Miguel Krassnoff, Marcelo Moren Brito, and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann are among those implicated.

The minister for extraordinary cases of human rights violations at the Santiago Court of Appeals, Hernán Crisosto, sentenced 77 agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) this Monday for their responsibility in the kidnapping of Héctor Garay Hermosilla in 1974.

Garay Hermosilla, a member of the Revolutionary Student Front (FER), was 19 years old when he was detained near his home on July 8, 1974. Days later, his name appeared in the national press on a false list of 119 people killed due to alleged internal disputes within the MIR, in what was known as "Operation Colombo." According to the judge's findings, "the publications that declared the victim Garay Hermosilla dead originated from disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad."

According to the reconstruction of events carried out by the visiting minister, the DINA agents who captured Garay "forced him into the back of a gray Chevrolet C-10 pickup truck and took him to the home of a friend of the victim, who was also forced into the aforementioned truck, to be taken to an unknown destination."

"Subsequently, it was established through testimonies that Héctor Marcial Garay Hermosilla passed through the clandestine detention center known as 'Londres 38,' which was guarded by armed guards and to which only DINA agents had access," the ruling continues, establishing that to date, there is no further information regarding Garay's whereabouts.

The convicted In the resolution, the presiding judge sentenced the following to 13 years in prison as authors of the crime perpetrated in 1974: César Manríquez Bravo, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Marcelo Luis Moren Brito, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann.

Meanwhile, the following former agents must serve 10 years in prison, also as authors: Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires, Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez, Sergio Hernán Castillo González, Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos, José Nelson Fuentealba Saldías, Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes, José Enrique Fuentes Torres, José Mario Friz Esparza, Julio José Hoyos Zegarra, Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante, Claudio Orlando Orellana de la Pinta, Enrique Tránsito Gutiérrez Rubilar, Gustavo Galvarino Caruman Soto, Hiro Álvarez Vega, José Alfonso Ojeda Obando, Olegario Enrique González Moreno, Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica, Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera, Alfredo Orlando Moya Tejeda, Carlos Alfonso Sáez Sanhueza, Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo, Hernán Patricio Valenzuela Salas, Hugo Rubén Delgado Carrasco, Juan Alfredo Villanueva Alvear, Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos, Lautaro Eugenio Díaz Espinoza, Leónidas Emiliano Méndez Moreno, Pedro Ariel Araneda Araneda, Rafael de Jesús Riveros Frost, Víctor Manuel Molina Astete, Máximo Ramón Aliaga Soto, Manuel Rivas Díaz, Juan Ángel Urbina Cáceres, Risiere del Prado Altez España, Raúl Juan Rodríguez Ponte, Hermon Helec Alfaro Mundaca, and Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle.

As accomplices to the crime of aggravated kidnapping of Garay Hermosilla, the presiding judge sentenced the following to 4 years in prison: Luis Eduardo Mora Cerda, José Jaime Mora Diocares, Camilo Torres Negrier, Carlos Justo Bermúdez Méndez, Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández, Fernando Adrián Roa Montaña, Gerardo Meza Acuña, Héctor Raúl Valdebenito Araya, Jaime Humberto Paris Ramos, Jorge Laureano Sagardia Monje, José Dorohi Hormazábal Rodríguez, José Manuel Sarmiento Sotelo, José Stalin Muñoz Leal, Juvenal Alfonso Piña Garrido, Luis René Torres Méndez, Manuel Antonio Montre Méndez, Moisés Paulino Campos Figueroa, Nelson Aquiles Ortiz Vignolo, Nelson Eduardo Iturriaga Cortés, Pedro Segundo Bitterlich Jaramillo, Reinaldo Alfonso Concha Orellana, Sergio Hernán Castro Andrade, Víctor Manuel de la Cruz San Martín Jiménez, Gustavo Humberto Apablaza Meneses, Héctor Carlos Díaz Cabezas, Jorge Antonio Lepileo Barrios, Óscar Belarmino la Flor Flores, Rufino Espinoza Espinoza, Héctor Manuel Lira Aravena, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett, Sergio Iván Díaz Lara, Juan Miguel Troncoso Soto, and Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel.

Meanwhile, Rodolfo Valentino Cocha Rodríguez and Armando Segundo Cofre Correa were acquitted due to a lack of participation in the events.

Source: t13.cl, August 31, 2015

In mid-1981, General Augusto Pinochet gave the order for the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), under the command of General Arturo Álvarez Scoglia, to assassinate Tucapel Jiménez, president of the National Association of Fiscal Employees (ANEF), who had emerged as the main Chilean union leader and was planning, along with other opposition leaders, a major national strike against the military government.

Álvarez Scoglia created a special group to carry out the mission and designated three officers as members of the execution command. However, the agents showed an evident "lack of commitment" to the assigned task, and the DINE command had to replace them with two officers who had been members of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and were assigned that year, 1981, to the National Intelligence Center (CNI), created in 1977 to succeed the DINA.

They were Lieutenant Colonel Maximiliano Ferrer Lima and Captain Carlos Herrera Jiménez, alias "Mauro" or "Bocaccio."

Both officers settled in early November at the facilities of the Counter-Espionage Unit, dependent on Department II of Counter-Intelligence of the Army Intelligence Corps (CIE), located at Avenida Echeñique 5995, in the commune of La Reina.

That unit was part of the intricate and highly secret structure of the DINE, in charge of Commander Víctor Pinto Pérez. Ferrer Lima and Herrera Jiménez, along with two teams of agents under their command, then focused on preparing every detail of the plan to assassinate Tucapel Jiménez.

They were in the midst of this when the various services of the military dictatorship's intelligence community learned that former President Eduardo Frei Montalva had decided to check into the Clínica Santa María to undergo surgery for a bothersome hiatal hernia.

At the beginning of the spring of 1981, the CNI was certain that the much-feared opposition union unit was forming rapidly and that its main architect was Tucapel Jiménez. The matter was even more serious because Jiménez was also holding conversations with several of the main political leaders of the opposition, including Eduardo Frei Montalva.

The ANEF leader and the former president had already met at the Vicaría de la Pastoral Obrera along with some dignitaries of the Catholic Church. CNI analysts concluded that a broad national strike with unpredictable consequences was being prepared, with the support, moreover, of numerous bodies and governments around the world.

The task of the CNI

From its inception, the CNI exercised close surveillance over the union world through the Labor Brigade or Political-Union Brigade, which depended directly on the Metropolitan Intelligence Division, commanded by Army Colonel Roberto Schmied Zanzi.

The head of the brigade since 1979 was Carabineros Captain Miguel Eugenio Hernández Oyarzo ("Felipe Bascur"), who had performed similar functions in the DINA in 1977, from the "Ollagüe" barracks, located on Calle José Domingo Cañas, in the commune of Ñuñoa.

