My name is Juan René Muñoz Alarcón, identity card 4.824.557-9 Santiago. I am 32 years old, married, and I live at 311 Sargento Menadier, Puente Alto, Población Maipo. I am a former leader of the Partido Socialista, a member of the Youth Central Committee, a national leader of the CUT (Central Única de Trabajadores), and I belonged to the Copper Workers' Confederation.

In the year 73, I resigned from the PS. I left because I did not agree with certain things. I made a report in the press, on television, and on the radio. This happened 4 or 5 months before the military coup, which meant being persecuted by people from the party, cornered.

They even burned my house down; I lost my family. At that time, I was married and had 6 children; the people of the Right took me in. To be more exact, Carlos Aston, who is today the Consul General of Chile in South Africa.

They hid me, they fed me, because I found myself practically at the final consequences; the last thing I lacked was to shoot myself. Then came the military pronouncement. I was taken to the Estadio Nacional (2) to identify people.

I did it voluntarily at that time because I had a spirit of revenge toward those who had been my former comrades due to the persecution I had been subjected to by them. I am the hooded man of the Estadio Nacional.

The security services hooded me and paraded me through the different sections where the detainees were. I identified quite a few people. Many of them died, and I am responsible for their deaths for the sole fact of having identified them and having accused them of being my former comrades, whether as members of the Central Committee or as members of the Party's security apparatus.

Later, I was asked to go out into the street with some groups of soldiers to identify people in the plazas. Unfortunately, I ran into the case of... I did not want to identify him... and for the sole fact of lying, I was imprisoned for three months.

I was given the same treatment as the detainees; that is, it was not taken into account that I no longer belonged to the Party and that I was no longer involved in anything. Afterward, I was released on the condition of cooperating; I was taken to Colonia Dignidad, in the interior of Parral, more or less about 40 km away.

There, a National Intelligence training center operates, run by Germans who are naturalized Chileans. They are old Germans who fled the war. They arrived here very young. They are of Jewish descent (3) and have a true set of regulations in Colonia Dignidad, where there is a hospital that has all the advancements that any of the hospitals in Santiago would want, where there are ambulance planes and mail planes, and underground prisons.

There, I was trained to interrogate people and perform counterintelligence tasks. Let me explain: I was asked to rejoin the Party's underground to pretend to be one of them. Unfortunately—I say fortunately—I could not do this because I was very "burned" (4).

Everyone knew that I had left, so it did not have an effect. Subsequently, I have been used in the task of hunting people, interrogating them, torturing them, and killing them. My direct boss in this case was the current Director of Civil Affairs of the Government Junta, Alvaro Puga Cox, with the coordinator of Channel 9 TV of the Universidad de Chile, Jorge Schilling Rojas, a law student at the University.

The other is the personnel chief of the newspaper El Cronista, whose surname is Zalaquett. The other is the area chief, the national coordinator of the Internal Revenue Service, Anibal Maturana Contreras, a relative of General Contreras of the DINA.

It is generally believed that the DINA is the only organization that forcibly disappears prisoners. This is not accurate. There are 7 intelligence services operating in this country. The largest of them is undoubtedly the DINA, where 70 or 80% of its components are, mostly military and Carabineros.

The other 20% are some civilians, sailors, and aviators. These last two participate little, because they give more importance to their own intelligence services. Furthermore, there are 5 counterintelligence services with clandestine apparatuses such as SICAR, DINE, DIGET, and the police information department.

I have worked with all of them, without exception. I recognize that when I started, I did it out of revenge, with hatred and with the joy of helping to take revenge, but later, due to the situation in which I lived and what I had to do, I reacted and tried on repeated occasions to leave, which has not been possible for me, because one enters but does not leave...

The purpose of this report is not to seek forgiveness or reconciliation with myself, because what I have done, honestly, has no name; I myself do not recognize myself now; I cannot explain how I could reach such incredible limits.

But in my defense, I say that it is very difficult when one has no support and when the intelligence services overwhelm one, to free oneself from them. I have participated in the disappearance of some people who are in Colonia Dignidad.

