It was a hunt. In September 1973, the Carabineros of the Laja Precinct arrested 14 workers from the Paper Mill and the Railways, two high school students, and two teachers, whom they took to the Fundo San Juan where they executed and clandestinely buried them.

All the police officers had been drinking heavily of pisco sent to them by the CMPC, which also provided vehicles for the caravan of death led by the farmer Peter Wilkens. Despite the desperate search by their families, the pact of silence regarding what happened that night was maintained until August of last year.

“Because it was sand, it wasn't difficult to dig. We made a trench 2 to 3 meters long by 1.5 meters deep. Then we took the 19 detainees out of the vehicles. We made some kneel in front of the trench; we left the others standing.

They were in front of us, with their backs to us. I remember very well when the Carabinero Gabriel González argued strongly with Nelson Casanova, because the latter did not want to shoot. It was so intense that I stepped in and told González that if he did anything to Casanova, I would shoot him with the Sig rifle I had in my hand.

The tension was so high. We were all very agitated, but even so, when the officer gave the order, we proceeded to shoot. We all shot, and when I say all, I include Lieutenant Alberto Fernández Michell.

We shot them in the back. Some fell directly into the pit. Others, already dead, we had to push so they would fall, or we grabbed them and threw them into the pit. They were left one on top of the other.

Then we covered them with the same sand and some branches and headed back to Laja. When we arrived at the Precinct, we continued drinking the pisco and the beverages that the lieutenant had brought from the casino of the CMPC paper plant.

Only then did those who remained on guard duty know what had happened. Fernández gave the order to keep silent. Afterward, everything continued as if nothing had happened.”

Corporal 1st Class (ret.) Samuel Vidal Riquelme was the first to break the pact. For 38 years, he kept the secret of what happened in the early hours of September 18, 1973, to the 19 workers whom he and his colleagues from the Laja Precinct had apprehended in that town and San Rosendo during the previous five days, only to put them in a small dungeon, torture them, and then, that night, execute them clandestinely in a forest near the Perales Bridge, at the Fundo San Juan.

The first time Vidal spoke about what happened that night was in 1979, when the Archbishopric of Concepción filed a complaint against the Carabineros of the Precinct and the then-visiting minister of the Court of Appeals of Concepción, José Martínez Gaensly, interviewed him.

But that time he said the same thing as his 15 colleagues from the Laja Precinct: that the prisoners had been taken to the Los Ángeles Regiment. Martínez asked the military personnel of that regiment about the 19 workers, but they claimed they never entered there.

Then he spoke with the Carabineros again. Although they changed their version, they all said the same thing: that they had put them on a bus provided by the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC) and that on the way to Los Ángeles, they had handed them over to a “phantom patrol” of military personnel. That they had lost track of them since then.

Martínez’s inquiries were useful for something: it was learned that the bodies were in a mass grave in the Yumbel Parish Cemetery. They had been taken there in October 1973, without anyone knowing, when they were removed from the hole where they had been buried after a farmer reported to the Yumbel Carabineros that his dogs were gnawing on human remains.

The report with the complaint reached the local Court of Major Quantities, but Judge Corina Mera ordered it to be kept in the safe. It was never investigated.

Without knowing how the bodies had reached the cemetery or who had executed them, the remains were identified and handed over to their families, who had searched for them relentlessly for six years. In March 1980, Martínez declared himself incompetent and referred the records to the Ad Hoc Military Prosecutor's Office of Concepción.

In three months, the case was dismissed, and at the end of 1981, the Supreme Court ratified the dismissal. That was the extent of the justice served.

27 years later, the Association of Relatives of Political Executions (AFEP) and the Law 19.123 Continuation Program of the Ministry of the Interior requested the reopening of the case from the Court of Appeals of Concepción.

After reviewing the records, Minister Carlos Aldana annulled the resolution that had definitively dismissed the accused Carabineros and the ratification of that ruling by the Supreme Court. Thus, the summary and the investigation were reopened under case file 27-2010.

CIPER had access to the statements and documents of that investigation. Among them is the confession of Corporal Samuel Vidal on June 14, 2011, before the Investigative Police (PDI). Since then, details began to emerge one by one about the fate of the 19 workers whom he and his colleagues murdered in the back in the early hours of September 18, 1973.

This is how the capture operations, the execution in an open field, and the support and financing provided for their extermination by an important businessman in the area and especially the local CMPC—a company presided over at that time by former President Jorge Alessandri and whose main shareholder was businessman Eliodoro Matte Ossa—became known.

The oath that the Carabineros of the Laja Precinct made in November 1973 at the Perales Bridge, when their officer in charge, Lieutenant Alberto Fernández Michell, was being reassigned to Antofagasta, had been broken: “That if anyone opened their mouth, they had to be taken out by the colleagues themselves.”

15/9/73: HUNT IN SAN ROSENDO

Railway machinist Luis Alberto Araneda went at noon to the San Rosendo Roundhouse to see if he was on the “schedule.” It was what he did every day when he was not scheduled to travel the previous day. When he arrived, he saw through his thick black-rimmed glasses the paper indicating the itinerary of the trains that would depart that day.

He looked for his name, but it did not appear among those scheduled to travel that Saturday, September 15, 1973. Then he began the walk back to his home in the Quinta Ferroviaria neighborhood.

“Go back to work, the Carabineros are looking for you, for you and Juan Acuña,” his neighbor Eusebio Suárez told him, worried, when he saw him arrive.

But Luis Alberto did not listen to him. He replied that his machine was in the workshop, so he had nothing to do there that day. Besides, if they were looking for him, he had no reason to worry. The day before, he had arrived from a trip to the south, and as soon as he learned that the Carabineros required militants and union leaders to present themselves, Luis Alberto went to the San Rosendo police station.

There, they asked for his details. On a piece of paper, they wrote his name, his RUT, that he was 43 years old, that he was a militant of the Socialist Party (PS), that he presided over the Supply and Price Board (JAP), and that he was a union leader of the Santiago Watt Federation of State Railways.

Afterward, they told him he could leave. Luis Alberto returned home and did not think about it anymore, not even when Eusebio told him the next day on the street that they were looking for him, that just a few minutes earlier a police patrol from Laja had asked about him and that he had told them where he lived.

When he was about to reach his home, his wife saw him coming through the window in his striped gray jacket, brown pants, black shoes, and glasses of the same color. She also saw how six or seven Carabineros with helmets blocked his path, raised their rifles, and aimed at him just as he was about to open the gate.

Luis Alberto froze. She did not think twice and went out screaming at the police to at least let her say goodbye. Luis Alberto, who already had his hands tied behind his back, told her to take the money and his watch from his pocket. She did so. Then she saw them take him away. It was shortly before 4:00 PM. The hunt in San Rosendo had just begun.

Since the patrol commanded by Lieutenant Fernández came from Laja and did not know who they were supposed to detain, Carabinero Sergio Castillo Basaul, from the San Rosendo station, served as their guide.

There was no formal list or arrest warrants: the order that came from the Los Ángeles Police Station was to detain all the leaders of the Popular Unity (UP). If Castillo, who knew them, said that any of the neighbors should be detained, they immediately aimed at them, tied them up, and took them away.

Juan Antonio Acuña, 33 years old, three children, also a machinist and leader of the Railway union, was the next on the list. They went to look for him at his house an hour later, when he was about to sit down to have tea with his family.

The same patrol that had arrived on foot from Laja broke in by force and took him out at gunpoint. Then it was the turn of the employee of the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC), Dagoberto Garfias, 23 years old.

He was followed by Mario Jara (21), who was at home with his mother and grandmother; Raúl Urra (23), who was also at his home; and the director of School 45 of San Rosendo, Óscar Sanhueza (23).

They were all taken to the San Rosendo Plaza, where another detainee was waiting for them: Jorge Zorrilla, a 25-year-old mining worker who worked in Argentina and was spending his vacation in Chile. He, like Luis Alberto Araneda, presented himself voluntarily to the Carabineros.

They immediately arrested him, and when the others arrived, the patrol tied them up and took them on foot across the pedestrian bridge that connected San Rosendo with Laja. On the other side, a bus was waiting for them, one of the many courtesies of the CMPC to the patrol commanded by Lieutenant Fernández Michell, the officer in charge of the Laja Precinct. Once on the bus, they took them away.

11/9/73: THE FIRST ORDERS

Although he was the first to be detained, Lieutenant (ret.) Fernández Michell was the last of the members of the Laja Precinct to testify before the Court. On August 16 of last year, he was arrested in Iquique, where he worked as an instructor at a driving school. And when the next day he broke the pact of silence that he himself proposed after the execution, he started from the beginning:

“I was at my home provided by the CMPC when I received the news of the Military Coup. I had arrived at the Laja Precinct in mid-1973 as a substitute second lieutenant, and since there was no officer, I became the chief.