By mid-1979, the brigade moved to a new secret barracks on Calle Agustinas and was divided into four groups, each under the command of Army Captain Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez ("Manolo Arriagada"), Héctor Lira ("Julián Reyes"), Nelson Fernández Franco ("Carlos Santander"), and Jorge Ramírez Romero ("Carlos de la Fuente"), respectively.

The Labor Brigade achieved an important milestone when it managed to recruit Luis Becerra, Frei Montalva's driver, for its tasks—a man who was also of absolute trust to the former president.

Among the agents were Pedro Alfaro Fernández, Juan Araos Araos, Carlos Asalgado Martínez, Edmundo Alberto Asenjo Gálvez, Daniel Cancino Varas, Gustavo Caruman Soto, Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos, Germán Erazo Ahumada, Ricardo Erazo Ahumada, Héctor Alfredo Flores Vergara, Segundo Gangas Godoy, Enrique Gutiérrez Rubilar, Luis Gutiérrez Uribe, Guido Jara Brevis, Jaime Márquez Campos, Luis Mora Cerda, José Mora Diocares, José Muñoz Leal, Enrique Naranjo Muñoz, Nelson Ortiz Vignolo, Manuel Poblete Vergara, Luis Tomás Rojas Torres, Manuel Tapia Tapia, and Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera.

The Labor Brigade achieved an important milestone when it managed to recruit Luis Becerra, Frei Montalva's driver, a man who was also of absolute trust to the former president and knew the activities and the inner circle of the Christian Democrat leader very closely.

In 1977, the Ministry General Secretariat of Government created, under the dependence of the Directorate of Civil Organizations, the National Secretariat of Guilds and placed Misael Galleguillos at its head, a mathematics teacher from the Valparaíso branch of the University of Chile, an active militant of Patria y Libertad during the Unidad Popular government.

His apparent mission was to train pro-government union leaders, but in truth, his main role consisted of monitoring and infiltrating opposition union leaderships and passing all that information to the CNI.

One of the actions with the greatest public repercussion by Galleguillos, who also directed the National Revolutionary Syndicalist Movement (MRNS), was the boycott of an ANEF press conference, in which Guillermo Henríquez, Jorge Salazar Hojman, Genaro Pozo, and Jorge Baldrich Camus burst in shouting "traitor" and "sellout" at Tucapel Jiménez.

The next day, Baldrich appeared photographed in El Mercurio. He later declared that the order had been given to him by the then Minister General Secretariat of Government, General Sergio Badiola Brodeg, who was seconded by the undersecretary of the portfolio, the lawyer Jovino Novoa Vásquez.

Galleguillos also had a secret informant among the opposition who anticipated all the activities of the "Grupo de los Diez" (Group of Ten). It was Federico Mujica Canales, a short man of radical origin, a constant pipe smoker, who presided over the Confederation of Private Employees of Chile (Cepch).

Very soon, the CNI refined its methods of tracking, surveillance, eavesdropping, and penetration. The information gathered was incorporated into individual folders, and their contents were periodically replicated, with copies sent to the central barracks on Calle República.

There, they were received by Mirtha Espinoza Caamaño, the secretary to Colonel Roberto Schmied, head of the Interior Department, who was later appointed commander of the Metropolitan Intelligence Division, where the various anti-subversive brigades were located. Under Schmied's direct command were Major Zanelli and Captain Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, in charge of operational tasks.

One of the most secret paid snitches that the repressive organization maintained in the leadership circles of the opposition union movement could only be identified in the first half of 2009. It was the socialist Víctor Hugo Gac, a member of the executive committee of the CNS, a man then very close to Arturo Martínez.

The secretary recorded the information in control books, with the date of entry, the originating unit, and a brief description of the content. Acronyms and codes were used according to the respective units and sections. Thus, for example, F.1.1 corresponded to the head of the division; F-1.2 to the deputy head, and so on, according to the various departments into which the CNI was divided.

Leaders such as Tucapel Jiménez, Eduardo Ríos, Ernesto Vogel, and Manuel Bustos, among others, had their telephones tapped, and all correspondence sent to them and their families from abroad and within the country was reviewed in the unit the CNI maintained at the Post Office. A folder was kept for each one with their personal, work, and family background, as well as their contact networks.

In 1976, a CNI agent nicknamed "Omar" recruited as an informant an employee who worked as an assistant for the ANEF, at its three-story headquarters located at Alameda and Riquelme. The "junior" was named Julio Olivares Silva and was the son of a friend of Tucapel Jiménez.

Twice a week, the boy delivered his reports to the Labor Brigade barracks, where he received a cash payment in exchange. In 1977, Olivares Silva was incorporated into the CNI staff under the alias "Gabriel Carrasco González," although everyone called him "Barnabás."

Valericio Orrego, for his part, also became a paid collaborator for the CNI. He infiltrated Carlos Santa María, a leader of the Group of Ten, by recruiting an employee of his in a business he had at Bandera and General Mackenna. The informant was named Patricio Pezoa and had to report periodically to "Manolo" or "Carlos de la Fuente," his control agents in the CNI.

One of the most secret paid snitches that the repressive organization maintained in the leadership circles of the opposition union movement could only be identified in the first half of 2009. It was the socialist Víctor Hugo Gac, a member of the executive committee of the CNS, a man then very close to Arturo Martínez.

The hard road to unity

At the end of May 1976, ten important union leaders, nine of them linked to the PDC, who claimed to represent 400 unions and more than 600,000 workers, sent a document to the military government complaining about the new labor legislation that was being imposed and the marginalization of workers from political decisions.

The signatories were Tucapel Jiménez (ANEF), Ernesto Mellado (peasants), Pedro Cifuentes (Iansa), Antonio del Campo (bank employees), Guillermo Santana (Copper Workers Confederation, CTC), Manuel Bustos (textiles), Ernesto Vogel (Fifch), Federico Mujica (Cepch), Antonio Mimiza (oil), and Eduardo Díaz (ComaCh).

From that moment on, they were known as the Group of Ten, and very soon other important union organizations joined them, such as the Plastic Workers Confederation, the Federation of Professionals and Technicians of the National Health Service, and the Federation of Unions of the Banco Español.

At the end of the summer of 1978, former deputy Gladys Marín entered the country clandestinely, followed by Manuel Cantero Prado, both members of the political commission. Two months later, in May, the new Interior Directorate Team (EDI) was constituted, headed by Marín, along with Cantero ("Miguel"), Oscar Riquelme ("El viejo Pablo"), and Nicasio Farías ("Héctor"), who took charge of the Infrastructure Front, entrusted with all logistical work and the search for resources and materials for clandestine tasks. "Mariana," meanwhile, had to assume the delicate management of the party's finances.

One of the main tasks of the EDI was to rebuild internal structures and, in particular, the union fabric. To this end, Moisés Labraña, responsible for that sector in the JJ.CC. (Communist Youth), was promoted to union manager of the party and integrated into the EDI.