There are 112 people at this moment in Colonia Dignidad. Some are former leaders of the different UP parties. In Santiago, here in Peñalolén, in Colina, is the rest. There are around 145. The rest are all dead.

They were discharged in Peldehue by the DINA execution apparatus commanded by Fernando Cruzat; it has its headquarters at 312 Ahumada, 6th floor. It is a gold buying and selling shop. 90% of the gold buying and selling shops that exist in downtown Santiago are property of the DINA.

The engraving workshops and where they make keys belong to the DINA; I can give some examples. 1061 Moneda; 121 Bandera; others are not relevant because these are the most important. It is there where a man is detained in the center.

It is there where he is preventively detained and later taken out in an ambulance heading toward Tobalaba, to Camp 4, not to Cuatro Alamos (7) because everyone knows Tres Alamos and Cuatro Alamos. There are 6 places of detention, and I have already named some for you, and the other most important thing is that they use aliases.

When a man is detained, for example when he falls prisoner, for example, I will give my name; I fall, Juan Muñoz Alarcón; they make an alias; they name him Francisco López Aguirre, and that is why when a writ of amparo is filed, the name is never located, but the man is actually detained.

They burn all his real documentation and give him the alias. In some cases, some appear to be leaving the country. Of course, they left the country; they have been taken to Argentina and returned by plane.

Other times, when the man has refused to collaborate—I want to establish this well because inside, we all collaborate, Moors and Christians, very clearly—they make a DINA alias for a man, and he leaves with official documentation of that man.

His departure from the country is officially registered, and subsequently, he is executed. Really, I had been preparing to make this statement, but I am a little nervous because I know what this is for me; I am dead on one of the two sides.

I am very clear about that. That is why I do not ask for help or protection from anyone. Because the ones who were my former comrades will kill me to take revenge on me, just as these other people will, because when one is no longer useful, it is better to leave the witnesses silenced than talking.

It is much safer. Regarding the actual operation of the system: they are captured in Santiago, they are taken to Tobalaba, next to Grimaldi (8) there is a fairly large house where they are detained. It is called Dignidad; in Dignidad, there is a radio with which one can connect in seconds with any place in the world; it is the central receiver of all the information of the DINA's external apparatus.

At this moment, in Venezuela, Colombia, France, Sweden, Italy, 50% of the DINA is working; that is to say, the officers of the permanent cadre, not civilian personnel. The civilian personnel are replacing these people in the country.

And from where and from whom do these groups depend? Cruzat was the one who assaulted the Confederation of Fiscal Employees (9) ANEF, with Group 1 of 121 Bandera. I want to give a piece of information regarding Fernando Cruzat.

He is the stepbrother of Captain Jorge Zuchino (10), head of the labor apparatus of the Tacna regiment, second department, who is the one in charge of all the industries of greater Santiago and its surroundings.

Said organization is prepared to persecute, disappear, fire, and terrorize all workers in general, seconded by the personnel chief of the metallurgical industry ASA, Ivonne Rios Talledo, a social worker, and by the personnel manager of CINTAC, Carmen Smith; both manage this system.

This labor apparatus maintains a true army of snitches, which allows the intelligence services to detain, interrogate, torture, and, as I have reiterated several times, kill these people for committing or demonstrating discontent toward the government.

It is enough to say one word against the government for the man to lose his job. The most impressive thing about all this, and to try to have justice return to this country, is to say clearly that this government has surpassed all possible limits of legality; it is a totally illegal government.

There exists at this moment in this country a death squad, commanded by Captain Rolando Larenas, an artillery officer, so that you can locate him later. This man maintains contact with the Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan intelligence services, who act indiscriminately within the country. 50% of the vehicles with Argentine license plates that enter through the various crossings enter as tourists, being in reality vehicles of Argentine intelligence, which work in teams with our intelligence services.

The work of these services is to hunt the man abroad and bring him here, and here it ends; prisoners are exchanged; everything is permitted and endorsed by the President of the Republic, who is the direct head of all this matter because the head of the DINA answers directly to him.

The Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Justice have no interference over these services. Another man I was forgetting and who is very important is Daniel Galleguillos, husband of Silvia Pinto; both are in charge of the CIA in this country.

Who directs them is James Jahn Bleayton, of the American Embassy, and the Chilean secretary of the Ambassador, Sheila Fortnacon. An immediate collaborator who is a former socialist like me, who has all the confidence of the PS at this moment and who is a traitor, is named Hugo Vicencio.

He is responsible for the fall of Exequiel Ponce and all those who have fallen lately. That is, in broad strokes, my report... the consequences do not matter; I am willing, as I declared, in this form for my own safety because I am threatened with death and I know that I am going to die sooner or later.

I am not going to die from a bullet, because they are not that stupid, but I am going to suffer a heart attack or I am going to slip when I am waiting for a bus or I am going to fall anywhere; one does not only die from a bullet.

As a security measure, I repeat, so that it can be used for the benefit of so many people who are suffering, for whom I am responsible—not directly, if you will, but responsible in the end—and I do it to clarify the truth.

I am willing to go to the courts or wherever it is necessary to report and ratify all these things. Everything previously stated, I say in full use of my faculties, because I have never been a sick man of anything, except for some colds, and without pressure of any kind, voluntarily, because I believe that this is needed at this moment.

I believe the conditions are given to face the monster that is the DINA. I also want to leave on record, to swear if it is necessary, that part of the prisoners are alive, in poor physical condition, but many of them on the verge of madness due to the treatment they have undergone, which is very harsh.

I refer in particular to Carlos Lorca, to Ponce, head of the internal Front of the PS and SG at the time of his detention. They are in Colonia Dignidad, Second pavilion. I also want to refer to Tolosa of the Communist Youth (JJCC) and the CC (Central Committee), who has denounced half the world, but I also want to leave and say in his favor that he was terribly and barbarically tortured.

There is a yellow magazine, with my own handwriting I marked, there are some numbers and some names, I marked those who are alive and those who are dead; those who are alive are no more than 150 people, I said the exact number before, they are one hundred and forty-something people.

These people are imprisoned with this name in the official file, but the file that the DINA has located on Vicuña Mackenna street, the file that the Joint Staff of the Armed Forces has, they all appear with aliases without exception.

In the place of detention itself, they appear with their name and with the aliases... because here you have a witness who interrogated them, saw them, and has a witness of their stay in Colonia Dignidad; the witness I am not going to name now... but when the time comes, it will be useful for something.

These people, up to the moment, have no guarantee of leaving alive; I believe they are not going to leave alive, really, because from the moment their detention is denied, it is because they were important men within the underground, and at these moments they are kept alive to use them, to bring down the rest.

The established places, I repeat it, and from there the evil must be attacked: Colonia Dignidad, Colina, and Peñalolén. In no other place will you find forcibly disappeared persons. Occasional detainees can be found in many places, but the disappeared are in those three fixed places.

The women are in San José de Maipo, where the lung patients are—incredible, but an excellent place to hide people. Undoubtedly, in these last days or in these last months, more people have fallen, but some of them are alive, as is the case of Contreras Maluje.

Just as the Supreme Court ordered the immediate release of this gentleman... The only service that hides and takes prisoners away from the DINA is the counterintelligence apparatus of the FACH, which destroyed the MIR almost totally, helped by the famous Commander Raúl, whose real name is Raúl Romo.

That would be practically everything I would have to say and ratify that I am willing to do it in a legal form, before a notary, before the courts, for the good and so that the injustice in this country ends, and that when a citizen goes out to the street, he goes out with the tranquility that he is walking through a free country and not with the fear and terror that are stalking him on the block or on the corner because a neighbor accused him of being a communist or socialist.

I am at your disposal, whenever you want and in any situation, and if later I can be useful to you, count on me unconditionally. I do not ask for anything, nor do I want anything, and let no one stand up for me, because we must take responsibility for what we do and face the consequences when the time comes.