I was 22 years old. By September 11, I was the police authority, and as soon as I learned of the Coup, while waiting for orders, I called for the mobilization of all Carabineros. That was coordinated by Sub-Officer Major Evaristo Garcés Rubilar and Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos, who were next in command under me.”

“That same morning, I received the order from the Los Ángeles Headquarters to detain all government authorities, sub-delegates, and the mayor. The action was carried out without problems, and after detaining them in our unit, they were transferred to the Los Ángeles Regiment in buses provided by the Paper Mill, because I already had many people in the barracks.

Days later, my superior in Los Ángeles, Commissioner Aroldo Solari Sanhueza, ordered me to begin detaining all the activists in the commune. Since the CMPC had a chemical plant, the activists could take it over and act against us.

That was the information that reached me from military intelligence. One of those days, Army Colonel Alfredo Rehern Pulido arrived to reiterate the order. I ordered Sub-Officers Garcés and Rodríguez to proceed with the personnel to carry out that task, because they knew those people better.”

Since Salvador Allende assumed the presidency in 1970, the CMPC was part of the list of companies that the government intended to expropriate. For this reason, on the same day of the Coup, a patrol commanded by Fernández Michell went to the plant that the Paper Mill had—and still has—in Laja.

It was 4:00 PM when the nearly 300 employees who were leaving their shift encountered Fernández, Garcés, Rodríguez, and other members of the Precinct. They made them form lines. The patrol had in their hands a list that the plant superintendent, Carlos Ferrer, and the personnel chief, Humberto Garrido, had prepared: those were the “activists.”

Those who appeared on the list were separated and taken, beaten and at gunpoint, to the adjacent building, where the company's polyclinic operated. There, they beat them again. Afterward, they put them into CMPC vehicles and took them to the barracks.

All of them were later transferred, in the same bus from the Matte Group company, to Los Ángeles. Among them was Eduardo Cuevas, a maintenance mechanic at the Paper Mill and a MIR militant who voluntarily joined the reconstruction of the scene carried out by Minister Aldana on August 18 of last year.

Before they took him away, Fernández grabbed him and showed him to his coworkers still formed in the line: “Look at him for the last time!” he shouted at them.

After a little more than a year and three months in detention and torture centers, and after passing through a War Council, Eduardo Cuevas was seen again. A “luck” that those who were hunted in the following days did not have.

13 and 14/9/73: THE FALL OF THE STUDENT AND THE WORKERS

The first thing the patrol, which was led that day by Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos, did was go to the Train Station. On the platform, Manuel Becerra was saying goodbye to his mother, his grandmother, his brother, and his cousin.

It was 8:00 AM, and in just a few minutes, the train that would take him back to Curacautín, where he was attending secondary school at the Industrial School, would depart. He was about to board when the Carabineros grabbed him.

Amidst the screams of his relatives, Manuel Becerra was taken out of the station by force, put into the jeep that the CMPC had granted them for their mobility, and taken to the Laja Precinct. It was September 13, 1973. Manuel was 18 years old.

In a matter of minutes, they notified his father, who worked at the Transportes Cóndor offices. As soon as he found out, he asked his boss to speak with the Carabineros and arrange for his release. He went to the Precinct and spoke with the guard on duty, but they told him that they had already registered his detention in the corresponding books.

Later, they would tell his father that they had detained him because “he was a militant with the Miristas.” Manuel had already been detained before, during the campaign for the 1973 parliamentary elections, for painting MIR slogans in Laja along with other friends. The young man remained detained.

The next on the list was Luis Armando Ulloa, 41 years old, married, five children, a militant of the Communist Party (PC) and a lumber worker at the Barraca Burgos in Laja, where they went to look for him.

It was 8:30 AM. Since his eldest son worked with him, the first thing his colleagues did was notify him as soon as he arrived, because just when they took him away, he was not there. He ran to his house and notified his mother, who was still recovering from her last childbirth. They could not do anything to get him out either.

That afternoon, the Carabineros returned to the CMPC. As soon as he stepped outside the plant, Juan de Dios Villarroel was kidnapped by Rodríguez’s patrol. He was 34 years old, had four children, and the misfortune of working at a company that drew up a blacklist with the names of its own employees.

On that same list were his coworkers Jack Gutiérrez, a MAPU militant; Heraldo Muñoz, from the PS; and Federico Riquelme. They were all taken to the Precinct, where the fruit and vegetable merchant and municipal councilman, Alfonso Macaya, who arrived voluntarily after hearing on a local radio station that they were looking for him, joined them.

They let him go the next day, but on September 15, they went to look for him again at his in-laws' house. He never returned.

On September 14, Rodríguez went out to the streets again in the CMPC jeep. He did not have to go far, because he found the two men who joined the group of political detainees that day leaving their work at the paper plant. One was Wilson Muñoz. The other was Fernando Grandón, who at 34 years old already had eight children.

16 and 17/9/73: THE SMALL PRECINCT

Most likely, the Laja Precinct never had as many visitors as it did in those days. By the night of September 15, 1973, in the dungeon of that building at Las Viñas No. 104, which Fernández remembers as “two large temporary structures to which some additions had been made,” there were 17 people detained: to the seven they brought from San Rosendo and the nine they kidnapped in Laja, the director of the CMPC Industrial Union, Jorge Lamana, who presented himself at the Precinct voluntarily, had been added that afternoon.

Since the detentions began, their parents, siblings, and children went to visit them with the authorization of the officer in charge of the facility. Fernando Grandón’s wife arrived the same day he was detained to see him for the first time.

When she saw him, she noticed he was scared but without injuries. Luis Armando Ulloa’s eldest daughter also went to see him, and when she found him in the middle of the group, she realized that his hair had been cut in jagged tufts.

But the worst part was suffered by those from San Rosendo. All of them had bruises, scratches, and dog bites. Jorge Zorrilla, the miner detained during his vacation, told one of the relatives of the detainees that they had also been made to sit on the pica.

On September 16, the last two members of the group arrived in the cell. Juan Carlos Jara, 17 years old, was grabbed by Pedro Rodríguez’s patrol when he was fighting with other youths in the street. Rubén Campos, director of the Consolidada School of Laja, was taken from his house, and from there, he went straight to the dungeon.

Until September 17, visits to the prisoners continued. In the mornings, almost all the relatives arrived with the...

freshly brewed coffee and clean clothes. Later, they were brought lunch, and dinner at night. They were also visited by the parish priest of Laja, Father Félix Eicher, who had naively accompanied some of those who voluntarily presented themselves at the police station so that they could “settle their problems.” And every time they went, they tried to convince the carabineros to release them.

The prisoners told them to stay calm, that they would be out of there soon. On the night before the national holidays, Lieutenant Fernández Michell received an order.

“I was eating dinner in the dining room when Sub-officer Garcés told me that Major Solari, the commissioner of Los Ángeles, was on the phone. He was very upset with me because I had sent many people to the regiment without asking him.

I had done it because of a space issue. I was scared that he was angry, because I had gotten married without my superiors' permission and was expecting my first daughter, so I had to do whatever he told me, otherwise I risked another sanction.

He asked me how many detainees I had in the unit. I told him there were 19 people. He gave me the order to 'eliminate them.' He told me that if I didn't do it, I would have to face the consequences. Then he hung up. I immediately called Garcés and Rodríguez and told them to get the personnel ready.”

18/9/73: MASSACRE IN THE FOREST

The men who followed Fernández in the chain of command made a few calls and in just minutes obtained ropes, wires, shovels, vehicles, and even a remote place where they could carry out the massacre. They had carbines and rifles for all the officers at the station. They also had the alcohol provided by the CMPC. The plan to kill the 19 was already underway.

“When they called us to the barracks, the curfew had already begun. Upon arriving, they gathered us in a room we used as a dining hall and ordered us to drink a large amount of pisco. Almost all the members of the Laja station were there, from Lieutenant Fernández Michell on down.

Those who didn't arrive at the barracks would join us later. After drinking, Lieutenant Fernández told us to take the 19 detainees out of the station's cells. We tied their hands behind their backs with hemp and hay-bale wire, took them outside, and loaded them onto the CMPC bus.

I had to guard the inside of the bus. That is why I had my Sig rifle in my hands. We took the highway toward Los Ángeles. Leading the caravan in a jeep were Fernández, Garcés, and Peter Wilkens, a German farmer from the area.”

Until Corporal Samuel Vidal testified in June 2011, Wilkens' name never appeared in the investigation. After him, Fernández and several carabineros confirmed his participation in the massacre that night.