Labraña had a determined team in which Héctor Cuevas, Alamiro Guzmán, and José Lecaros, among others, stood out. The PC unionists managed to refine links with the main labor leaders of the Christian Democrats, including Manuel Bustos of the textiles, Eduardo Ríos of the maritime workers, and Ernesto Vogel of the railway workers, and with other historical figures, such as the octogenarian Clotario Blest.

The leftist union movement, meanwhile, grouped together in the National Union Coordinator (CNS), created under the wing of the Labor Studies Center, dependent on the Cardijn Foundation, which in turn was closely linked to the Catholic Church.

The CNS appeared publicly in 1978, representing, as it maintained, some 400 grassroots unions, mainly industrial, small and medium mining, and peasant unions. Among the members, the Mining Confederation, Fensimet, Fenamex, Fiemec, Ranquil, UOC, Association of Pensioners, Sanitation Workers, the Painting Federation, and the Graphic Union stood out.

There was also the Workers' Unitary Front (FUT), a small formation of Christian unionists, led by Carlos Frez, a dismissed president of the Port Workers' Union, linked long before to the Young Christian Workers and the Christian Workers' Action Movement.

Thus, more than three thousand workers from these three union benchmarks converged on May 1, 1978, toward Plaza Almagro, a few blocks south of La Moneda, to commemorate Labor Day. Carabineros forced them to disperse, but they regrouped a few blocks away, at the San Francisco church, next to the Alameda Bernardo O’Higgins, where they were chased away again.

By mid-afternoon, pickets of workers were still shouting slogans in various places in downtown Santiago. By nightfall, the balance of the demonstrations indicated nearly 400 detainees, including several foreigners and religious figures. The military dictatorship and the pro-government press were forced to acknowledge, for the first time, the dissident street demonstrations.

Neither the PC nor the other leftist parties nor the Christian Democrats perceived well the effects that the Labor Plan designed by Minister Piñera would provoke among the workers.

On May 22, relatives of the forcibly disappeared simultaneously occupied the offices of UNICEF and the parishes of Jesús Obrero, in General Velásquez, in the western sector of the capital; La Estampa, in Independencia, a few meters from Plaza Chacabuco, in the northern sector; and Don Bosco, in Gran Avenida, in the southern zone.

They stayed there until June 7, demanding to know the fate of their relatives. Neither the CNI nor the police dared to evict them because the Catholic Church was involved, and, moreover, the demonstration coincided with the arrival in the country of five high-ranking representatives of the American union AFL-CIO and a visit by prosecutor Eugene Propper, who was investigating the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington.

On June 7, two surprise marches were held through the downtown streets of Santiago in solidarity with the relatives of the disappeared. The presence of dissident pamphlets in crowded places became frequent in those days, and graffiti on walls in neighborhoods and on the city's main avenues began to multiply.

Flash rallies emerged in university headquarters, and folk music gatherings (peñas) multiplied under the wing of religious venues and some nightclubs. In the working-class neighborhoods, meanwhile, all kinds of community organizations began to be created, and in the factories, slowly, workers dared to meet to voice their complaints.

In August, at the Chuquicamata division of Codelco, next to the city of Calama, copper miners decided to go to the cafeterias at lunchtime with their empty "lunchboxes." The prolonged protest movement for labor demands received the name "viandazo."

At the beginning of September, surprised and annoyed by the symptoms of union unrest, the dictatorship decreed a state of siege in the degree of internal commotion. The right of amparo (habeas corpus) before the courts of justice was limited, the arrest and relegation of people were authorized, as well as the cancellation of nationality and the prosecution of detainees in military courts.

Almost a month later, on October 20, 1978, the illegality of the main entities that made up the CNS was decreed, union headquarters were raided, assets and bank accounts were confiscated, and numerous leaders were arrested.

At the same time, the renewal of union leaders in the private sector was also decreed, and many businessmen took the opportunity to fire opposition workers who could be elected. In the following weeks, some nine thousand labor leaders were renewed.

Several of the main global union organizations then intervened, and the powerful American AFL-CIO threatened a boycott of Chilean exports starting in early 1979. Alarmed, the military government announced the appointment of a new Minister of Labor, the economist José Piñera, who took office on December 26, committed to normalizing labor relations, and announced the promulgation in mid-79 of a Labor Plan that would put an end to the problems.

Pérez Zujovic, Frei, Jaime Castillo, and Modesto Collados

Neither the PC nor the other leftist parties nor the Christian Democrats perceived well the effects that the Labor Plan designed by Minister Piñera would provoke among the workers. In July 1979, the main decrees that imposed the new labor institutional framework were promulgated: affiliation with unions ceased to be mandatory, and the formation of several unions in the same company was authorized; collective bargaining became by company and not by productive branch; the dismissal of workers "for company needs" was authorized; the right to strike was restricted to 60 days, with the possibility of replacing workers after that period; and retirement was postponed from 60 to 65 years for men and from 55 to 60 for women, among other measures. Those provisions were devastating; the union movement was extremely weakened, and the fear of "losing the job" was imposed.

In 1980 and 1981, despite the protests of union leaders, Piñera's Labor Plan was consolidated. The Group of Ten was transformed into the Democratic Workers' Union (UDT), although without several Christian Democrat leaders who were marginalized, such as Manuel Bustos, who became the leader of the new National Union Coordinator (CNS).

The hour of the executors

When the plan to assassinate Tucapel Jiménez was already underway and the military dictatorship learned that Frei Montalva would check in for surgery, a parallel operation was apparently activated to eliminate the former president and cover up the homicide as a series of post-surgical complications. However, Judge Alejandro Madrid could not specify the details of the conspiracy.

He convicted former Captain Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez, a former member of the CNI and later of the DINE, and the driver Luis Becerra, but could not clarify from which instance of the military dictatorship the order to assassinate him came.

Lillo Gutiérrez was the agent who controlled Becerra and Genaro Cerda Weber, a DC militant and husband of Hilda Navarro Varas, secretary of that same party. Lillo, transferred in the late 80s to the DINE, participated in the assassination of the chemist Eugenio Berríos in Uruguay, and for that crime, he was sentenced in August 2013 to ten years and one day in prison.

For many years, it was presumed that the chemist Berríos was the one who had inoculated the former president with some poison or other toxic substance while he was in the clinic. In fact, the former director of the Investigative Police (PDI), Nelson Mery, asserted in the process that Berríos was assassinated to prevent him from talking about the assassination of Frei Montalva.

Judge Madrid also convicted four doctors: one—the gastric surgeon Patricio Silva Garín—as the main author; another—Pedro Valdivia Soto, a former member of the DINA—as an accomplice; and the remaining two—the pathologists Helmar Rosenberg Gómez and Sergio González Bombardiere—as cover-ups.

