On September 17, 1974, Néstor Alfonso GALLARDO AGUERO, 24, an accountant and regional leader of the MIR in Temuco, was forcibly disappeared. His detention took place in Santiago at the hands of DINA agents.

There are testimonies indicating that he was seen in Cuatro Alamos and Villa Grimaldi afterward. The Commission is convinced that his disappearance was the work of State agents, who thereby violated his human rights.

Source: Rettig Report

Operation Colombo: Supreme Court confirms convictions of DINA agents for the aggravated kidnapping of an accountant.

The highest Court ruled out that the grounds put forward by the appellants to invalidate the sentence handed down by the Santiago Court of Appeals—which confirmed the first-instance ruling convicting the former agents—were applicable in this case.

The Supreme Court rejected the appeals in cassation filed against the sentence that convicted former agents of the defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) César Manríquez Bravo, Ciro Torré Sáez, and Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko to 5 years and one day of imprisonment as authors of the crime of aggravated kidnapping of accountant Néstor Alfonso Gallardo Agüero, who was detained on September 28, 1974, within the framework of the so-called "Operation Colombo." Before analyzing the appeals, it is convenient to recall that in the fifth point of the first-instance ruling—adopted by the challenged sentence—the following facts were established: ‘1.- That the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA, was an organized, hierarchical structure with its own resources, detention centers, etc., in charge of a General Director who exercised national command and to whom all its members were subordinate. DINA operations in the Metropolitan Region were in charge of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade (BIM), commanded by an Army officer and his general staff, who advised him on intelligence tasks. Two Brigades depended on this Chief, one of them called Caupolicán, one of whose objectives at the time these events occurred was the fight against the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), with which the victim of this process was associated. These Brigades were organized at the top around a commanding Officer who established the guidelines, objectives, and priorities of the work; the Caupolicán brigade was directed by the late Army Officer Marcelo Moren Brito, who established the guidelines, objectives, and priorities of the work, and was also seconded by a general staff composed of officers who provided advice and were in charge of the operation of the barracks. This level of structure, like any hierarchical organization, maintained contact and information channels with its superiors, to whom it reported on its repressive work. The operations of the Brigades were carried out by Groups or work teams, composed of members of the Army, Carabineros, and the Investigations Police of Chile, who used the facilities or detention centers where they carried out their work; 2.- That Néstor Alfonso Gallardo Agüero, ‘El Bolche’, 24 years old, accountant, regional leader of Temuco of the Revolutionary Left Movement, was detained on September 28, 1974, on a public street by armed civilians belonging to the Halcón group, which at that time was directed by Officer Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and upon being apprehended, he received a gunshot wound to one of his arms. Although he was wounded, he was still taken to one of the clandestine DINA detention centers, the one at JOSÉ DOMINGO CAÑAS No. 1367 IN ÑUÑOA, which at that date had Carabineros Officer Ciro Torré Sáez as Barracks Chief, and in which detainees were subjected to various types of torture with the clear purpose of obtaining from them relevant information about their organization and the participation of other members, seeking thereby to prevent and dismantle any opposition to the de facto government under a policy of fear, directed at that time by Gendarmerie Officer Orlando Manzo Durán. According to witness statements, the victim was seen in both places before disappearing; detainees who obtained their freedom were able to recognize him; 3.- That the aforementioned Gallardo Agüero was included in a public list in the written press in 1975, which reported that, along with other leftist militants, he had died in the town of Salta in Argentina as a result of an alleged confrontation. This information, which became known as the case of the 119 or Operation Colombo, was the result of disinformation maneuvers carried out by DINA agents abroad to hide the kidnapping and disappearance of political party militants detained between May 27, 1974, and February 20, 1975; 4.