Before that, it was not known that Garcés had called him, that he had accompanied Fernández in the CMPC jeep leading the caravan, or that after the Perales Bridge, following a curve on the road between Laja and Los Ángeles, it was he who told him to turn right and stop 300 meters further on, in a clearing next to a pine forest.

Since only the carabineros who were there that night and had sworn to silence knew that Wilkens had been there, no one connected the event when, in 1985, a 19-year-old named Arturo Arriagada, with no prior record, entered his estate in Laja, killed his foreman, entered his room, and shot him with a shotgun.

Later, he loaded the bodies into his van and buried them on the side of the road, very close to where they had buried the detainees from Laja and San Rosendo that night.

According to a report published by Contacto when the death penalty was about to be abolished in Chile in 2001, Arriagada was sentenced to life imprisonment and by then, due to his good behavior, had been incorporated into the Work and Education Center (CET) of Concepción.

For his criminal act, the justice system did work. Wilkens, on the other hand, died without anyone questioning him for having been an accomplice and for having guided and observed as a group of police officers executed 19 workers by firing squad on the dawn of September 18, 1973, at the San Juan Estate. A night that 2nd Sergeant (ret.) Pedro Parra remembers very well:

“There were no soldiers or DINA agents; it was just us from the station, except for the three who stayed on guard duty. When we stopped, the truck was very close to some bushes. The night was clear and there was a moon, but the vehicle lights were used anyway.

With the fight between Gabriel González and Nelson Casanova, I finally grasped the weight of what was happening. Everything was already decided. Lieutenant Fernández Michell said nothing; he was just one more of the group.

The detainees were in front of us with their hands tied. I had a Mauser carbine. When Fernández gave the order, we all aimed at the detainees who had been assigned to us. None of them complained or said anything. Then they gave the order to fire. We all did it.”

18/9/73: AFTER THE MASSACRE

The bodies remained underground. The group of carabineros got into the vehicles and returned to the Laja barracks. Everyone remembers that it was a strange moment, that no one dared to say anything. When they arrived, they drank what was left of the pisco they had consumed before leaving.

And right there, they agreed that no one would say anything, that if anyone spoke, they would suffer the same fate as those they had just murdered.

On the morning of that day, Gloria Urra got up early, prepared breakfast, and as on previous days, went to the station to see her brother Raúl. She hoped to meet all the detainees and their families, sit with them, and share the food.

But the cell was empty. Now that they were cleaning it, it looked much larger. Hilda Bravo, the wife of fruit merchant Alfonso Macaya, had not been allowed to see him when he was locked up two days earlier, so that morning she hoped to meet her husband.

But they told her the same thing they told the mothers, wives, brothers, and children of the 19 workers who were there until the night before: that they had been transferred to the Los Ángeles Regiment.

The relatives grouped together and set off to look for them. They did not find them at the Los Ángeles Regiment. They went through the jail, the IANSA gymnasium; nothing. Later, some went to Concepción and asked at the Regional Stadium, at Isla Quiriquina, in Talcahuano; their names did not appear on the prisoner lists.

Days passed and the desperate search was repeated over and over in Chillán, in Linares. It was like that for weeks, for years. Many spent their savings traveling through different cities in the country, searching and asking without answers. They went through Temuco until they reached Santiago. Everything was useless: the 19 had vanished.

Two days after the massacre, Father Félix Eicher accompanied the CMPC worker, Luis Sáez, to Los Ángeles, according to his statement before Judge Carlos Aldana, “so that those in Laja wouldn't do anything to him.” In the previous days, they had raided his house twice looking for him, but had not found him. “Just as Macaya turned himself in, tell your husband to do the same,” Sergeant Rodríguez had allegedly told his wife.

The priest convinced him to turn himself in on September 20, 1973. That same day he was detained. Six years later, when they found the other 19 in the Yumbel cemetery—where they had been taken clandestinely by Fernández and his men—the remains of Luis Sáez appeared at the San Juan Estate.

THE TRIAL OF THE LAJA FIRING SQUAD

Although 38 years had passed, many of the carabineros who worked at the Laja station in September 1973 tried in 2011 to maintain their oath of silence regarding what happened on the dawn of September 18 of that year. 1st Sergeant (ret.) Gabriel González, for example, assured the PDI that he knew nothing about the 19 forcibly disappeared and that he only participated in some arrests.

He said nothing about his fight with Nelson Casanova that dawn just before shooting them in the back. And Casanova himself, who according to testimonies resisted firing, declared: “At that time there was a very good relationship with the CMPC workers, so I had no knowledge that employees of that company had been detained.”

It was the testimonies of those who did decide to confess that allowed the visiting judge Carlos Aldana to issue an arrest warrant in August 2011 for the 14 officials still alive who participated in the arrests and the execution of the workers murdered at the San Juan Estate.

After that, everyone began to talk. On the 18th of that month, Aldana carried out the reconstruction of the scene with all the detainees regarding the chain of events that ended the lives of the 19 workers.

It was a key, dramatic day. After that, there were no more doubts: after four days, the judge prosecuted nine of the carabineros for homicide and one for cover-up. Three others, those who stayed on guard duty that night, were dismissed. Despite the brutality of the crimes, today they are all free.

The following is the list of all the carabineros involved and what happened to them:

1.- Alberto Juan Fernández Michell: Lieutenant (ret.) of Carabineros. He was the officer in charge of the Laja station and the person responsible for executing the orders that came from Los Ángeles. He ordered and participated in the arrests and the execution at the San Juan Estate.

He was called to retire from the institution in 1979, citing “lack of vocation.” He was prosecuted as the perpetrator of homicide. When everyone else obtained provisional release, he remained detained for being the responsible officer. His defense appealed and he was released after paying a bail of $300,000.

2.- Evaristo Garcés Rubilar: He was a Sub-officer of Carabineros and second in command at the Laja station, which is why he played a key role in organizing the arrests and the massacre of the 19 at the San Juan Estate. He obtained the place for the clandestine execution and contacted the German farmer Peter Wilkens. He died on December 25, 1987, at age 60, from a stroke caused by diabetes.

3.- Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos: Sergeant of Carabineros. He was in charge of several of the arrests and had a leading role in managing the execution. He was married and some time after what happened that night, he became part of the DINA. He died on December 22, 2002, at the Dipreca Hospital from metastatic gastric cancer that caused multi-organ failure. He was 64 years old.

4.- Lisandro Alberto Martínez García: 1st Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. Although he initially declared that he had not participated in the massacre because he was working in the station's records office at the time, he ended up accepting his participation: “We all carried rifles and we fired,” he said.

He was prosecuted as the perpetrator of homicide and was released on provisional release with a bail of $300,000.

5.- Luis Antonio León Godoy: 2nd Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. At first, he said that it had been the soldiers who passed by the station and took the 19 detainees. Later he changed his version: “When my sub-officer Garcés gave the order, we all had to fire,” he noted. He was prosecuted as the perpetrator of homicide and was released on provisional release after paying a bail of $300,000.

6.- José Jacinto Otárola Sanhueza: Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. In his statements, he assured that he had not participated and that he was not there on the night of the massacre. But in the reconstruction of the scene, he admitted to having been there.

His function was to be in the CMPC jeep the whole time, lighting up what was happening in front of him. He saw everything, but he did not pull the trigger. He was prosecuted for cover-up of homicide and after paying a bail of $100,000, he obtained his provisional release.

7.- Gerson Nilo Saavedra Reinike: 1st Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. He was one of the first to provide a statement and acknowledge what happened on the dawn of September 18, 1973. That night he joined the caravan when they were about to arrive at the San Juan Estate. He was prosecuted for homicide and obtained his provisional release after paying a bail of $300,000.

8.- Florencio Osvaldo Olivares Dade: 2nd Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. He also acknowledged his participation since September 11, 1973. “They were difficult days, we slept little,” he said. He is one of those prosecuted for homicide and after paying the $300,000 bail, he was released on provisional release.

9.- Pedro del Carmen Parra Utreras: 2nd Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. As soon as he was interrogated, he recounted in detail what happened that night. He was also prosecuted for homicide and has been on provisional release since he paid his $300,000 bail.

10.- Gabriel Washington González Salazar: 1st Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. He was the man who fought before firing, although when it was his turn to testify, he said it had been the soldiers. Later he acknowledged his participation. He was prosecuted for homicide and today he is free.

11.- Samuel Francisco Vidal Riquelme: 1st Corporal (ret.) of Carabineros. He was the first to break the pact of silence. His testimony was key to clarifying what happened to the 19 workers in Laja. He was prosecuted for homicide and also obtained his release after paying the $300,000 bail.