The magistrate also failed to establish whether these doctors colluded with each other for the crime and/or obeyed orders to commit it.

Human rights lawyers, very close to the PDC, who requested that their names be withheld, told INTERFERENCIA that they considered the 800-plus-page ruling very weak and that, in their opinion, both the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court would have to make strenuous efforts to draft a new and better resolution.

Source: interferencia.cl, December 19, 2019

Case No. 1.643; case of the aggravated homicide of Tucapel Jiménez Alfaro

Multiple Confrontation Proceeding of the Political-Union Brigade of the National Intelligence Center. Multiple confrontation proceeding of persons who worked in the political-union unit of the National Intelligence Center, from page 1127, volume III, reserved, to which the following persons appeared:

• Miguel Eugenio HERNANDEZ OYARZO - Luis Tomás ROJAS TORRES - Daniel Valentín CANCINO VARAS - Carlos Enrique ASALGADO MARTINEZ - Pedro René ALFARO FERNANDEZ - Juan Manuel ARAOS ARAOS - Gustavo Galvarino CARUMAN SOTO - Juan Evaristo DUARTE GALLEGOS - Germán Ricardo ERAZO AHUMADA - Héctor Alfredo FLORES VERGARA - Segundo Armando GANGAS GODOY - Enrique del Tránsito GUTIERREZ RUBILAR - Luis Germán GUTIERREZ URIBE - Guido Arnoldo JARA BREVIS - Jaime Andrés MARQUEZ CAMPOS - Luis Eduardo MORA CERDA - José Jaime MORA DIOCARES - José Stalin MUÑOZ LEAL - Enrique Segundo NARANJO MUÑOZ - Nelson Aquiles ORTIZ VIGNOLO - Manuel Humberto POBLETE VERGARA - Manuel Alexis TAPIA TAPIA - Rudeslindo URRUTIA JORQUERA

Source: Judiciary, August 5, 2002

Judge Montiglio prosecuted 98 former agents for victims of Operation Colombo - The biggest blow to the repression

Among the accused, all of whom are retired, there are eight colonels and 23 non-commissioned officers from the Army, 40 officers and non-commissioned officers from the Carabineros, two former agents from the FACH, one former agent from the Navy, and seven former agents from the Investigative Police.

The greatest blow to the repression of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship was dealt yesterday by Minister Víctor Montiglio, who prosecuted 98 former agents from different branches of the Armed Forces, Carabineros, and the Investigative Police for 42 victims of Operation Colombo.

This is the largest resolution issued among the nearly 400 human rights violation cases currently being investigated in the country. It even surpassed the 67 former agents prosecuted by the same Judge Montiglio in 2007 for the crimes of the Brigada Lautaro and its Grupo Delfín at the Simón Bolívar barracks.

Among those accused in the Colombo case are eight Army colonels (R), six of whom had not been prosecuted before in any case. Also declared defendants were 23 Army non-commissioned officers (R), of whom at least 50 percent appear for the first time in these types of cases.

Among these non-commissioned officers is Juvenal Piña, alias "El Elefante," a former agent of the Brigada Lautaro, who was the one who suffocated the communist leader in hiding (1976) Víctor Díaz with a plastic bag over his head, prior to him being injected with cyanide.

Furthermore, the magistrate prosecuted 40 former official and non-commissioned officer agents of the Carabineros, among whom are Ricardo Lawrence, Heriberto Acevedo, Claudio Pacheco, and José Mora, all former members of the same Brigade. Among those prosecuted are also former agents who belonged to the Investigative Police. The only civilian (Army) is Juan Suárez.

Of the total list, at least thirteen are already serving sentences for other cases (see list).

As of the closing of this edition, the accused continued to be detained to be interned in different locations, such as the Peñalolén Military Police Battalion.

Among the 42 victims for whom the minister issued his resolution are María Angélica Andreolli, Miguel Acuña Castillo, Juan Carlos Perelmann Ide, Juan Chacón Olivares, Jorge Müller Silva, Luis Guendelmann Wisniak, Mario Calderón Tapia, and Carmen Bueno Cifuentes.

Operation Colombo and the media

The list of the 119 was published in the magazine Lea (Buenos Aires) and the newspaper O Dia (Brazil) in 1975, information that was also false. Both publications were created by DINA agents.

Operation Colombo was part of Operation Condor and consisted of a setup by the dictatorship to make the population believe that 119 detainees who were forcibly disappeared had clandestinely left for Argentina and died there in confrontations with police and Army forces during the phase prior to the 1976 military coup in Argentina.

Some of those names appeared as militants "assassinated" in Buenos Aires and its surroundings, with signs on their bodies stating they had been executed by their own comrades as a settling of scores due to internal disputes. However, this also turned out to be a setup.

The list of the 119 was published in the magazine Lea (Buenos Aires) and the newspaper O Dia (Brazil) in 1975, information that was also false. Both publications were created by DINA agents abroad and had only one edition.

In Chile, the pro-dictatorship press, such as the newspapers El Mercurio, La Tercera, Las Ultimas Noticias, and La Segunda, reproduced the intelligence services' setup. The headline of the evening paper remains in memory, which reported: "Exterminated like rats: 59 Chilean MIR members fall in military operation in Argentina." They were part of the list of the 119 disappeared of Colombo.

The former fugitive Raúl Iturriaga, who was one of those in charge of the DINA's foreign department, was the one who first shed light on this operation in Buenos Aires.

According to the former civilian agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, convicted in Buenos Aires for the crime of General Carlos Prats and his wife, it was Iturriaga who met with him at the beginning of 1975 to ask him to prepare what was necessary because "we have to make some dead people from Operation Colombo appear."

It was about preparing the appearance of the supposed bodies of Jaime Robotham and Luis Guendelmann as part of the setup.

List of the accused

Army (all retired)

Víctor Molina Astete (colonel); Sergio Castillo González (col); Eduardo Guerra Guajardo (col); Víctor San Martín Jiménez (col); José Fuentes Torres (col); Manuel Carevic Cubillos (col); Jaime Paris Ramos (col); César Manríquez Bravo (col); Raúl Toro Montes (non-commissioned officer); Eduardo Reyes Lagos (NCO); Orlando Torrejón Gatica (NCO); Osvaldo Tapia Alvarez (NCO.