- That the victim continued to be illegitimately deprived of liberty by the DINA, with December 1974 being the date when his trail was lost from the Cuatro Álamos detention center, as well as the fate he has met both physically and psychologically, without any news of him having been received to date, nor is there any record of his departure from or entry into the country, nor is his natural death or death by the intervention of third parties proven’”, the highest court's ruling reproduces. “The events described were qualified by the sentence as constituting the crime of aggravated kidnapping, provided for and sanctioned in article 141, third paragraph, of the Penal Code. In the same sense, the illicit act was qualified as a crime against humanity, since the crime was committed because the authorities and the legal-political context and the military jurisdiction of the time favored impunity and defenselessness, and favored the elimination of invisible or undesirable persons,” it adds. For the Criminal Chamber, from reading the defense brief of the accused Torré Sáez, it emerges that the petitioner attempts, in a first section, to invalidate the ruling with the purpose of obtaining an acquittal because he is exempt from criminal responsibility, given the concurrence of the exculpatory circumstance of article 10 No. 9 of the Penal Code. Notwithstanding the above, he immediately directs the appeal toward the goal of achieving a reduced sentence, as a corollary of being favored by the same aforementioned facts with the mitigating circumstance of article 214 of the Code of Military Justice, to finally estimate that the mitigating circumstance of article 103 of the same legal body applies in his favor, allegations that the ruling rejects. The resolution adds that what the petitioner begins by denying, he ends up accepting, from which it is inferred that the ground for nullity under study contains motives that are incompatible with each other, based on different, contradictory, and irreconcilable assumptions, which cancel each other out and which, consequently, are foreign to the strict-law appeal that is the appeal in cassation on the merits. “In accordance with what has been stated above, the appeal under analysis will be dismissed,” it states. Regarding the substantive challenge formulated by the defense of Manríquez Bravo, the Second Chamber maintains that: the facts of participation declared by the ruling conflict with those stated in the appeal, for which it has been claimed that the laws regulating evidence were violated in their establishment. However, the error of the brief is that the provisions cited do not satisfy the intended purpose. Indeed—it continues—regarding testimonial evidence, it can be maintained that article 459 of the Code of Criminal Procedure does not possess the quality required to support the ground for nullity under examination, since it only empowers the court to grant witness statements the value of sufficient demonstration of the fact about which they testify; that is, it does not constitute an imperative for the conduct of the lower court judges but only has the purpose of indicating to the court a specific criterion for weighing the statements provided by the deponents, in the valuation of which the judges act with exclusive powers. By virtue of this, it is up to the trial judges to sovereignly assess the assertions of the witnesses and make an estimative and comparative examination of them, being discretionally authorized to consider or not as sufficient proof of a fact the testimonies that meet the intrinsic qualities determined by the aforementioned article. Additionally, article 464 of the indicated body of laws gives the trial judges the discretion to consider the statements of such persons as judicial presumptions when they do not meet the requirements of the aforementioned article 459, a condition that distances the precept from the normative character attributed to it by the appeal. “In turn, article 485 of the Code of Criminal Procedure does not constitute a law regulating evidence either, because it only deals with defining what a presumption is in a criminal trial. For its part, article 487 of the same text only refers to general principles of a procedural nature, but does not contain any mandate that judges must observe in the task of assessing evidence. Regarding the infringement of article 488 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, although the section of the precept that has the status of a rule regulating evidence is cited—numbering 1° and 2°, first part—in strict terms, the reading of the appeal does not demonstrate the imputation of having violated such a provision, since it only raises a discrepancy regarding the valuation that the ruling confers on the elements of conviction gathered and related in the sentence, according to which the intervention of his client in the events was considered proven, disagreeing only with its conclusions, a matter foreign to this appeal of a substantive nature,” it affirms. It concludes that finally, and regarding article 456 bis of the same body of rules, it is necessary to point out that said precept alludes to the conviction that the Judge must have in order to convict, which does not oblige him to value the evidence produced in the way the appellant requires, since the latter, by virtue of the law, has a wide margin to estimate or dismiss them in his activity of valuing those means, so the alleged violation could hardly be configured. Therefore, it is resolved that the appeals in cassation on the merits filed by the defendants César Manríquez Bravo and Ciro Torré Sáez against the sentence handed down by the Santiago Court of Appeals on April 4, 2019, are rejected. In the civil aspect, the sentence ordering the State to pay $40,000,000 for moral damages to a sister of the victim was confirmed.

