The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence convicting six retired Carabineros for their responsibility in the crimes of aggravated kidnapping and simple kidnapping committed against fifteen people in the town of Isla de Maipo during the civil-military dictatorship in 1973, whose remains were found in 1978 inside the Lonquén Ovens.

“Pieces of yellowish skulls, with traces of scalp; loose, black hairs; torn clothing in which a pair of blue jeans and a man’s vest can be recognized.” This was the description by the deputy director of Revista Hoy, Abraham Santibáñez, following the discovery of the bodies of fifteen peasants detained, tortured, and murdered by Carabineros during the civil-military dictatorship in 1978.

In 1973, a Carabineros patrol detained 15 men between the ages of 17 and 51, who were taken to the Isla de Maipo police station, the place where they were last seen alive. Following this, the police officers took them with their hands tied and they were thrown into the lime kiln ovens in Lonquén.

Statements made by an elderly man who claimed to have found human remains in the abandoned mines led to the creation of a commission tasked with going to Lonquén that same day to verify those claims. Its members were Enrique Alvear, auxiliary bishop of Santiago; Vicar Cristián Precht; Javier Egaña, executive secretary of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad; Alejandro González, chief lawyer of the same institution; Máximo Pacheco, lawyer; the director of the magazine Qué Pasa, Jaime Martínez; and the deputy director of the magazine Hoy, Abraham Santibáñez.

The highest-ranking officials of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, together with Máximo Pacheco and Bishop Alvear, went to the Supreme Court to file a complaint and request an investigation.

On December 6, 1978, the Plenary of the Supreme Court appointed the Minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Adolfo Bañados Cuadra, as Minister in Extraordinary Visit in charge of continuing the Lonquén investigation.

Information from the dictatorship’s agencies indicated that those detainees had been taken to the Estadio Nacional. This was also affirmed by Captain Lautaro Castro, who at the time of the detention was the chief of the Isla de Maipo police station, and his subordinates.

In April 1979, the visiting minister declared himself incompetent and the case was transferred to military justice; however, the investigation had determined that the victims did not die during a confrontation and that Captain Lautaro’s version was “intrinsically implausible.”

“In none of the 15 skeletal remains studied by the Legal Medical Institute were signs of perforations, fractures, or other types of traces found that could be related to firearm projectiles impacting a living organism, therefore the death of the fifteen people must be attributed to other causes,” stated the resolution by Minister Bañados.

The military prosecutor issued an indictment against Captain Lautaro Castro Mendoza and Carabineros Juan Villegas Navarro, Félix Sagredo Aravena, David Coliqueo Fuentealba, José Belmar Sepúlveda, Jacinto Torres González, Manuel Muñoz Rencoret, and Justo Romo Peralta as authors of the death of the 15 Lonquén victims.

However, the following month—on August 16—the Amnesty Law was applied to them, resulting in their release and the dismissal of the case. This resolution was confirmed by the Court Martial on October 22 of the same year.

According to information from the Museum of Memory, once the investigation was concluded, the relatives requested that the victims’ bodies be handed over for burial, but although Military Prosecutor Gonzalo Salazar ordered the remains to be released, they were removed from the Legal Medical Institute that night in secret and buried in a mass grave in what was called operation “Television Set Removal.”

On February 18, 2010, the acting special judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, Héctor Solís, announced the identification of 13 of the 15 bodies whose remains were found in 1978, finally allowing for their burial, with the remains being removed from the Legal Medical Service on March 26.

On March 27, a public wake was held at the Civic Courtyard of the Isla de Maipo Municipality, and on Sunday the 28th, the solemn burial of the victims took place at the Isla de Maipo Parish Cemetery.

Convicted Carabineros

This afternoon, the Supreme Court convicted six retired Carabineros for their responsibility in the crimes of aggravated kidnapping and simple kidnapping committed against fifteen people from the town of Isla de Maipo.

In a split decision, the Second Chamber of the highest court rejected an appeal for cassation and confirmed the sentence of Judge Marianela Cifuentes, which sentenced David Coliqueo Fuentealba, Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta, Félix Héctor Sagredo Aravena, Jacinto Torres González, and Juan José Villegas Navarro to 15 years and one day in prison as authors of aggravated kidnapping.

Pablo Ñancupil Raguileo was sentenced to 11 terms of 60 days in prison as the author of simple kidnapping.

Lorena Pizarro, president of the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared, said that “it is so brutal that, for multiple murders, entire families destroyed, after so many years of impunity, they receive a sentence of this type, especially when today they are senior citizens and lived their whole lives with impunity.