Committed suicide); Juvenal Piña Garrido (NCO. “El Elefante”); Juan Suárez Delgado (civilian); Nelson Paz Bustamante (NCO); José Aravena Ruiz (NCO); Luis Torres Méndez (NCO); Raúl Soto Pérez (NCO); Jorge Andrade Gómez (NCO); Juan Escobar Valenzuela (NCO); Rolando Concha Rodríguez (NCO); Gustavo Apablaza Meneses (NCO); Hiro Alvarez Vega (NCO); Víctor Alvarez Droguett (NCO); Jorge Venegas Silva (NCO); Carlos Rinaldi Suazo (NCO); Carlos Letelier Verdugo (NCO); Reinaldo Concha Orellana (NCO); Máximo Aliaga Soto (NCO); Hugo Clavería Leiva (NCO); Samuel Fuenzalida Devia (NCO)

Investigative Police

Juan Urbina Cáceres; Hugo Hernández; Manuel Rivas Díaz; Herman Alfaro; Eugenio Fieldhouse; Osvaldo Castillo

Carabineros (officers and non-commissioned officers, all retired):

Gerardo Godoy García; Ciro Torres Sáez, Alejandro Molina Cisternas; Camilo Torres Negrier; Héctor Lira Aravena; José Fritz Esparza; Claudio Pacheco Fernández; Jorge Sagardia Monge; Sergio Castro Andrade; Luis Villarroel Gutiérrez; Armando Cofré Gómez; Fernando Roa Montaña; Gerardo Meza Acuña; Enrique Gutiérrez Rubilar; Luis Mora Cerda; José Muñoz Leal; Juan Duarte Gallegos; Carlos Miranda Meza; Rufino Jaime Astorga; Luis Urrutia Acuña; Luis Zúñiga Ovalle; Pedro Alfaro Hernández; Orlando Inostroza Lagos; Rosa Ramos Hernández; Gustavo Caruvan Soto; Héctor Valdebenito Araya; Manuel Avendaño González; José Mora Diocares; Guido Jara Brevis; Nelson Ortiz Vignolo; Ruderlindo Urrutia Jorquera; Héctor Flores Vergara; Jerónimo Neira Méndez; Manuel Montré Méndez, Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo; Claudio Orellana de la Pinta; Nelson Iturriaga Cortés; Luis Gutiérrez Uribe; José Ojeda Obando

Air Force

Delia Gajardo Cortés; Hernán Avalos Muñoz

Navy

Teresa Navarro Osorio

Accused who are already serving sentences:

Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda; Pedro Espinoza Bravo; Raúl Iturriaga Neumann; Marcelo Moren Brito; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko; Ricardo Lawrence Mires; Basclay Zapata Reyes; Conrado Pacheco; Francisco Ferrer Lima; Gerardo Urrich; Orlando Manzo Durán; Rizier Altez España; Fernando Lauriani Maturana

Source: lanacion.cl, May 27, 2008

The ruling by Hernán Crisosto for an Operation Colombo case is not only striking due to the high number of those convicted. It is also his first sentence since he took charge of human rights violation cases during the dictatorship.

A historic sentence regarding human rights was issued by the minister in visitation of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Hernán Crisosto, by convicting 75 former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their responsibility in the aggravated kidnapping of the forcibly disappeared detainee Jorge Grez Aburto.

The voluminous sentence of more than 400 pages and 310 considerations is the first issued by Magistrate Crisosto since he was appointed in August 2013 as minister in visitation to investigate human rights violation cases.

"CRUDE SETUP"

The ruling corresponds to one of the episodes of the so-called "Operation Colombo," which was investigated by the late minister Víctor Montiglio Rezzio. And the victim is Jorge Arturo Grez Aburto (in the photo), a socialist militant at the time of his capture and founder of the MIR in Concepción. At the time of his disappearance, on May 23, 1974, he was 28 years old.

Grez's case was linked by the authorities of the time to Operation Colombo, the cover-up device deployed by the DINA to attribute the disappearances to supposed confrontations between militants of leftist parties.

When explaining the ruling to the press, Crisosto described the "setup" of the repressive organ of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship as "very crude" and "very failed."

THE RULING

Grez was detained in downtown Santiago and transferred to torture centers such as Londres 38, the Estadio Chile, and "Cuatro Álamos." "He was kept without contact with the outside, blindfolded, tied up, and continuously subjected to interrogations under torture by the indicated agents, in which they asked him about his party activities and about the name and address of his political group comrades in order to proceed with their detention," the resolution states.

The conviction adds that the last date on which Grez Aburto was seen alive occurred on an undetermined date in July 1974.

THE CONVICTIONS

For the crime, the minister sentenced the former agents Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda; César Manríquez Bravo; Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo; Marcelo Luis Moren Brito; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko; and Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González to a penalty of 13 years in prison, without benefits, for their responsibility as authors of the crime of aggravated kidnapping.

Meanwhile, Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann; Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García; Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires; Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez; Sergio Hernán Castillo González; Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos; José Nelson Fuentealba Saldías; Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes; José Enrique Fuentes Torres; José Mario Fritz Esparza; Julio José Hoyos Zegarra; Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante; Claudio Orlando Orellana de la Pinta; Enrique Tránsito Gutiérrez Rubilar; Gustavo Galvarino Carumán Soto; Hiro Álvarez Vega; José Alfonso Ojeda Obando; Luis Salvador Villarroel Gutiérrez; Olegario Enrique González Moreno; Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica; Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera; Alfredo Orlando Moya Tejeda; Carlos Alfonso Sáez Sanhueza; Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo; Hernán Patricio Valenzuela Salas; Hugo Rubén Delgado Carrasco; José Fernando Morales Bastías; Juan Alfredo Villanueva Alvear; Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos; Lautaro Eugenio Díaz Espinoza; Leonidas Emiliano Méndez Moreno; Pedro Ariel Araneda Araneda; Rafael De Jesús Riveros Frost; Víctor Manuel Alvarez Droguett; and Víctor Manuel Molina Astete were sentenced to 10 years in prison, without benefits, for their responsibility as authors of aggravated kidnapping.

In the case of Luis Eduardo Mora Cerda; José Jaime Mora Diocares; Alfonso Humberto Quiroz Quintana; Camilo Torres Negrier; Carlos Justo Bermúdez Méndez; Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández; Fernando Adrián Roa Montaña; Gerardo Meza Acuña; Héctor Raúl Valdebenito Araya; Jaime Humberto Paris Ramos; Jorge Laureano Sagardia Monje; José Dorohi Hormazábal Rodríguez; José Manuel Sarmiento Sotelo; José Stalin Muñoz Leal; Juan Manuel Troncoso Soto; Juvenal Alfonso Piña Garrido; Luis René Torres Méndez; Manuel Antonio Montre Méndez; Máximo Ramón Aliaga Soto; Moisés Paulino Campos Figueroa; Nelson Aquiles Ortiz Vignolo; Nelson Eduardo Iturriaga Cortes; Orlando Enrique González Moreno; Pedro Segundo Bitterlich Jaramillo; Reinaldo Alfonso Concha Orellana; Sergio Hernán Castro Andrade; Gustavo Humberto Apablaza Meneses; Héctor Carlos Díaz Cabezas; Jorge Antonio Lepileo Barrios; Luis Fernando Espinace Contreras; Oscar Belarmino La Flor Flores; Rufino Espinoza Espinoza; and Sergio Iván Díaz Lara, they were sentenced to 4 years in prison, without benefits, for their responsibility as accomplices to aggravated kidnapping.