12.- Víctor Manuel Campos Dávila: He belonged to the Carabineros for 30 years. In his first statement, he only said that after September 11, the Laja station moved to CMPC facilities. Later he added that he was there that night and that he fired when ordered to, but that he did not fire at the bodies. He is one of those prosecuted for homicide and today enjoys provisional release.

13.- Nelson Casanova Salgado: 1st Sergeant (ret.) of Carabineros. He had said that he had never participated in an operation to detain CMPC workers, but his participation was proven. Also prosecuted for homicide, today he is free after paying the bail.

14.- Luis Muñoz Cuevas: 1st Corporal (ret.) of Carabineros. Since he stayed on guard duty at the barracks that night, Judge Aldana dismissed him from the investigation.

15.- Anselmo del Carmen San Martín Navarrete: Sub-officer (ret.) of Carabineros. His mission that night was to stop traffic in the hospital area so the caravan could pass. Later he returned to the station and stayed there all night. He is one of the three carabineros who were dismissed.

16.- Juan de Dios Oviedo Riquelme: Sub-officer (ret.) of Carabineros. He also stayed on guard duty at the Laja station that night, so he was dismissed.

17.- Sergio Castillo Basaul: Sub-officer of Carabineros. Although he did not participate in the execution, he had an active role in guiding the arrests in San Rosendo, since he worked in that town and knew its inhabitants. He died on September 16, 2005, from a massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage, esophageal varices, and Laennec's cirrhosis, which is produced by alcoholism.

LUIS SÁEZ: THE 20TH VICTIM

The first time the carabineros from the Laja station went to look for Luis Sáez Espinoza (37 years old) at his home in the Mario Medina neighborhood, it was September 11, 1973, at 10:00. In addition to being an employee at the CMPC, Sáez was a union leader and a member of the MAPU.

For this reason, as soon as he heard about the Coup, he went into hiding. Since he was not there when the carabineros arrived, they raided his house in front of his wife, Rosa Ibaca, and his children. Three hours later, the patrol under the command of Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos returned in the jeep that the Matte Group company had provided them, with helmets and long weapons.

They raided his home again, but this time they took Rosa. Pointing their rifles at her, they took her to some neighbors, and since no one knew where Luis was, they left her there. The next day the scene was repeated.

On September 14, Sergeant Rodríguez arrived again to look for Luis and for the third time, he did not find him. That was the day he gave his wife the message: that he should turn himself in as Alfonso Macaya had done the day before.

Minutes later, some social workers from the company arrived to see how the family was doing and promised to speak with Lieutenant Fernández Michell so they would not raid that house anymore. The children were traumatized.

Six days later, the parish priest of Laja, Félix Eicher, went to speak with the woman. He told her he knew where Luis was and that he wanted to speak with her. The priest took her in his truck. When they met, she told him he had to turn himself in.

Luis was afraid; he knew his life was in danger, that only two days earlier the group of 19 detainees had disappeared without a trace. So that nothing would happen to him, the priest convinced him to go to Los Ángeles and not to the Laja station.

He accepted. That same day, September 20, 1973, shortly before the curfew, they went in the priest's truck to the Los Ángeles Prefecture. Luis got out of the vehicle, presented himself, and was detained there. Father Eicher was a witness.

The next day, the same priest notified Sergeant Rodríguez that Luis had already turned himself in.

Rosa went to leave him clothes and food at the Red Cross office, but they returned everything to her because Luis was not in any detention center. His wife searched for him for years with the help of the priest and the bishop of Los Ángeles, Orozimbo Fuenzalida, but nothing. Nothing more was ever heard of Luis.

The search extended until 1979, when the investigation led by visiting judge José Martínez led to the whereabouts of those executed in Laja and San Rosendo, but not their perpetrators. While the others had been taken to the Yumbel Parish Cemetery, Luis's remains appeared buried clandestinely in the same place where the massacre was carried out, at the San Juan Estate, next to a CMPC pine forest.

He had a bullet hole and was tied with wire.

In the documents to which CIPER had access, Police Report No. 988 of March 15, 2011, is mentioned. According to that document, his direct relatives were asked, but they said that his remains were never returned to them, so Luis Sáez Espinoza is still a forcibly disappeared person.

Source: ciper.cl, January 13, 2012

New president of the Electoral Qualification Court hid information about the Laja Massacre

In 1978, the now-minister of the Supreme Court, Rosa Egnem, admitted that she concealed key information regarding the Laja massacre: the execution of 19 people, perpetrated by civilians and Carabineros.

At the time, she worked at a court in Yumbel, and despite this episode, she continued to rise through the ranks until reaching the highest court. Now, she will add a new distinction: on January 31, she will assume the presidency of the Electoral Qualification Tribunal (TRICEL).

In that position, she will have to oversee the constitutional plebiscite. On January 7, a sentence was handed down for the Laja crimes, 46 years later. Only Carabineros were sentenced, and nothing was said about the role of the executives of the CMPC Laja Plant, an emblematic company of the Matte Group.

One week after the coup d'état, in the early hours of September 18, 1973, 19 men—workers of the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC), railway workers, teachers, and two students—were murdered and surreptitiously buried on a private field in Laja, in the Biobío Region.

For more than 40 years, there was impunity for their perpetrators and whispers about what happened to the victims. A silence that reveals the collusion that existed to hide crimes against humanity between private enterprise, politicians, police, and, certainly, different echelons of the Chilean justice system.

The protection for the murderers and their accomplices reached a milestone just one month after what became known as the Laja and San Rosendo Massacre. In October 1973, a local farmer found the mutilated bodies of some of the victims and reported it to the justice system.

But his report was hidden in a safe and kept under lock and key by the lawyer Rosa Egnem, then secretary to Judge Corina Mera of the Yumbel Court of Greater Quantities.

Rosa Egnem is today a minister of the Supreme Court. Her act of omission and manipulation of judicial records meant that the widows and children of all those murdered continued for six years to search for their loved ones.

In contrast, Egnem, who confessed to her crime in 1978 without receiving any sanction from the Concepción Court of Appeals, went on to become a judge and continued to ascend in her judicial career.

Despite her record, on January 31, Minister Rosa Egnem will assume the presidency of the Electoral Qualification Tribunal, which must oversee the decisive plebiscite on a new Constitution on April 26.

The conviction for the Laja and San Rosendo crimes was just handed down this January 7 by the minister of the Concepción Court of Appeals, Carlos Aldana. Only Carabineros were convicted. Not a word about the leading role that the executives of the Laja Plant of the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC), owned by the Matte Group, had in the qualified homicides.

Just as in the recent multi-million dollar toilet paper collusion fraud organized by the CMPC, its owners will not pay with prison time. The only one who was questioned by the justice system was the businessman Roberto Izquierdo Menéndez, who in September 1973 was the manager of the CMPC, owner of Forestal Mininco, which in turn owned the Fundo San Juan where the bodies of the 19 executed prisoners were illegally buried.

Roberto Izquierdo Menéndez had to acknowledge that he did have knowledge of the Laja and San Rosendo massacre, although today he remembers nothing. He is currently a councilor of the Sofofa and one of the most powerful businessmen in the country.

And his power makes itself felt. From the presidency of Alimar, and despite having been investigated for the illegal payments to politics that he made through the southern fishing association (ASIPES), to which he belongs, and after it was confirmed in the courts and in CIPER that the Fisheries Law voted on by Congress was tailored to the fishing companies and their illegal payments, in January of last year he launched a scathing attack against the government.

Facing the new Fisheries Law that must replace the one obtained through bribes, Izquierdo Menéndez accused "expropriation" and reiterated: "Obviously yes. If the authority changes the conditions, they have to compensate us because they are acquired rights."

Izquierdo Menéndez knows about impunity. Two of his brothers, Diego and Julio Izquierdo Menéndez, participated in the assassination of General René Schneider in October 1970, executed by an extreme right-wing group to prevent Salvador Allende from assuming the presidency.

They were never prosecuted: despite all the judicial evidence demonstrating their participation, they enjoyed the impunity provided to them by the military regime.

THE COLLUSION RULING

Forty-six years had to pass for the families of the victims of Laja and San Rosendo to obtain some justice.