If there is any pressure against me, it is from the government. I have done all this voluntarily, without pressure, and I am left with a very clear conscience because I am telling the truth. General note: The words placed in parentheses do not appear in the statement and were added in order to clarify some detail. 1) This statement was made approximately in June 1977.

In the month of August of that same year, Mr. Muñoz was murdered, a fact widely publicized by the press as a merely police case despite the evident traces of torture that the corpse presented. 2) The Estadio Nacional was the first concentration camp established by the Pinochet government in September 1973. 3) All information available about Colonia Dignidad has been published in an Amnesty International report. (4) "Burned," in this case, means that the activity of being an informant is very well known by the opponents of the dictatorship.

7) Refers to the Cuatro Alamos concentration camp.

8) Refers to the torture center called Villa Grimaldi.

9) Refers to the ANEF - National Association of Fiscal Employees, whose central office was assaulted by the DINA.

10) It is probable that the spelling of this surname is different.

Source: Vicaria de la Solidaridad, June 1977

The Hooded Man of the Estadio Nacional

The man in the ski mask.

In June 1977, a young man appeared at the Vicaria de la Solidaridad in Santiago de Chile who wanted, he said, to make a confession: and he wanted it to be recorded, as a testimony for the future. The Vicaria de la Solidaridad was created by the archbishop to help the victims of the coup d'état and their families: poorly tolerated, therefore, by the Government Junta.

The suspicion that that man was the instrument of a provocation was more than legitimate. He was consequently rejected. He appeared again and was rejected again. When he returned for the third time, perhaps considering that a true provocateur would not have insisted so desperately, it was accepted to record his confession.

Thus, the most frightening figure of the days of the coup d'état and the repression had an identity—name, history, and, very shortly after, destiny: it seemed like an evocation of the times of the Inquisition: atrocious hallucination, atrocious symbol.

The man with the hidden face, the man in the ski mask. The one who, without saying a word, only with a gesture of his hand, chose from among the prisoners crowded into the Estadio Nacional whom to send to torture and death.

One of the released remembers: "The sinister character, escorted by soldiers, reviewed thousands of prisoners. Despite his insignificant stature, his new and tacky clothes, and his insecure step, the man in the ski mask imposed himself on everyone as a phantasmagoric presence and imposed a silence full of panic on the stands...

We looked at him with anxiety... Some turned their heads to avoid being identified or tried to sneak toward the restrooms. Any one of us could find ourselves before the index finger of the man in the ski mask: in a tension that reached paroxysm, the drama of a people imprisoned in the face of torture and betrayal found expression.

This denunciation gave us a kind of vertigo. Was it a traitor or someone who had always been our enemy? From what party was he, from what social condition had he come, how had he managed to be among us without us discovering him?

The man approached, stopped, continued the search: sometimes he went back to better recognize someone. His eyes, those hollows rimmed with black from the ski mask, crossed with terrified gazes, questioning gazes, intrepid gazes.

He walked slowly and slowly chose the victims: a gesture of his hand was enough..." A gesture of his hand was enough—or at least that is what he had believed, as the prisoners crowded into the Estadio Nacional had believed—to give torture and death; and here he is now, already without that power, trying to put himself, miserably, ignobly, on the side of the victims: in front of a tape recorder and, presumably, in front of a priest.

Estadio Nacional of Santiago "My name is Juan René Muñoz Alarcón, identity card 4824557/9. I am thirty-two years old, I am married, and I live at 331 Sargento Menadier Street, in Puente Alto, Población Maipo.

I am a former leader of the Partido Socialista, a former member of the Central Committee of the Juventud Socialista, a former national leader of the CUT (Central Única de Trabajadores). I belonged to the Copper Workers' Confederation...

The man in the ski mask of the Estadio Nacional is me." Thus begins the confession. But he suddenly falls into reticence regarding the reasons that had decided him to leave the Partido Socialista, four or five months before the military coup d'état: "I did not agree on certain things"; and, without further ado, he is ambiguous when speaking of the persecutions he was subjected to by the Partido Socialista.