Source: diarioconstitucional.cl 6/28/2021

Date: 06-28-2021

Four Chilean repressors sentenced to five years in prison

The Santiago Court tribunal sentenced those guilty of the kidnapping and death of Néstor Alfonso Gallardo Agüero, who was 24 years old at the time. Four members of the repressive apparatus of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet were sentenced to five years and one day in prison for the 1974 disappearance of a leader of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), judicial sources said this Monday.

The Santiago Court tribunal imposed the sentences on Orlando Manzo Durán, César Manríquez Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Ciro Torré Sáez, whom it found guilty of the kidnapping of Néstor Alfonso Gallardo Agüero, who was 24 years old at the time.

Gallardo Agüero was intercepted on a public street on September 28, 1974, by armed civilians of the "Halcón" group, then directed by Krassnoff, who has accumulated sentences of more than 600 years in prison for various crimes against humanity, reported the EFE agency.

During the detention operation, the victim was shot and, despite being wounded, was taken to a detention center of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Pinochet's secret police, where the sentenced Torré was the barracks chief, as explained by Judge Mario Carroza in the ruling. "The detainees were subjected to various types of torture with the clear purpose of obtaining from them relevant information about their organization and the participation of other members, seeking thereby to prevent and dismantle any opposition to the de facto government under a policy of fear," stated Carroza. During that time, the victim was held at the 4 Álamos detention center, in the south of the Chilean capital, then directed by Manzo Durán, where he was last seen, as confirmed by people who were also imprisoned in that place and who acknowledge having seen Gallardo. A year later, however, his name appeared among the victims of Operation Colombo, which was a setup by the dictatorship to cover up the disappearance of 119 political prisoners, which even included unique editions of two apocryphal newspapers from Argentina and Brazil, published with the help of the security services of those countries. According to those publications, the 119 were members of the MIR, a group that fought against Pinochet, supposedly killed in internal purges of that group. The ruling also ordered the State to pay compensation of 40 million pesos (a little more than 60,000 dollars) to a sister of the victim.

Source: eldiariodelarepublica.com 4/8/2019

Date: 04-08-2019

45 years after the Coup: University of Chile to award 11 more posthumous and symbolic degrees to executed and disappeared students

Those distinguished on this occasion will be the political executions of José Modesto Amigo Latorre, Tatiana Valentina Fariña Concha, Sócrates Augusto Ponce Pacheco, and Frank Randall Teruggi Bombatch; and the forcibly disappeared Clara Elena Canteros Torres, Bernardo de Castro López, Jorge Humberto D’Orival Briceño, Jorge Enrique Espinosa Méndez, Néstor Alfonso Gallardo Agüero, José Fernando Romero Lagos, and Eduardo Humberto Ziede Gómez. [UPDATED] This Tuesday, September 11, the University of Chile will award posthumous and symbolic degrees to 11 new students, who will join the other 100 who already received them earlier this year, as part of an institutional commitment to memory, reparation, truth, and justice. As reported by the institution, the list will continue to grow as they are analyzing other cases based on various sources and archives, in an open process. As an institutional memory process, open and in constant development. This is how the decree that officialized the awarding of university distinctions of posthumous and symbolic degrees and posthumous and symbolic academic degrees to forcibly disappeared and politically executed students of this university was defined since its announcement in 2017. That is why this Tuesday, September 11, within the framework of the official commemoration ceremony of the 45th anniversary of the Coup d'État, the Casa de Bello will deliver this recognition to 11 students in the hands of their relatives, who will participate in this meeting that will be held at the Central House of the campus, an activity open to the entire community. Those who will be distinguished join the other 100 students who received their degrees and licenses on April 11 of this year, a list that will continue to grow in the coming months since, as reported by the institution, they continue to receive cases and background information that they are studying and analyzing, in a process that has been supported by associations of relatives and human rights organizations. Those distinguished on this occasion will be the political executions of José Modesto Amigo Latorre, Tatiana Valentina Fariña Concha, Sócrates Augusto Ponce Pacheco, and Frank Randall Teruggi Bombatch; and the forcibly disappeared Clara Elena Canteros Torres, Bernardo de Castro López, Jorge Humberto D’Orival Briceño, Jorge Enrique Espinosa Méndez, Néstor Alfonso Gallardo Agüero, José Fernando Romero Lagos, and Eduardo Humberto Ziede Gómez. An institutional commitment Since the return to democracy, the University of Chile has been developing initiatives to clarify and disseminate the consequences of the dictatorship on the country's first public university, among which are the closure of degree programs and the disappearance, persecution, and death of members of its university community. To work on the awarding of posthumous and symbolic degrees, the university established the Posthumous Degrees Committee, which includes the Human Rights Chair and the Andrés Bello Central Archive of the Vice-Rectorate of Extension and Communications, the Legal Directorate, and the Vice-Rectorate of Academic Affairs, organizations supported by the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared and the Association of Relatives of the Politically Executed. Added to the awarding of this distinction is the declassification of the summary proceedings of the dictatorial period, open to the general public and which had as one of its results the publication of the book "The Dictatorship of the Summary Proceedings (1974-1985). Intervened University of Chile." Finally, the U. of Chile called on the national community so that those who have information linked to this topic can send it to continue with this process of memory and justice.

Source: elmostrador.cl 9/10/2018

Date: 09-10-2018