On January 7, the extraordinary visiting minister Carlos Aldana, of the Concepción Court of Appeals, sentenced nine retired Carabineros for their responsibility in 19 crimes of qualified homicide. Only one of them, the former Carabineros officer Alberto Juan Fernández Michell, received a life sentence as the perpetrator of the qualified homicides of: Fernando Grandón Gálvez, Jorge Andrés Lamana Abarzúa, Rubén Antonio Campos López, Juan Carlos Jara Herrera, Raúl Urra Parada, Luis Armando Ulloa Valenzuela, Óscar Omar Sanhueza Contreras, Dagoberto Enrique Garfias Gatica, Luis Alberto del Carmen Araneda Reyes, Juan Antonio Acuña Concha, Juan de Dios Villarroel Espinoza, Heraldo del Carmen Muñoz Muñoz, Federico Riquelme Concha, Jorge Lautaro Zorrilla Rubio, Manuel Mario Becerra Avello, Jack Eduardo Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Mario Jara Jara, Wilson Gamadiel Muñoz Rodríguez, and Alfonso Segundo Macaya.

The story that Minister Aldana began to unravel in 2010, when the reopening of the case that had been dismissed was ordered, began to be written in the early hours of September 11, 1973, when Lieutenant Alberto Fernández Michell ordered the 16 Carabineros of the Laja Station under his command to report to the barracks.

That same day, he received an order from Los Ángeles: to detain all officials and political authorities of the Unidad Popular government.

Why were there a group of workers from the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones (CMPC) plant, whose owner was and is the Matte Group, among the detainees? Because its executives and the main farmers in the area were the ones who ordered the Carabineros on which people to detain and even murder according to lists that were drawn up on September 11 itself or that had been prepared in advance.

A similar situation was repeated in other regions of the country.

A part of the sequence of the Laja and San Rosendo Massacre was reported by CIPER on January 13, 2012, just one year after the trial was reopened due to new evidence provided by the Association of Families of Political Executions of the Biobío Region. Without their action, this crime, like so many others, would remain in impunity. And now it is completed with the recent ruling by Minister Aldana.

9/15/73: HUNT IN SAN ROSENDO

The railway machinist Luis Alberto Araneda went at noon to the San Rosendo Engine House to see if he was on the "schedule." It was what he did every day when he was not scheduled to travel the previous day.

When he arrived, he saw through his thick, black-rimmed glasses the paper indicating the itinerary of the trains that would leave that Saturday, September 15, 1973. He looked for his name, and since it did not appear among those who had to travel, he returned to his home in the Población Quinta Ferroviaria.

– "Go back to work, the Carabineros are looking for you, for you and Juan Acuña," his neighbor Eusebio Suárez told him, worried, when he saw him arrive.

But Luis Alberto replied that his machine was in the workshop, that he had nothing to do there. And that, if they were looking for him, he had no reason to worry: the day before he had arrived from a trip to the south and as soon as he learned that the Carabineros required militants and union leaders to present themselves, Luis Alberto went to the San Rosendo station.

There they asked for his details. On a piece of paper, they wrote his name, his RUT, that he was 43 years old, that he was a militant of the Socialist Party (PS), that he presided over the Supply and Price Board (JAP), and that he was a union leader of the Santiago Watt Federation of State Railways.

Afterward, they told him he could leave. Luis Alberto returned home and did not think about it again, not even when the next day Eusebio told him in the street that just a few minutes earlier a police patrol from Laja had asked about him and that he had told them where he lived.

When he was about to reach his home, his wife saw him coming through the window in his gray striped jacket, brown pants, black shoes, and glasses of the same color. She also saw how six or seven Carabineros with helmets blocked his path and pointed their rifles at him just as he was about to open the gate.

Luis Alberto froze. She did not think twice and ran out, shouting at the police to let her, at least, say goodbye. Luis Alberto, who already had his hands tied behind his back, told her to take the money and his watch from his pocket. She did so and watched as they took him away. It was almost 4:00 PM. The hunt in San Rosendo had just begun.

Since the patrol commanded by Lieutenant Alberto Fernández came from Laja and did not know who they were supposed to detain, the Carabinero Sergio Castillo Basaul, from the San Rosendo station, served as their guide. If Castillo said that any of the neighbors should be detained, they immediately pointed at them, tied them up, and took them away.

Juan Antonio Acuña, 33 years old, three children, also a machinist and railway leader, was the next on the list. They took him at gunpoint from his house, when he was about to sit down to have tea with his family.

Then it was the turn of the CMPC employee, Dagoberto Garfias, 23 years old. He was followed by Mario Jara (21), who was at home with his mother and grandmother; Raúl Urra (23), who was also at his home; and the director of School 45 in San Rosendo, Óscar Sanhueza (23).

They were all taken to the Plaza de San Rosendo, where another detainee was waiting for them: Jorge Zorrilla, a 25-year-old mine worker who worked in Argentina and was spending his vacation in Chile. He, like Luis Alberto Araneda, presented himself voluntarily to the Carabineros.

They immediately arrested him, and when the others arrived, the patrol tied them up and took them on foot across the pedestrian bridge that connected San Rosendo with Laja. On the other side, a minibus was waiting for them, one of the many courtesies of the CMPC to the patrol commanded by Lieutenant Fernández Michell, the officer in charge of the Laja Station.

They put them on the bus and took them away.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PAPER MILL

Since Salvador Allende assumed the presidency in 1970, the company that held the monopoly on paper production in Chile, the CMPC, was on the list of more than one hundred companies that the government intended to nationalize.

The battle to prevent its expropriation involved all business associations and the right wing of the country, and marked a milestone. Its board of directors was headed by former president Jorge Alessandri and its main shareholder Eliodoro Matte Ossa (in 1976 he was succeeded by his son, Eliodoro Matte Larraín), who received such powerful support that it allowed the Matte Group to retain the company.

Because of the importance that the CMPC had for the coup plotters, on September 11 itself, a patrol commanded by Lieutenant Fernández Michell arrived at the paper mill in Laja. It was 4:00 PM when the nearly 300 employees leaving their shift encountered Fernández, the two non-commissioned officers who seconded him—Evaristo Garcés Rubilar and Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos—and other Carabineros from the Laja Station.

They made them form lines. The patrol had a list that the plant superintendent Carlos Ferrer and the personnel chief Humberto Garrido had prepared: the "activists."

Those who appeared on the payroll were separated and taken with blows and rifles pointed at them to the adjacent building, where the company clinic operated. There they were beaten again before being loaded into CMPC vehicles and transported to the station and to Los Ángeles.

In the group was Eduardo Cuevas, a maintenance mechanic at the paper mill and a militant of the MIR. Before they took him away, Lieutenant Fernández grabbed him and showed him to his coworkers still formed in the line: "Look at him for the last time!" he shouted at them. That is how Cuevas himself remembered it in the reconstruction of the scene ordered by Minister Aldana on August 18, 2011.

After more than a year and three months in detention and torture centers, and after passing through a War Council, Eduardo Cuevas returned to life. Those who were hunted in the following days would follow a very different path.

9/13 and 9/14/73: THE FALL OF THE STUDENT AND THE WORKERS

The first thing the patrol led that day by Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos did was to go to the Train Station. On the platform, Manuel Becerra was saying goodbye to his mother, his grandmother, his brother, and his cousin.

It was 8:00 AM and in just minutes the train would leave that would take him back to Curacautín, where he was attending high school at the Industrial School. He was about to board when the Carabineros grabbed him.

Amidst the screams of his relatives, Manuel Becerra was taken away with blows from the station, they put him in the jeep that the CMPC executives had given them for their transport, and they took him to the Laja Station. It was September 13, 1973. Manuel was 18 years old.

In a matter of minutes, they notified his father, who worked at Transportes Cóndor. He asked his boss to speak with the Carabineros and arrange for his son's release, and then went to the station himself.

There he spoke with the guard on duty. They told him that they had already registered his detention in the corresponding books. Later they would tell him that his son had been detained because he "militated with the MIRistas." Manuel had already been detained during the 1973 parliamentary election campaign for painting MIR slogans in Laja with some friends.

The next on the list was Luis Armando Ulloa, 41 years old, married, five children, a militant of the Communist Party (PC) and a lumber worker at the Barraca Burgos in Laja, where they went to look for him.

It was 8:30 AM. Since his eldest son worked with him, the first thing his coworkers did was notify him, because just when they took him away he was not there. He ran to his house and notified his mother, still recovering from her last childbirth. They could not do anything to get him out of the station either.

That afternoon, the Carabineros returned to the CMPC. As soon as Juan de Dios Villarroel set foot outside the plant, he was kidnapped by Rodríguez's patrol. He was 34 years old, had four children, and had the misfortune of working for a company that drew up a blacklist with the names of its own employees.

On that same list were his coworkers Jack Gutiérrez, a MAPU militant; Heraldo Muñoz, from the PS; and Federico Riquelme. They were all taken to the Laja Station, where the fruit and vegetable merchant and municipal councilor, Alfonso Macaya, who arrived voluntarily after hearing on a local radio that they were looking for him, joined them.