We have to face the fact that the sentences are not exemplary of the magnitude of the crime. It is good that it was confirmed, but it should have been more than that, without a doubt.”

“In general, the judiciary has been quite lenient with the criminals responsible for crimes against humanity; most of the convictions never involve civilians, since the dictatorship was civil-military.

Here there were clear responsibilities of those who held positions in ministries and public services. The judiciary has settled for sentences that are sometimes even laughable, which allow criminals to go free.

So the delay in investigations, the low sentences, and the fact that the truth is not a subject we know, occurs in the immense number of cases being investigated in Chilean courts. One feels that this justice, ‘to the extent possible,’ dictated and decreed in the first government of the transition until today, is a reality in the judiciary,” Lorena Pizarro elaborated.

For his part, lawyer Nelson Caucoto said that “we are satisfied with the justice system’s resolution, because we have finished a case that dates back to 1973, which had an interval until 2005 and was dismissed by the military justice system.

We managed to extract it from the military justice system and take it to the ordinary one. I don’t know if there is anyone who thought that in the Lonquén case the subjects would be convicted, when they had been definitively dismissed through the application of the amnesty.

From that point of view, it is an important achievement; the main achievement was recognizing the victims and handing them over to their families, because the remains were thrown into a mass grave and we had to start with the identification process, which was finally achieved for the peace of mind of the families.”

“Under other circumstances, the sentences could have been several life imprisonments, but a fifteen-year sentence for these people is significant nonetheless. With this, a long investigative process is concluded, and that must be valued,” the lawyer concluded.

Regarding civil matters, the sentence ordering the State to pay a total compensation of $2,050,000,000 to the victims’ families was confirmed.

Source: radio.uchile.cl, June 19, 2018

Lonquén: The Carabineros massacre of 15 peasants

On October 7, 1973, at 9:45 PM, a group of eleven peasants from the town of Isla de Maipo was detained by Carabineros officers. The police did not carry arrest or search warrants for the homes of these people.

Numerous witnesses saw how they were beaten and loaded into a white pickup truck owned by the owner of the Fundo Naguayán—where the houses of the three families were located—and how they were tied up and laid face down on the floor of the vehicle.

They were the agricultural workers: Enrique Astudillo Álvarez (51), Omar Astudillo Rojas (20), Ramón Astudillo Rojas (27), Carlos Hernández Flores (39), Nelson Hernández Flores (32), Oscar Hernández Flores (30), Sergio Maureira Lillo (46), José Maureira Muñoz (26), Rodolfo Maureira Muñoz (22), Segundo Maureira Muñoz (24), and Sergio Maureira Muñoz (27).

The Carabineros officers stood on their backs. They paraded them through the streets of the town to intimidate the entire population. Finally, they were taken to the police station.

The same fate befell four young men who had been detained that same day in the town square: Miguel Brant Bustamante (22), Manuel Navarro Salinas (20), Iván Ordóñez Lama (17), and José Herrera Villegas (17).

The families were deceived by government authorities. They were informed that the detainees had been transferred to the Estadio Nacional in the capital. In 1974, the relatives filed a writ of amparo. When the local authorities were questioned by the courts, they merely stated that “all had been transferred on October 8, 1973, to the Estadio Nacional.” This was completely false.

The SENDET (National Service for Detainees) contradictorily indicated that it “did not have, and had never had, information about them.”

Sergio Diez—today a senator for Renovación Nacional—and at that time a delegate of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s dictatorship to the OAS, lied to the whole world in 1975, saying that: “these people had no legal existence,” while other “Lonquén detainees had been admitted to the Legal Medical Institute in October 1973.”

On November 29, 1978, an informant gave the Catholic Church the exact location where the ill-fated remains of the peasants and young men were: some lime kilns in the town of Lonquén, 14 kilometers from the town of Talagante.

The Vicar of the Solidarity, Cristián Precht, and the Bishop of Santiago, Enrique Alvear, decided to verify the information by going to the site along with journalists—Jaime Martínez (Qué Pasa) and Abraham Santibáñez (Revista Hoy)—and lawyers Máximo Pacheco (PDC) and Alejandro González.

The press reported: “In an old stone construction, about twelve meters high, attached to the slope of a hill, inside which there are two silos of two and a half meters, were the corpses (...) In the other, covered with stones from above and with an exit at its lower part, also walled up, there were human remains, a skull, torn clothes (...)”.

It was a precise and painful blow to the conscience of thousands of Chileans. A wound open to this day, unspeakable. An image of pain and human misery, of horror without limit and brutality that the history of humanity will remember forever.