DEMENTIA

In the case, Víctor Manuel de la Cruz San Martin Jiménez was sentenced to 4 years in prison as an accomplice, but the execution of the sentence was suspended upon confirming that he suffers from dementia, for which it was ordered that he be handed over on bail into the custody of his family.

INDEMNIFICATION

Regarding the civil aspect, Minister Crisosto ordered the payment of an indemnification of $70 million for moral damages to Rebelión Grez Rodríguez, the victim's daughter.

Source: La Nación, May 8, 2014

He was detained in July 1974 in the Macul commune. Numerous witnesses saw him at the torture and extermination center of Londres 38. He is one of the victims of "Operation Colombo." The Justice system convicted 78 former DINA agents for this crime against humanity.

The minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Hernán Crisosto, issued a first-instance sentence for the kidnapping and disappearance of Miguel Angel Acuña Castillo.

The magistrate established that the young man, a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), was detained in the vicinity of his home located at Pasaje Talca N° 2033 in the Macul commune by State agents belonging to the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), among them Osvaldo Romo Mena, alias "El Guatón Romo."

His sister, Rosa Acuña Castillo, declared that her father tried to climb into the back of the covered pickup truck at the moment they were taking him away, but he was struck in the mouth by one of the individuals, falling to the ground.

A week after the kidnapping, Romo went to their home again and told her that her brother was in good condition along with Héctor Garay Hermosilla, who is also disappeared. Both were members of the Revolutionary Student Front (FER) at the Liceo 7 in Ñuñoa.

Judge Crisosto determined that the DINA agents "transferred him to the clandestine detention facility called 'Yucatán' or 'Londres 38'."

Acuña Castillo belonged to the secondary student structure of the MIR's Military Political Group 3 (GPM3), an organization that grouped militants from the eastern area of the capital and was led by Agustín Reyes González, whose trail was lost forever at Londres 38.

There, he "remained without contact with the outside, blindfolded and tied up, being continuously subjected to interrogations under torture by DINA agents" and, the last time he was seen alive, "occurred on an undetermined day in the month of July or August 1974, remaining disappeared to this date," the first-instance ruling states.

Laughing in Londres 38 with Héctor Garay Hermosilla

In the "Yucatán" barracks, he was seen by Erika Hennings, detained on July 30, 1974. "I can say that he was very young, I think they called him 'El Pampa'," she asserted during the process. She heard that they took roll call twice a day for the detainees.

On July 31, 1974, she heard the name of Miguel Angel Acuña Castillo, who answered "present." Later, she did not hear him called again. "They took them out of Londres 38 just like other detainees, among whom she remembers María Inés Alvarado," a 21-year-old forcibly disappeared detainee.

Hugo Chacaltana Silva, detained on May 4, 1974, a former student of the Liceo Manuel de Salas and member of the Revolutionary Student Front (FER), also saw him at Londres 38. He related that in the early hours of July 8 to 9, 1974, Miguel Angel Acuña arrived along with Héctor Garay Hermosilla, whom they called "Titín"; he was able to see them through a gap that formed between the nose and the cheekbones of the blindfold.

Chacaltana pointed out that he met Castillo in 1971, when both were secondary students. Both coincided in meetings that were held at the time between members of the FER, the judicial ruling notes. He remembers "Miguel Ángel as a young man of great leadership capacity and great physical resistance."

He stopped seeing him on September 11, 1973. He found him again at Londres 38. He arrived along with Héctor Garay to the same room where he was lying on the floor. "At that moment, I did not address Miguel Ángel"; on the contrary, he pretended not to notice his presence. "The next day, when the mattresses on which we detainees lay were removed and replaced by chairs, I sat down and, to one side, I observed that they were still sitting.

It caught my attention that both were talking and laughing, which made me think that they were unaware of the magnitude of what awaited them. Miguel Ángel approached me in Londres 38, telling me, 'I know you'."

His mother found out at the hair salon that her son was in Londres 38

León Gómez, detained on July 15, 1974, and transferred to Londres 38, saw Miguel Angel along with Héctor Garay, whom he knew. Someone commented to him that among the detainees was "Pampino," which he corroborated upon hearing him "with his typical jokes that he made to the guards, as if giving the impression that what was happening in the place had no importance.

Even 'Titín' and 'Pampino' would drive the guards crazy. They were very irreverent."

David Cuevas Sharon, detained on May 4, 1974, also testified to having seen him. "'El Pampino,' despite showing signs of mistreatment, looked very high-spirited; he was very physically strong." He shared time with him for at least five days.

When Cuevas was released, Acuña Castillo remained a prisoner. His maternal grandmother had a hair salon in Ñuñoa, and one of her clients was Miguel Angel's mother. In a conversation, "she found out about the problem she had with a disappeared son.

Given this, my grandmother made her go to the hair salon, where she met 'Pampino's' mother and told her what she knew about him, specifically the place where he had been imprisoned with him."

Regarding the torments applied to the detainees at Londres 38, including Miguel Angel, Minister Crisosto incorporated statements from Osvaldo Romo, who stated that among other tortures, the detainees were subjected to "the dry submarine, which was covering their breathing with a plastic bag placed on their heads; the detainees' eyes would look like 'fried eggs,' and blood would come out of their noses and eardrums.

After the interrogations and duress, the detainees would be exhausted."

Another former agent, Samuel Fuenzalida Devia, specified in this regard that "the general treatment of the prisoners was to keep them blindfolded, they were not allowed to wash, there were no beds for them to sleep, the food was scarce, and they were subjected to intense interrogations in which electricity was applied to them, especially to the genitals and breasts.

Another form of torture consisted of keeping the detainees sitting in chairs, tied by their feet and hands, while current was applied to them with magnets, although common electric current was also applied, which burned those people, a procedure in which many people died."

Eugenio Fieldhouse Chávez maintains that as an official of the Investigative Police, in mid-June 1974, he was assigned to that repressive body and indicated that the same DINA agents who intervened in the detention and interrogation of the detainees, once the information sought was obtained, were the ones in charge of making them disappear, upon the order of the DINA's superior command.

The name of Miguel Ángel Acuña Castillo appeared among the 119 Chileans of Operation Colombo, in a list disseminated in the national press, after it appeared in publications that were published only once in Brazil and Argentina, "in which it was reported that Miguel Ángel Acuña Castillo had died in Argentina, along with 58 other people belonging to the MIR, due to internal disputes."

The convictions

"The publications that presumed the victim Acuña Castillo dead had their origin in disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad," determined Judge Crisosto, who convicted 78 former DINA agents for his disappearance.

The magistrate issued a sentence of 13 years of major imprisonment in its medium degree to Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda; César Manríquez Bravo; Pedro Espinoza; Marcelo Luis Moren Brito; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko; and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann.