He says: "they burned my house, I have lost my family." If we understand it literally, it seems that his family (wife and six children) died in the fire of the house. But shortly before, he has said that he was married and not a widower: it gives the feeling that he was speaking figuratively, metaphorically, of an economic ruin that caused the family disintegration (in Sicily, for example, the expression "bruciare la casa," to burn the house, also means economic ruin: it is not infrequent the nickname of "ardicasa," house-burner, to whom, due to excessive prodigality, destroys his own family).

And, on the other hand, if he had really lived through such a tragedy—the house burned, the family dead—he would have stopped to tell it with more details and more obsessively. We accept that his former comrades persecuted him; but it is not credible that the persecution was unleashed for not agreeing on "certain things" and for his departure from the party.

Instead, it is possible that they had suspected or discovered that he was a confidant of the right or had accused him—perhaps unjustly—of some irregularity or embezzlement. Be that as it may, from the persecution, he found protection on the right. "Men of the right," he says, "hid me and fed me." And he had to pay his debts.

But he paid them with joy, shortly after the pronouncement. A joy not entirely extinguished at the time of the confession: "There were not few people I recognized. And of the many who are already dead, I am responsible for their death, for the sole fact of having recognized them." And it would be adventurous, perhaps even unjust, to discover in this phrase a certain pleasure, a satisfaction, if in the context of the confession other details had not made us think that Muñoz Alarcón had not made a true and sincere confession, but once again a gesture of revenge: as yesterday against his former comrades, today against his former protectors. A confession implies a radical repentance, a radical repugnance toward the actions committed, toward the past, toward oneself in the past: and Muñoz Alarcón does not see in that past more than incidents, facts that fortuitously rebel to disturb his career as an informant. He is, in short, a "repentant" just as today in Italy it is customary to call the one who breaks a criminal solidarity and gives names of accomplices and bosses. But let's go in order. Interior of the Stadium To his protectors, turned into masters, it was not enough that he carried out a funereal task in the Estadio Nacional: "They sent me later to go out through the streets, with military patrols, in order to recognize people. Unfortunately, I ran into Miguel Plaza. Thanks to me, he is still alive: I did not want to recognize him. But, unfortunately, they had a photograph in which he and I were together..." Unfortunately, by misfortune: without that incident, if at least they had forgiven him the only sin of having wanted to leave his friend Miguel Plaza alive, Muñoz Alarcón would not be now in the Vicaria accusing the Military Junta. But they did not forgive him: "for the fact of having lied, they kept me for three months in prison, treating me like the other detainees: that is, they did not take into account that I no longer belonged to the (socialist) Party and that I was not mixed up in anything." In anything, that is, that he was not one of the defeated, tortured, murdered. They released him on the condition that he would collaborate again. He accepted. They took him to Colonia Dignidad, where there was a highly efficient training center, directed by Germans, for the, let's say, political police: everything modern that can be imagined, including underground prisons. And here Muñoz Alarcón falls into a significant confusion: speaking of the German instructors, he calls them Hebrews who took refuge in Chile during the war. Undoubtedly due to ignorance; but it is a confusion in which he gives symbolic projection of himself, persecutor and persecuted, executioner and victim. In Colonia Dignidad, they taught him how to interrogate prisoners, as well as the art of infiltrating clandestine groups opposed to the regime. Only that Muñoz Alarcón could not put this art