Pinochet and his lackeys could do nothing to hide the horrendous crime. The bishop informed Israel Bórquez, president of the Supreme Court and collaborator of the regime, who sent the records to the Talagante Court. Judge Juana Godoy was appointed to begin the investigation.

In December 1978, the remains were sent to the Legal Medical Institute. The Plenary of the Supreme Court appointed Judge Adolfo Bañados as Minister in Visit, who ordered autopsies and ballistic examinations and consolidated the cases in which the disappearance of persons or presumed misfortune had been reported. He interrogated the relatives of the “disappeared” peasants.

The police officers involved: Lautaro Castro Mendoza—chief of the Isla de Maipo police station—and Carabineros Juan Villegas Navarro, Félix Sagredo Aravena, Manuel Muñoz Rencoret, Jacinto Torres González, David Coliqueo Fuentealba, José Belmar Sepúlveda, and Justo Romo Peralta, gave the courts the version that they had “taken the highly dangerous detainees to the Lonquén ovens in order to unearth the weaponry they had hidden, and that later—at the site—they had suffered an armed attack by unknown persons, with the peasants being killed by the gunfire.

Fearing reprisals, they had decided to hide the bodies in the abandoned ovens.”

In April 1979, Minister Bañados had to declare himself incompetent due to the prevailing legislation that grants immunity to uniformed personnel and hands over criminal cases in which they are involved to the Military Justice system.

However, before leaving the case, he established the responsibility of these police officers in the events. His resolution states: “The version (...) to try to explain the death of their prisoners, not only contradicts the merits of the case in multiple aspects and details, in particular, of course, regarding the number of victims, but is intrinsically implausible (...) in none of the remains were signs of perforations, fractures, or other types of traces found that could be related to firearm projectiles impacting a living organism, therefore the death of the fifteen people must be attributed to other causes.”

The case then passed into the hands of the “Second Military Court,” which indicted the Carabineros officers as “authors of the crime of unnecessary violence causing death.” After a short process, the case was definitively dismissed through the Amnesty Law dictated by Pinochet, legislation to which the eight Carabineros had requested to be subject.

Subsequently, the “Court Martial” confirmed that resolution.

The murderer Lautaro Castro was promoted to the rank of Captain.

One year after the bodies of the peasants and young men were found, the remains were handed over to their families. The bodies were transported by officials of the Legal Medical Institute to Isla de Maipo and buried immediately—except for Sergio Maureira Lillo—to avoid the presence of their relatives, depositing them in a mass grave.

The relatives, aggrieved once again by the military authorities, filed a complaint with the Court Martial—which was forced to accept it—against military prosecutor Gonzalo Salazar Sweet for “fault and abuse committed by not complying with the order to hand over the bodies.” He was given a written censure.

In January 1980, the Supreme Court decided to set it aside, considering that the prosecutor “did not commit any fault. It was the judges themselves who imposed it on him who indicated the procedure he employed.”

A complaint was filed again with the justice system for the death of the Isla de Maipo peasants. This case was handled by visiting minister Héctor Solís, who could not continue his investigation. The judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, Marianela Cifuentes, continued the investigation, concluding it on September 12, 2016, when she issued a first-instance sentence.

The judge convicted the 7 Carabineros who detained the fifteen peasants; the former Carabineros were convicted for the crime of aggravated kidnapping: Lautaro Castro Mendoza, head of the patrol, to a sentence of 20 years in prison for his responsibility as an author.

David Coliqueo Fuentealba, Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta, Félix Héctor Sagredo Aravena, Jacinto Torres González, and Juan José Villegas Navarro were sentenced to 15 years in prison. Pablo Ñancupil Raguileo was sentenced to 900 days in prison.

The case went to the second instance, the San Miguel Court of Appeals, which on May 16, 2017, confirmed the sentence. On June 16, 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence convicting 6 former Carabineros, given that the head of the Carabineros, Lautaro Castro, had passed away before the conviction.

On February 18, 2010, the acting special judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, Héctor Solís, announced the identification of 13 of the 15 bodies whose remains were found in 1978, finally allowing for their burial, with the remains being removed from the Legal Medical Service on March 26.

On March 27, a public wake was held at the Civic Courtyard of the Isla de Maipo Municipality, and on Sunday the 28th, the solemn burial of the victims took place at the Isla de Maipo Parish Cemetery.

The Lonquén Ovens were demolished to erase all traces and footprints of memory, to definitively impose oblivion.

By Arnaldo Pérez Guerra

Source: prensaopal.cl, October 7, 2020