They let him go the next day, but on September 15 they arrived again to detain him, this time at his in-laws' house. He never returned.

On September 14, Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos went out again to the streets in the CMPC jeep. He did not have to go far, because at the exit of the paper mill, just as they were leaving their workday, he detained the two men he was looking for: Wilson Muñoz and Fernando Grandón, who at 34 years old already had eight children.

9/16 and 9/17/73: THE SMALL STATION

It is very likely that the Laja Station had never been as visited as it was in those days. Parents, wives, brothers, and children of the detainees arrived to see them with the authorization of the officer in charge.

Fernando Grandón's wife arrived the same day he was detained to see him for the first time. She saw him scared, but without injuries. Luis Armando Ulloa's eldest daughter also went to see him and realized that his hair had been cut with scissors.

But the worst part was suffered by those from San Rosendo: everyone had bruises, scratches, and dog bites. Jorge Zorrilla, the miner detained during his vacation, told one of the relatives of the detainees that they had also been made to sit on the "pica" (a torture device).

By the night of September 15, 1973, in the cell of that makeshift construction at Las Viñas No. 104, there were 17 people detained: to the seven they brought from San Rosendo and the nine they kidnapped in Laja, the director of the CMPC Industrial Union, Jorge Lamana, who presented himself voluntarily, was added that afternoon.

On September 16, the last two members of the group arrived at the cell. Juan Carlos Jara (17 years old) was grabbed by Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez's patrol when he was fighting with other young people in the street. Rubén Campos, director of the Consolidada School in Laja, was taken from his house.

Until September 17, visits to the prisoners continued. In the mornings, almost all the relatives arrived with breakfast and clean clothes. Later they brought them lunch and at night dinner. The parish priest of Laja, Father Félix Eicher, also visited them, who naively accompanied some of those who presented themselves voluntarily to the Station so that they could "fix their problems." And every time he went, he told the prisoners to be calm, that they would soon be out of there.

On the night of the eve of the national holidays, Lieutenant Fernández Michell received an order. Thirty-eight years later, he would confess to a court part of what happened that night:

"I was having dinner in the dining room when non-commissioned officer Garcés told me that Major Solari, the commissioner of Los Ángeles, was on the phone. He was very upset with me because I had sent many people to the regiment without asking him.

I had done it because of a space issue. It scared me that he was angry, because I had gotten married without permission from my superiors and was expecting my first daughter, so I had to do whatever he told me, otherwise I risked another sanction.

He asked me how many detainees I had in the unit. I told him 19 people. He gave me the order to 'eliminate them.' He told me that if I didn't do it, I would have to face the consequences. Then he hung up. I immediately called Garcés and Rodríguez and told them to get the personnel ready."

9/18/73: MASSACRE IN THE FOREST

The two police officers who followed Fernández in the chain of command made a few calls and in just minutes they obtained ropes, wires, shovels, vehicles, and even a remote place to carry out the massacre. They had carbines and rifles for all the station's personnel. Also the alcohol. Everything was provided by the CMPC. The plan to murder the 19 was already underway.

It would be one of the Carabineros who participated in the massacre and who kept silent for 38 years who would be the first to break the oath of silence sworn on September 18, 1973. Samuel Vidal gathered his courage:

"When they called us to the barracks, the curfew had already begun. Upon arriving, they gathered us in a room we used as a dining room and ordered us to drink pisco in large quantities. Almost all the members of the Laja Station were there, from Lieutenant Fernández Michell downwards.

Those who did not arrive at the barracks would join us later. After drinking, Lieutenant Fernández told us to take the 19 detainees out of the station's cells. We tied their hands behind their backs with hemp and hay bale wire, took them outside, and loaded them onto the CMPC bus.

I had to guard the inside of the bus. That's why I carried my Sig rifle in my hands. We took the road to Los Ángeles. At the front of the caravan went Fernández, Garcés, and Peter Wilkens, a German farmer from the area, in a jeep."

Until Corporal Samuel Vidal testified in June 2011, Wilkens' name never appeared in the investigation. Later, former Lieutenant Fernández and several Carabineros ratified his participation in the massacre that night.

That was how the truth was known: that non-commissioned officer Evaristo Garcés Rubilar called him, that Wilkens accompanied Fernández in the CMPC jeep that led the caravan, and that, after the Perales bridge, after a curve in the road that connects Laja and Los Ángeles, it was Peter Wilkens who told him to turn right and stop 300 meters further on, in a clearing next to a pine forest.

In 1985, Arturo Arriagada, a 19-year-old youth with no criminal record, entered Peter Wilkens' estate in Laja and killed his foreman. Then he entered Wilkens' room and shot him with a shotgun. Afterward, he loaded the bodies into his van and buried them on the side of the road, very close to where, twelve years earlier, they had buried the prisoners from Laja and San Rosendo.

Since only the Carabineros who were there that night and swore silence knew that Wilkens had been there, no one connected the events.

According to a report by Contacto, when the death penalty was about to be abolished in Chile in 2001, Arriagada was sentenced to life imprisonment and by then, due to his good behavior, he had been incorporated into the Center for Education and Work (CET) of Concepción.

For his criminal act, the justice system did work. Wilkens, on the other hand, died without being questioned for having been an accomplice and for having guided and observed how a group of police officers executed 19 workers in the early hours of September 18, 1973, at the Fundo San Juan.

A night that Corporal 1st Class (ret.) Samuel Vidal Riquelme remembered very well on June 14, 2011, when he was the first to break the pact of silence:

"Since it was sand, it wasn't difficult to dig. We made a trench 2 to 3 meters long by 1.5 deep. Then we took the 19 detainees out of the vehicles. We made some kneel in front of the trench; we left the others standing.

They were in front of us, with their backs to us. I remember very well when the Carabinero Gabriel González argued strongly with Nelson Casanova, because the latter did not want to shoot. It was so much that I intervened and told González that if he did anything to Casanova, I would shoot him with the Sig rifle I had in my hand.

The tension was so high. We were all very agitated, but still, when the officer gave the order, we fired. We all fired, including Lieutenant Alberto Fernández Michell. We shot them in the back."

After Vidal, Sergeant 2nd Class (ret.) Pedro Parra also decided to remember and speak:

"There were no soldiers or DINA agents; it was just us from the Station, except for the three who stayed on guard. When we stopped, the truck was..."

very close to some bushes. The night was clear and there was a moon, but we used the vehicle lights anyway. With the fight between Gabriel González and Nelson Casanova, I finally grasped the weight of what was happening.

Everything had already been decided. Lieutenant Fernández Michell said nothing; he was just one more of the group. The detainees were in front of us with their hands tied. I had a Mauser carbine. When Fernández gave the order, we all aimed at the detainees who had been assigned to us.

None of them complained or said anything. They gave the order to fire. We all did it.” Corporal Samuel Vidal continued to recall: “Some fell directly into the pit. Others, already dead, we had to push so they would fall, or we grabbed them and threw them into the pit.

They were left one on top of the other. Then we covered them with the same sand and some branches and headed toward Laja. When we arrived at the police station, we continued drinking the pisco and sodas that the lieutenant had brought from the CMPC paper mill canteen.

Only then did those who remained on guard duty know what had happened. Fernández gave the order to keep silent. Afterward, everything continued as if nothing had happened.” Days later, Carabineros officers returned to the area to cover the bodies with lime, the kind used at the CMPC plant, which had allegedly been provided to the police by employees of the same company.

This was established by Judge Carlos Aldana in his ruling.

18/9/73: AFTER THE MASSACRE

On the morning of that September 18, Gloria Urra got up early, prepared breakfast, and went to the Laja police station to see her brother Raúl. But the cell was empty. Now that they were cleaning it, it looked much bigger.

Hilda Bravo, the wife of fruit merchant Alfonso Macaya, had not been allowed to see him when they locked him up two days earlier, so that morning she hoped to finally embrace her husband. But they told her the same thing they told the mothers, wives, brothers, and children of the 19 workers who had been there until the night before: they had been transferred to the Los Ángeles Regiment.

The relatives grouped together and set off to look for them. They did not find them at the Los Ángeles Regiment. They went through the jail and the IANSA gymnasium; nothing. Later, some went to Concepción and asked at the Regional Stadium, on Isla Quiriquina, in Talcahuano; their names did not appear on the prisoner lists.

Days passed and the desperate search was repeated over and over in Chillán, in Linares. It was like that for weeks, for years. Many spent their savings traveling through different cities in the country, searching and asking. They did not get a single answer. They went through Temuco until they reached Santiago. Everything was useless: the 19 had vanished.