into practice: "Unfortunately... No, I mean: fortunately, this I could not do... Everyone knew that I had left the Party." For the first time, he realizes that a truly repentant man cannot call a misfortune what has led him to repentance, to confession. "Later," he continues, "they assigned me the task of hunting people, interrogating them, torturing them, murdering them." A task that he fulfilled, one must believe, with sufficient scruples: without unfortunate incidents like that of not recognizing the friend and without arousing distrust in his masters, although he entered and left the Vicaria three times. If they had watched him, he would not have survived the first visit. Just as he did not survive the third. If at a certain moment he had a revelation of his own misery, of his own guilt, of the need to confess and expiate them, his victims might have noticed it, but his masters absolutely did not. The confession continues with precise and detailed accusations against the five secret police forces of the regime, against their bosses. He reveals the technique by which people who have instead been murdered in prisons are expatriated, fled into exile (police agents make trips abroad with the documents of the dead, return to Chile with their own). He describes, in short, the entire apparatus and functioning of a system in which one passes, irremediably, from torture to abjection or death. "I want," he says at one point, "for this to be clear: in there everyone, without exception, collaborates"; and he tells the case of one from the Communist Youth, from the central committee, who revealed a good number of things and names: "but it must be said that he was frightfully and savagely tortured." Detentions in the street As for himself, he sees no salvation: he considers himself dead, and death can come to him as much from his former comrades as from the regime. Surely more from the regime: because, if his former comrades would only consummate a revenge, the regime has every interest in silencing a witness who asks for nothing, who wants nothing, who wants only to assume "the responsibility for what he has done and face, when the time comes, the consequences." But that moment, which perhaps he believed was close, neither he saw nor do we glimpse yet. On October 24, four months after the confession, the corpse of Muñoz Alarcón was found in La Florida, on the outskirts of the capital. He had received seventeen stab wounds. The recording of the confession, sent by the Vicaria to the judiciary, gave rise—according to Pinochet's newspapers—to an investigation that lasted six months in Colonia Dignidad. Such a long investigation ended, naturally, in a dismissal. But what impresses us most about this case, about this confession, is not the complexity of the character nor the gravity of the revelations: it is the image of the man in the ski mask in his ferocious, tremendous gratuitousness. Because the fact is this: just as bloodily gratuitous, bloodily useless, was the military uprising—the Allende government would have inevitably fallen a few months later—so too was atrociously gratuitous, atrociously useless, the appearance of the man in the ski mask in the stadium of Santiago, in the streets. Gratuitous but atrocious. Useless but atrocious. It is enough to think about it for a moment: the men who were crowded into the stadium had been arrested in their homes, known by their names, their positions, for what they had done or for what it was feared they could do. Was there a need for someone to recognize them, to point them out? And in the same way the men in the streets: so much so that as soon as Muñoz Alarcón pretends to be mistaken about one, not to recognize him, a harsh punishment falls on him immediately. So? So, here is the most frightening, most inhuman fact than prison, torture, the firing squad: they wanted, with the man in the ski mask, to create an indelible, obsessive image of terror. The terror of the faceless denunciation, of the nameless betrayal. They wanted deliberately and with macabre wisdom to evoke the ghost of the Inquisition, of every inquisition, of the eternal and every day more refined inquisition. by Leonardo Sciascia