Likewise, he sentenced to 10 years of major imprisonment in its minimum degree Gerardo Ernesto Urrich González; Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García; Ricardo Víctor Lawrence Mires; Ciro Ernesto Torré Sáez; Sergio Hernán Castillo González; Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos; José Nelson Fuentealba Saldías; Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes; José Enrique Fuentes Torres; José Mario Friz Esparza; Julio José Hoyos Zegarra; Nelson Alberto Paz Bustamante; Claudio Orlando Orellana de la Pinta; Enrique Tránsito Gutiérrez Rubilar; Gustavo Galvarino Caruman Soto; Hiro Álvarez Vega; José Alfonso Ojeda Obando; Luis Salvador Villarroel Gutiérrez; Olegario Enrique González Moreno; Orlando Jesús Torrejón Gatica; Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera; Alfredo Orlando Moya Tejeda; Carlos Alfonso Sáez Sanhueza; Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo; Hernán Patricio Valenzuela Salas; Hugo Rubén Delgado Carrasco; Juan Alfredo Villanueva Alvear; Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos; Lautaro Eugenio Díaz Espinoza; Leónides Emiliano Méndez Moreno; Pedro Ariel Araneda Araneda; Rafael De Jesús Riveros Frost; Víctor Manuel Molina Astete; Manuel Rivas Díaz; Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle; Juan Ángel Urbina Cáceres; Risiere del Prado Altez España; Hermon Helec Alfaro Mundaca; and Raúl Juan Rodríguez Ponte.

As accomplices to the kidnapping and disappearance of the 19-year-old, he sentenced to 4 years of minor imprisonment in its maximum degree Luis Eduardo Mora Cerda; José Jaime Mora Diocares; Camilo Torres Negrier; Carlos Justo Bermúdez Méndez; Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández; Fernando Adrián Roa Montaña; Gerardo Meza Acuña; Héctor Raúl Valdebenito Araya; Jaime Humberto Paris Ramos; Jorge Laureano Sagardia Monje; José Dorohi Hormazabal Rodríguez; José Manuel Sarmiento Sotelo; José Stalin Muñoz Leal; Juvenal Alfonso Piña Garrido; Luis René Torres Méndez; Manuel Antonio Montre Méndez; Máximo Ramón Aliaga Soto; Moisés Paulino Campos Figueroa; Nelson Aquiles Ortiz Vignolo; Nelson Eduardo Iturriaga Cortes; Pedro Segundo Bitterlich Jaramillo; Reinaldo Alfonso Concha Orellana; Sergio Hernán Castro Andrade; Víctor Manuel de la Cruz San Martin Jiménez; Gustavo Humberto Apablaza Meneses; Héctor Carlos Díaz Cabezas; Jorge Antonio Lepileo Barrios; Oscar Belarmino La Flor Flores; Rufino Espinoza Espinoza; Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel; Víctor Manuel Álvarez Droguett; Héctor Manuel Lira Aravena; and Sergio Iván Díaz Lara.

Regarding Víctor Manuel De la Cruz San Martín Jiménez, due to having fallen into dementia, the fulfillment of the sentence is suspended, and he must, in due course, be handed over under bail of custody to a family member.

Source: Villa Grimaldi.cl, February 3, 2015

Since its beginnings in 1977, the CNI exercised close surveillance over the union world through the Labor Brigade. The head of the brigade from 1979 was the Carabineros captain Miguel Eugenio Hernández Oyarzo ("Felipe Bascur"), who had performed similar functions in the DINA.

By mid-1979, the brigade moved to a new secret barracks on Agustinas Street and was divided into four groups, each of them under the command of Army captain Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez ("Manolo Arriagada"), Héctor Lira ("Julián Reyes"), Nelson Fernández Franco ("Carlos Santander"), and Jorge Ramírez Romero ("Carlos de la Fuente"), respectively.

Among the agents were Pedro Alfaro Fernández, Juan Araos Araos, Carlos Asalgado Martínez, Edmundo Alberto Asenjo Gálvez, Daniel Cancino Varas, Gustavo Caruman Soto, Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos, Germán Erazo Ahumada, Ricardo Erazo Ahumada, Héctor Alfredo Flores Vergara, Segundo Gangas Godoy, Enrique Gutiérrez Rubilar, Luis Gutiérrez Uribe, Guido Jara Brevis, Jaime Márquez Campos, Luis Mora Cerda, José Mora Diocares, José Muñoz Leal, Enrique Naranjo Muñoz, Nelson Ortiz Vignolo, Manuel Poblete Vergara, Luis Tomás Rojas Torres, Manuel Tapia Tapia, and Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera.

In 1977, the Ministry General Secretariat of Government created, under the dependency of the Directorate of Civil Organizations, the National Secretariat of Guilds and placed Misael Galleguillos at its head, a mathematics teacher from the Valparaíso branch of the University of Chile, an active militant of Patria y Libertad during the Popular Unity government.

His apparent mission was to form pro-government union leaders, but in truth, his main role consisted of watching and infiltrating opposition union leaderships and passing all that information to the CNI.

The directorate of the Secretariat of Guilds had its offices in the Diego Portales building, but most of its officials and collaborators worked near there, in a three-story house that stood at the corner of the Alameda and Victoria Subercaseaux Street, on the side of Cerro Santa Lucía.

Galleguillos, enthusiastic about his task, recreated the National Revolutionary Syndicalist Movement (MRNS)—inspired by an old movement of the same name—with headquarters in a large house on Vergara Street 180, in the old República neighborhood, southeast of downtown Santiago, and closely linked to the CNI.

Several of the main pro-government union leaders gathered in that place, among them René Sotolicchio, president of the National Association of Municipal Employees; Valericio Orrego Salas, president of the Association of Employees of the Ministry of Public Works; Carlos Navarrete, president of the Sindicato N° 1 of Street Fairs of Santiago; and Jaime Tramont Castillo, a union leader from Valparaíso.

Galleguillos also summoned Werner Anís Bischosausen, Eugenio Cáceres Contreras, Ramón Callís Arrigorriaga, Iván Catalina Sánchez, Gustavo Cuevas Torrealba, Héctor Larenas Bugueño, Luis Lillo Abarca, Lázaro Maluenda, Claudio Matte, and Pedro Urquieta.

Claudio Matte and Héctor Larenas financed the rent of the headquarters, where the security officers were Hugo Cabezas Freire, a member of the CNI, and Rigoberto Moreno, a former Navy official.

The leadership of the movement, headed by Galleguillos, was composed of José Fernández Jorquera, Arturo Marshall de Amesti, Alfredo Urrutia, Fernando Muñoz Parra, and Marcelo Retamal Moreno, who dedicated themselves to planning shock actions, producing propaganda, and programming union training courses for the cadres and leaders they summoned to their meetings.