THE COMPLICIT ROLE OF ROSA EGNEM

The relatives of the 19 forcibly disappeared prisoners knew nothing of what happened in October 1973, a month after the massacre. When a local farmer notified the Yumbel Carabineros, 20 kilometers from Laja, that his dogs had found human remains, the conspiracy of silence had other actors here.

The report was sent to Judge Corina Mera, of the Yumbel Court of Letters. But since the judge was on medical leave, it was received by the court secretary: the lawyer Rosa Egnem , who in 1979 was accused by the victims' relatives of having kept the report on the illegal burial in the court safe and even later of having erased it, altering judicial records.

But those who were informed of the farmer's discovery were the perpetrators themselves. Because the truth is that, in that same month of October and in complete secrecy, Lieutenant Fernández secretly exhumed the bodies and ordered them buried in the Yumbel Parish Cemetery.

It was in that year, 1979, that the circle of protection for those involved in the Laja and San Rosendo Massacre was deployed once again. Because the pressure from the relatives of the 19, with the support of the Archbishopric of Concepción, which in 1979 filed a criminal complaint against the Carabineros of the Laja police station, opened a door.

The Court of Concepción appointed José Martínez Gaensly as a visiting judge. It would be the first time that Corporal Samuel Vidal would be compelled to remember what happened on the night of September 18, 1973.

Vidal declared the same thing as his 15 colleagues from the Laja police station: the prisoners had been taken to the Los Ángeles Regiment. Judge Martínez asked the military personnel of that regiment about the 19 workers.

They assured him that they never entered there. Then, Judge Martínez did something unusual for the terror that reigned at the time: he questioned the Laja Carabineros again. Although they added details, they all said the same thing: they had been put on a bus provided by the CMPC and on the way to Los Ángeles they were handed over to a “military patrol.” The investigation by Judge José Martínez opened a second door: it became known that the bodies were in a mass grave at the Yumbel Parish Cemetery.

That they had been taken there in October 1973, without anyone knowing, when they were removed from the hole where they had been buried after a farmer reported to the Yumbel Carabineros that his dogs were gnawing on human remains.

The report with the complaint reached the local Court of Letters, where the court secretary, the lawyer Rosa Egnem, hid it in the safe. It was never investigated. Without any branch of the justice system assuming how the 19 bodies had arrived at the cemetery or who had executed them, in 1979 the remains were identified and handed over to their relatives who had searched for them relentlessly for six years.

A new victim would be added to the 19 prisoners: the CMPC worker, Luis Sáez , who had gone missing on September 20 and whose remains appeared at the Fundo San Juan, the very same place where the 19 from Laja and San Rosendo had been illegally buried.

And that was all, because in March 1980, Martínez declared himself incompetent and referred the case files to the Ad Hoc Military Prosecutor's Office of Concepción. In three months, the case was dismissed, and at the end of 1981, the Supreme Court ratified the dismissal.

That was as far as the action of justice went for the 19 murdered in Laja and San Rosendo. Rosa Egnem was appointed judge and continued her path to the top of the judiciary without obstacles; the Carabineros from the station continued their lives without anyone questioning them again.

Roberto Izquierdo Menéndez continued doing business and being a respectable businessman. None of them ever believed that the truth would resurface 27 years after the massacre, thanks to the persistence of the victims' families.

In 2010, the Association of Relatives of Political Executions (AFEP) and the Law 19.123 Continuation Program of the Ministry of the Interior requested the reopening of the case from the Concepción Court of Appeals.

It was then that Judge Carlos Aldana nullified the resolution that definitively dismissed the Carabineros and the ratification of that ruling by the Supreme Court. Thus, the summary and investigation were reopened (Case File 27-2010). The time had come to unravel several mysteries.

OTHER MURDERS

Although he was the first to be detained, Lieutenant (ret.) Fernández Michell was the last of the members of the Laja police station to testify. On August 16, 2011, he was arrested in Iquique, where he worked as an instructor at a driving school.

And when he broke the pact of silence the following day, he started from the beginning: “I was at my home—which was provided to me by the CMPC—when I received the news of the Military Coup. I had arrived at the Laja police station in mid-1973 as a substitute sub-lieutenant, and since there was no officer, I remained in charge.

I was 22 years old. By September 11, I was the police authority, and as soon as I heard about the Coup, while waiting for orders, I called for the mobilization of all Carabineros. This was coordinated by Sub-Officer Major Evaristo Garcés Rubilar and Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos, who were next in command to me.” “That same morning I received the order from the Los Ángeles headquarters to arrest all government authorities, sub-delegates, and the mayor.

The action was carried out without problems and after detaining them in our unit, they were sent to the Los Ángeles Regiment on buses provided by the Paper Mill, because I already had many people in the barracks.

Days later, my superior in Los Ángeles, Commissioner Aroldo Solari Sanhueza, ordered me to begin arresting all the activists in the commune. Since the CMPC had a chemical plant, the activists could take it over and act against us.” “That was the information that reached me from military intelligence.

One of those days, Army Colonel Alfredo Rerhern Pulido arrived to reiterate the order. I ordered Sub-Officers Garcés and Rodríguez to proceed with the personnel to carry out that task, because they knew those people better.” Colonel Rerhern left a lethal mark during those months in the area, always linked to other murders of leaders of important companies: he participated in the kidnapping and homicide of 23 employees and workers of the El Toro and El Abanico hydroelectric plants of Endesa, in Los Ángeles.

All of them were executed between late 1973 and early 1974. The remains of some of them were found at the La Mona estate, which after the Coup d'État was bought by Forestal Mininco of the CMPC of the Matte Group.

The sentence for this case was signed by visiting judge Jorge Zepeda in November 2010. It was in those same days of Judge Zepeda's sentence that Carlos Aldana reopened the trial for the Laja and San Rosendo Massacre.

By then, of the 17 Carabineros who made up the Laja police station in September 1973, three had died and another three would have to be dismissed as they did not participate in the executions because they remained on guard duty at the station.

It remained to be determined what role the other 11 police officers played. But there were other participations in the 19 qualified homicides that had remained in the shadows. Especially that of the CMPC executives and the role played by Judge Rosa Egnem.

Was the accusation made by the victims' relatives about the concealment of the police report on the illegal exhumation false? Because if it was true, how had she not been sanctioned? The relatives of the executed knew they had not lied.

But another four years would have to pass for the official truth to emerge, when in September 2015 Judge Carlos Aldana asked for her statement in relation to her testimony before Judge José Martínez. By then, Rosa Egnem was already a Supreme Court justice: she was appointed in 2006, during the government of Michelle Bachelet.

In her 1978 statement, it reads: «Miss Mera (Corina Mera, titular judge of the Yumbel Court of Greater Quantities in September 1973) returned to her duties and the first thing I did was give her the report..., but she told me ‘just leave it in the safe and don't take it out of there.’ But in the meantime, I had entered that report into the entry book without consulting her, and when she ordered me to keep it stored, I told her that I had entered it...

She said to me ‘what will happen when they ask (from the Concepción Court of Appeals) for an account of the status of the case?’ I got scared and erased it from the entry book..., but I also remember that later I went back and put the same entry in the same place where I had erased it..., because I regretted having erased it before...».

When Milton Juica, then a Supreme Court justice, was consulted about these events, he stated: -Regarding Judge Corina Mera of Yumbel, a disciplinary sanction was applied to her for these events. And to the secretary of that time, the current justice Rosa Egnem, in the first instance, a sanction was also applied, which the Supreme Court left without effect, and she did not receive disciplinary sanctions, as the judge who was responsible for that court (in 1973) did.

Indeed, the sanction against Rosa Egnem was issued by the Concepción Court of Appeals in 1978, which was reviewed and revoked by the Supreme Court that same year. When Justice Juica spoke about this delicate matter in 2015, he took the opportunity to pay tribute to Judge José Martínez Gaensly, of the Concepción Court, who tried to advance the truth of the 19 qualified homicides: «I have incidental knowledge, because I do not know the case.

But regarding that terrible event in which 19 people were shot, an investigation was carried out by a judge of the Concepción Court of Appeals who had the virtue of recovering the bodies, performing all the corresponding forensic examinations, and made significant progress in this matter until the case ended up being absorbed by the military justice system, dismissed, and amnestied».

On December 16, Justice Rosa del Carmen Egnem Salgado was appointed president of the Electoral Qualification Tribunal, a position she will assume on January 31. It was as if she had prepared for this important role.

And this is because at the end of February 2018, it was she herself who asked to change from the Third Chamber (which sees constitutional matters) to the First Chamber, to replace Justice Patricio Valdés, who was also the president of the Electoral Qualification Tribunal and retired.