Source: elporteno.cl, December 31, 2017

The footprint of the "Hooded Man of the Estadio Nacional": the man who denounced his friends so they would be tortured

After the Coup d'État, there was a man whom they forced to denounce his comrades, using a hood and sowing terror in the Estadio Nacional. Years later he confessed, and only months later he was murdered.

Now they ask to remember him as a guarantee of "never again." Screaming in the Estadio Nacional between September 12 and November 9, 1973, had nothing to do with celebrating sports triumphs. Most of the howls were of pain and anguish: the venue became a prison where torture took place.

It is not known precisely how many people passed through there. The majority were militants in a left-wing party, although there were also union leaders, social leaders, or simply relatives of any of the previous groups.

There is talk of 40,000, but there are those who say that that number falls short. Be that as it may, of all of them, there was one case that to this day shakes society: that of Juan René Muñoz Alarcón, "the hooded man of the Estadio Nacional." History A former militant of the Partido Socialista (PS), Muñoz resigned a few months before the Coup from both the party and the leadership of the CUT "because I did not agree with certain things." However, with the National Stadium turned into a concentration camp, the military remembered him and took him there to denounce his former comrades. "The security services hooded me and paraded me through the different sections where the detainees were. I recognized quite a few people. Many of them died, and I am responsible for the sole fact of having recognized them and having accused them of being my former comrades," he recounted years later in his confession. Why did he do it? Out of "a spirit of revenge," according to him. Confession By June 1977, this story weighed on him. He approached the Vicaria de la Solidaridad to give his version, to acknowledge his authorship of the facts, and also to report that they made him walk through the street to continue denouncing, but he could no longer do it. "I know that I am going to die sooner or later; I am not going to die from a bullet, because they are not that stupid, but I am going to suffer a heart attack or I am going to slip when I am waiting for a bus or I am going to fall anywhere," he announced. Death And so it was. The press indicated that on October 21 of that year, a person murdered by stabbing was found in La Florida, and the main thesis was a brawl. Nearly 40,000 people were taken as prisoners to the Estadio Nacional The vision of the media of the time is criticized by Alberto "Gato" Gamboa, National Journalism Award 2018 and one of the prisoners of the Estadio Nacional. "They never reported it straight. They gave it little attention," he points out. That is why it is not surprising that it was not said that the last time he was seen alive was when he boarded a car together with two people who looked like civilian police. Moreover, just like those he denounced, today he is also considered a victim of crimes against humanity. Victim? "He is a victim and a perpetrator. There is no dichotomy there. He is a person who could not resist torture and for that reason collaborated with the torturers," affirms Consuelo Contreras, director of the National Institute of Human Rights. "Personally, I do not criticize him, because you have to be there to know what happens to you. The important thing is that when someone becomes a perpetrator and commits crimes against humanity, the path is repentance and asking for forgiveness from the families of the victims," adds Contreras. Psychological point of view For Isabel Puga, National Director of the College of Psychologists of Chile, it is not possible to make a psychological analysis of this person in particular, but it is possible of the psychological torture to which both he and the prisoners of the Estadio Nacional could have been exposed. "There are different types of people. There are those who do not control the level of resentment due to a lot of anger. Not because of a simple annoyance am I going to denounce my neighbors; that is why perhaps there was something more. Something that usually happens in totalitarian governments and that are vigilant; in fact, in East Germany, something similar also happened: Germans who accused their peers. That has to do with people and with circumstances," specifies Puga. In fact, one of the points that should not be forgotten is the fear that he spread among those who were prisoners. "That this hooded man went and that at random he pointed at someone who was later tortured, that spread the policy of terror: it could happen to anyone." "Psychological torture seeks to undermine the spirit of others so that they destroy themselves and thus say what was wanted to be heard from them. Among them is included, for example, intervening in sleep cycles, hitting, and scaring. It is a policy of terror," adds Puga. In fact, the same "Gato" Gamboa recognizes it. "I remember that they interrogated us at length. Sometimes they made decisions that one had no idea about," he points out when remembering such a dark time of his life. Reparation The Estadio Nacional was enabled as a prisoner facility until November 1973 For reparation, from the psychological point of view, Puga indicates that one of the first things that must be done is "the recognition must be at an institutional level," she reflects. At the same time, from the INDH, Contreras adds that it is also necessary that those who know something about the fate of those who remain disappeared, say it. "People are missing who ask for forgiveness, who say what they know. In this country, there are many people who do not know where their relatives are. Burying the dead is something essential in cultures; even the most primitive ones already performed these ceremonies, and prohibiting a funeral for the families of the victims is to continue torturing them," she specifies. Never again And finally, what remains is never to forget. "It is proven all over the world that the generation of spaces for memory is a guarantee of non-repetition. It is something that makes the gravity of the facts committed incorporated into the country's history as serious facts and that cannot be committed again," she clarifies. In that last line, it is worth mentioning that from 11:45 on this September 11, the Museum of Memory has several activities on the program, including the broadcast of the last speech of the then-President Salvador Allende, which can also be heard through the website www.sintonizaconlamemoria.cl and on the 690 AM signal of Radio Santiago. Film screenings, artistic exhibitions will also be held, and at 20:00, a commemoration for the victims will be held as an exercise in memory. The idea is that never again in Chile will events like these occur. by Jaime Liencura

Source: publimetro.cl, September 11, 2018