Luis Lillo Abarca was in charge of training, and Héctor Larenas Buqueño of propaganda and public relations.

Black shirts and Nazi salutes

In another property, located at Larraín Street 8081, in front of the Tobalaba airfield, or in a vacant lot in Farellones, paramilitary training was carried out for the militants who made up the shock groups.

This task was performed by Fernando Muñoz, Genaro Pozo, and Manuel Hernández. The use of black shirts, the salute with the arm raised in the Nazi style, and the singing of military hymns were mandatory.

Other militants such as Pablo Medina, Jorge Salinas (former Patria y Libertad, nicknamed "Bombero Loco"), and Santiago Schesta assumed the preparation of explosives that they installed in previously determined zones and which press releases attributed to leftist groups.

One of the MRNS's actions with public repercussions was the boycott of an ANEF press conference, in which Guillermo Henríquez, Jorge Salazar Hojman, Genaro Pozo, and Jorge Baldrich Camus burst in shouting "traitor" and "sell-out" at Tucapel Jiménez.

The next day, Baldrich appeared photographed in El Mercurio. He declared later that the order had been given to him by the then Minister Secretary General of Government, General Sergio Badiola Brodeg, who was seconded by the undersecretary of the portfolio, the lawyer Jovino Novoa Vásquez.

Galleguillos also had a secret informant among the opposition who anticipated all the activities of the "Group of Ten." It was Federico Mujica Canales, a short man, a constant pipe smoker, who presided over the Cepch.

Already in 1975, in the glory years of the DINA, opposition union leaders were closely watched and their meetings recorded by agents or collaborators infiltrated among them. Marcia Merino, "la flaca Alejandra," a MIR member who collaborated with the DINA, received from Rolf Wenderoth at the central barracks in Belgrado verbatim transcripts of the meetings of the Group of Ten, the National Union Coordinator (CNS), and the Unitary Workers' Front (FUT).

Her task was to analyze the contents and infer probable courses of action for the unionists, returning them later to Wenderoth's offices.

After the installation of the CNI in 1977, the DINA's replacement continued the same method of tracking, surveillance, listening, and penetration. The information gathered was incorporated into individual folders, and their contents were periodically replicated, with copies sent to the central barracks on República Street.

There, they were received by Mirtha Espinoza Caamaño, the secretary of Colonel Roberto Schmied, head of the Interior Department, who was later appointed commander of the Metropolitan Intelligence Division, where the various anti-subversive brigades were located. Under Schmied's direct command were Major Zanelli and Captain Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, in charge of operational tasks.

The secretary registered the information in control books, with the date of entry, the unit of origin, and a brief description of the content. Acronyms and codes were used according to the respective units and sections. Thus, for example, F.1.1 corresponded to the head of the division; F-1.2 to the deputy head, and so on, according to the various departments into which the CNI was divided.

Close surveillance was exercised over the union world through the Labor Brigade or Political-Union Brigade, which depended directly on the Metropolitan Intelligence Division, under the command of Colonel Schmied Zanzi.

The head of the brigade from 1979 was the Carabineros captain Miguel Eugenio Hernández Oyarzo ("Felipe Bascur"), who had performed similar functions in the DINA in 1977, from the "Ollagüe" barracks, located on José Domingo Cañas Street, in the Ñuñoa commune.

By mid-1979, the brigade moved to a new secret barracks on Agustinas Street and was divided into four groups, each of them under the command of Army captain Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez ("Manolo Arriagada"), Héctor Lira ("Julián Reyes"), Nelson Fernández Franco ("Carlos Santander"), and Jorge Ramírez Romero ("Carlos de la Fuente"), respectively.

Among the agents were Pedro Alfaro Fernández, Juan Araos Araos, Carlos Asalgado Martínez, Edmundo Alberto Asenjo Gálvez, Daniel Cancino Varas, Gustavo Caruman Soto, Juan Evaristo Duarte Gallegos, Germán Erazo Ahumada, Ricardo Erazo Ahumada, Héctor Alfredo Flores Vergara, Segundo Gangas Godoy, Enrique Gutiérrez Rubilar, Luis Gutiérrez Uribe, Guido Jara Brevis, Jaime Márquez Campos, Luis Mora Cerda, José Mora Diocares, José Muñoz Leal, Enrique Naranjo Muñoz, Nelson Ortiz Vignolo, Manuel Poblete Vergara, Luis Tomás Rojas Torres, Manuel Tapia Tapia, and Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera.

Leaders such as Eduardo Ríos, Ernesto Vogel, Manuel Bustos, and Tucapel Jiménez, among others, had their telephones tapped, and all correspondence sent to them and their families from abroad and within the country was reviewed in the unit that the CNI maintained at the Post Office.

A folder was kept for each one with their personal, work, and family background, in addition to their contact networks.

In 1976, a CNI agent, nicknamed "Omar," recruited as an informant the employee who worked as an assistant for the ANEF, at its three-story headquarters located at Alameda and Riquelme. The "junior" was named Julio Olivares Silva and was the son of a friend of Tucapel Jiménez.

Twice a week, the boy delivered his reports to the Labor Brigade barracks, where in exchange he received a cash payment. In 1977, Olivares Silva was incorporated into the CNI staff under the alias "Gabriel Carrasco González," although everyone called him "Barnabás."

Infiltration of the leaderships

Valericio Orrego, for his part, also became a paid collaborator of the CNI. He infiltrated Carlos Santa María, a leader of the Group of Ten, recruiting an employee of his in a business he had at Bandera and General Mackenna. The informant was named Patricio Pezoa and had to report periodically to "Manolo" or "Carlos de la Fuente," his control agents in the CNI.

One of the most secret paid snitches that the repressive body maintained in the leadership spheres of opposition unionism could only be identified in the first semester of 2009. It was the socialist Víctor Hugo Gac, a member of the executive committee of the CNS, a man then very close to Arturo Martínez, the current president of the CUT, to whom the CNI paid 40,000 pesos per month for his reports.

Thus, at the beginning of the spring of 1981, the CNI had the certainty that the much-feared opposition union unity was being achieved and that the main forger of it was the president of the fiscal employees, Tucapel Jiménez.

The matter was even more serious because Jiménez also held conversations with some of the main political leaders of the dissidence, among them Eduardo Frei Montalva. The ANEF leader and the former president had already met at the Vicaría de la Pastoral Obrera together with some dignitaries of the Catholic Church.

The CNI analysts reached the conclusion that a national strike of unpredictable consequences was being prepared, with the support, furthermore, of numerous instances and governments from the entire world.

The information gathered by the CNI reached La Moneda, and in the following weeks, the director of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINE), General Ramsés Arturo Álvarez Sgolia, received the order from General Augusto Pinochet to eliminate Tucapel Jiménez.

by Manuel Salazar Salvo

Source: interferencia.cl, May 5, 2020