Rosa Egnem has the support of the new president of the Supreme Court, Guillermo Silva, to whom the Laja and San Rosendo Massacre and the impunity of crimes against humanity in that region are not unknown.

Silva served as secretary of the First Court of Letters of Los Ángeles at the time and in August 1974 assumed the position of judge of Mulchén, where the murders were even more brutal than in Laja. In 1980, he was appointed judge of the 2nd Civil Court of Concepción and it fell to him to see the case regarding the death by self-immolation of Sebastián Acevedo Becerra.

A death that would make history, but not because of the role played by the current president of the Supreme Court.

THE TRIAL OF THE LAJA SHOOTERS

38 years had passed, and many of the Carabineros who served at the Laja police station in September 1973 tried in 2011 to maintain their oath of silence about what happened in the early hours of September 18 of that year.

It was the testimonies of those who did decide to confess that allowed Judge Carlos Aldana, in August 2011, to order the arrest of the 14 officers still alive who participated in the detentions and the execution of the workers murdered at the Fundo San Juan.

Afterward, everyone spoke. On August 18, 2011, Aldana carried out the reconstruction of the scene with all the detainees regarding the chain of events that ended the lives of the 19 workers. It was a key, dramatic day.

Afterward, the judge prosecuted nine of the Carabineros for homicide and one for cover-up. Three others, those who remained on guard duty that night, were dismissed. Despite the cruelty of the crimes, until January 7, the day Aldana issued the sentences, everyone was free.

1.- Lieutenant (ret.) Alberto Juan Fernández Michell : Officer in charge of the Laja police station and responsible for executing the orders that came from Los Ángeles. He ordered and participated in the detentions and the execution at the Fundo San Juan.

He was retired from the institution in 1979 for “lack of vocation.” He was prosecuted as the perpetrator of homicide and sentenced to prison. His defense appealed and he was released after paying a bail of $300,000.

On January 7, he was sentenced by Aldana to life imprisonment. 2.- Sub-Officer Evaristo Garcés Rubilar : Second in command at the Laja police station. He played a key role in organizing the detentions and the slaughter of the 19 at the Fundo San Juan.

He obtained the location for the clandestine execution and contacted the German farmer Peter Wilkens. He died on December 25, 1987, at age 60, from a stroke caused by diabetes. 3.- Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos : He was in charge of several of the detentions and had a leading role in managing the execution.

Shortly after the massacre, he joined the DINA. He died on December 22, 2002, at the Dipreca Hospital from metastatic gastric cancer that caused multi-organ failure. He was 64 years old. 4.- Sergeant 1st Class (ret.) Lisandro Alberto Martínez García : He was prosecuted as the perpetrator of homicide and released on provisional liberty with a bail of $300,000. 5.- Sergeant 2nd Class (ret.) Luis Antonio León Godoy : “When my sub-officer Garcés gave the order, we all had to shoot,” he confessed.

Prosecuted as the perpetrator of homicide, he was released on provisional liberty after paying a bail of $300,000. 6.- Sergeant (ret.) José Jacinto Otárola Sanhueza : In the reconstruction of the scene, he confessed his participation, being in the CMPC jeep the whole time, illuminating what was happening.

He saw everything, but did not pull the trigger. Prosecuted for cover-up of homicide, he obtained his release after paying a bail of $100,000. On January 7, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison, with the benefit of supervised release, as an accessory. 7.- Sergeant 1st Class (ret.) Gerson Nilo Saavedra Reinike : One of the first to acknowledge what happened in the early hours of September 18, 1973.

He joined the caravan when they were already arriving at the Fundo San Juan. Prosecuted for homicide, he obtained his release after paying a bail of $300,000. On January 7, he was sentenced to 5 years and one day in prison as a perpetrator. 8.- Sergeant 2nd Class (ret.) Florencio Osvaldo Olivares Dade : He acknowledged his participation, saying: “They were difficult days, we slept little.” Prosecuted for homicide and after paying $300,000 bail, he was released on provisional liberty. 9.- Sergeant 2nd Class (ret.) Pedro del Carmen Parra Utreras : He confessed details of the massacre.

Prosecuted for homicide, he had been on provisional liberty since paying $300,000 bail. Aldana sentenced him to 5 years and one day in prison as a perpetrator of the homicides. 10.- Sergeant 1st Class (ret.) Gabriel Washington González Salazar : After denying all participation, he had to acknowledge his role in the homicides.

He is free. 11.- Corporal 1st Class (ret.) Samuel Francisco Vidal Riquelme : The first to break the pact of silence. His testimony was key to clarifying what happened to the 19 victims in Laja. Prosecuted for homicide, he also obtained his release after paying the $300,000 bail. 12.- Víctor Manuel Campos Dávila : He belonged to the Carabineros for 30 years.

In his first statement, he said that after September 11, the Laja police station moved to CMPC facilities. Later he confessed that he shot when ordered to do so. Prosecuted for homicide and on provisional liberty, on January 7 he was sentenced to 5 years and one day in prison as a perpetrator. 13.- Sergeant 1st Class (ret.) Nelson Casanova Salgado : He denied his participation, but it was proven in the investigation.

Prosecuted for homicide, he was free after paying bail. Aldana sentenced him to 5 years and one day in prison as a perpetrator. 14.- Corporal 1st Class (ret.) Luis Muñoz Cuevas : Since he remained on guard duty at the barracks that night, Judge Aldana dismissed his case. 15.- Sub-Officer (ret.) Anselmo del Carmen San Martín Navarrete : His mission that night was to stop traffic in the hospital area so the caravan could pass.

Afterward, he returned to the station. His case was dismissed. On January 7, Aldana sentenced him to 5 years and one day in prison as an accessory to the 19 qualified homicides. 16.- Sub-Officer (ret.) Juan de Dios Oviedo Riquelme: He also remained on guard duty at the Laja station that night, so his case was dismissed. 17.- Sub-Officer Sergio Castillo Basaul : He did not participate in the execution, but his role was decisive in guiding the detentions in San Rosendo.

He died on September 16, 2005, from a massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage, esophageal varices, and Laennec's cirrhosis, which is caused by alcoholism.

LUIS SÁEZ: THE 20TH PERSON EXECUTED

The first time the Carabineros of the Laja station went to look for Luis Sáez Espinoza (37 years old) at his home in the Mario Medina neighborhood was on September 11, 1973, at 10:00. Sáez was an employee and union leader of the CMPC, as well as a militant of the MAPU.

As soon as he heard about the Coup, he went into hiding. Since he was not there when the Carabineros arrived, they raided his house in front of his wife, Rosa Ibaca, and his children. Three hours later, the patrol led by Sergeant Pedro Rodríguez Ceballos returned in the jeep that the Matte Group company had provided them, with helmets and long weapons.

They raided his home again, but this time they detained Rosa. Pointing their rifles at her, they took her to some neighbors, and since no one knew where Luis was, they left her there. The next day the scene was repeated.

On September 14, Sergeant Rodríguez arrived again to look for Luis and, for the third time, did not find him. That day he gave his wife the message: that he should turn himself in as Alfonso Macaya had already done the day before.

Minutes later, social workers from the company arrived to see how the family was doing and promised to speak with Lieutenant Fernández Michell so they would not raid that house again. The children were traumatized.

Six days later, the parish priest of Laja, Félix Eicher, went to speak with the woman. He told her he knew where Luis was and that he wanted to speak with her. The priest took her in his truck. When they met, she told him he had to turn himself in.

Luis was afraid; he knew his life was in danger, that just two days earlier the group of 19 detainees had disappeared without a trace. So that nothing would happen to him, the priest convinced him to go to Los Ángeles and not to the Laja police station.

He accepted. That same day, September 20, 1973, shortly before the curfew, they went in the priest's truck to the Los Ángeles Prefecture. Luis got out of the vehicle, presented himself, and remained detained there.

Priest Eicher was a witness. The next day, the same priest notified Sergeant Rodríguez that Luis had already turned himself in. Rosa went to leave him clothes and food at the Red Cross office, but everything was returned to her because Luis was not in any detention center.

His wife searched for him for years with the help of the priest and the bishop of Los Ángeles, Orozimbo Fuenzalida, but nothing. Nothing more was ever known about Luis. The search extended until 1979, when the investigation led by visiting judge José Martínez led to the whereabouts of those executed in Laja and San Rosendo, but not to their perpetrators.

While the others had been taken to the Yumbel Parish Cemetery, Luis's remains appeared buried clandestinely in the same place where the massacre took place, at the Fundo San Juan, next to a CMPC pine forest. He had a bullet hole and was tied with wire.

Source: ciperchile.cl, January 17, 2020