel Hernán Ramírez Ramírez took power of the governorship, which until that month of September was headed by the communist Fernando Teillier, father of the writer Jorge Teillier, they requisitioned a dark green pickup truck with a white roof.

That vehicle became the hallmark of the Patrol, a group specially formed to detain opponents of the dictatorship in the Cautín province and its surroundings. Of the members of this secret police, four of them today have an "R.I.P." attached to their names in judicial documents: Lieutenant Orlando Huerta Ávila, the man who gave the orders, Juvenal Sanhueza, Enrique Ferrier, and Mario Ponce Orellana, while Domingo Campos Collao has been in prison for a few months.

The group had an exclusive office assigned to them inside the barracks where they interrogated the detainees. For the rest of the Carabineros, entry was forbidden, although they knew that the decisions regarding the "rustler cleanup" being carried out in the area were made there.

In the first few days, the Patrol brought nearly forty detainees to the police station, a figure that would increase as the months passed. The Army officers had a disadvantage that they were quickly able to overcome with the help of the Carabineros.

It was that the military were unfamiliar with many sectors that became impassable due to the thick vegetation of the forests; something the police managed through their constant rounds in the territory, especially due to detentions for animal theft or cattle rustling.

It was a close collaboration that allowed the procedures to be carried out, led by Carabinero Major Jorge Schweizer and Colonel Ramírez. "It was toward the countryside where the terrorists had the land seizures," reads the statement made by Schweizer, the boss of the barracks, in the judicial process for the case of the peasant farmer José Domingo Llabulen, who, like Gervasio Huaiquil, was another victim of the Patrol.

They not only spoke of the detainees as "rustlers" but also of "Mapuche with bad records" or "political indigenous people"; the Carabineros' archives unit maintained a list and a detailed sketch of the places where they lived.

These were valuable coordinates for the Army. "Regarding the other indigenous people named to me, José Domingo Llabulen, Juan Milla Montuy, Julio Paine Lipin, and José Cuevas Cifuentes, for the first one, I showed his address to the officials or the military, that is all (...) For what reason did they ask for those lists?

I imagine it was to eliminate those people. They never appeared again," declared Campos Collao before the justice system. The Llabulen assignment Campos Collao was also convicted for the disappearance of José Domingo Llabulen Pilquinao, a peasant farmer and member of the Communist Party, which occurred on October 11, 1973.

Although in February of this year Judge Álvaro Mesa Latorre handed down a twelve-year sentence for his responsibility as the perpetrator of aggravated kidnapping, the Temuco Court of Appeals considered the partial statute of limitations, reducing it to five years, with which Collao could opt for parole.

Bus driver Manuel "Nilo" Cid and bus assistant Benedicto Mardones were witnesses to José's detention. Nilo was driving a 1961 Ford, white and green, that traveled between Lautaro, Chumil, and Temuco. On the morning of October 11, 1973, José took the bus along with two of his children.

He was going to sell an animal in town. The day passed, and both workers for the "Rojas" bus line were preparing to return to the first city on a now-routine trip: the passengers would return loaded with purchases and would stop at different points to head into their rural homes.

Everyone knew the trip started at 5:00 PM. Thirty minutes earlier, a Carabinero Patrol asked Nilo about a certain Llabulen. He said no, that he hadn't picked him up that morning. But his words would not prevent them from continuing to circle the area, a patrol that was already raising suspicions, especially among those who moved frequently through the sector.

Shortly after, José Llabulen appeared on the road again, and the driver, somewhat alarmed, suggested that he go on foot on the other side of the Cautín bridge so they wouldn't see him on the bus. "No, black, how could it be that much!" he replied, incredulous, and went to sit in the back of the vehicle.

Before crossing the bridge, the pickup truck overtook the bus, forcing it to stop near a mill. They made all the passengers get off. José moved behind the other people, and before getting off, he exchanged a few words with the driver: he entrusted him with the package he was carrying; it was a jug of kerosene and a package of food.

He knew how necessary it was for his family. Corporal Enrique Ferrier hit him with the butt of his rifle, and along with his peer Domingo Campos Collao, they threw him into the pickup truck. Of the entire group, they only took him.

They accused him of cattle theft. The next day, his wife, Francisca Llaulen Antilao, went to inquire at every place she thought her husband could be: the Lautaro Carabineros, the La Concepción Regiment, the Investigative Police, and the public jail.

Nothing. No one knew of José Llabulen's whereabouts. Two days passed, and the children went to the bus office to look for the package their father had left, not knowing, until then, that he would become one of the forcibly disappeared of Lautaro.

Illicit association It was rumored that Corporal Enrique Ferrier had marks on the handle of his revolver to keep count of the people detained or murdered. According to what soldier Paicaví Painemal, who was doing his military service in '73, saw, the detainees arrived at the regiment at night, after passing through the dungeons and stables of the first police station of Lautaro.

He also remembers that the torture sessions of those detained for "political issues" were in the gymnasium, in the stables, and in the riding arena; punches and kicks to different parts of the body, they would hang them, and they likely applied electric shocks.

In judicial statements, several Carabinero officials acknowledge that the majority of the detainees were of Mapuche origin. In the testimonies provided in both the case of José Llabulen and Gervasio Huaiquil, it is read that some Carabineros and officers thought it was all a bad joke because they saw that everything was functioning regularly.

Retired Army Colonel Jorge Nibaldo del Río has asserted before the justice system that he never received instructions to detain civilians or carry out raids in their communities. "Perhaps I should have investigated more thoroughly," said Lieutenant Marcial Vera Ríos when the lawyers reviewed these events before the courts, and he added in his statement of January 1996: "The serious problem was that the command of the police station did not know how or could not put a stop in time to the detentions or the activities of the Carabineros with the military." Until now, in none of the judicial cases in which members of the Patrol have been prosecuted has the crime of illicit association been considered, despite the fact that this was an organization that answered to a hierarchy and was constituted specifically to commit crimes. And the military remains untouchable; only the Carabineros have been prosecuted.

Source: cctt.cl 10/22/2018

Date: 10-22-2018