On October 27, 1973, Néstor Hernán CASTILLO SEPULVEDA, 23 years old, Regional Secretary of the Communist Youth; José Rosendo PEREZ RIOS, 24 years old, employee and militant of the Movement of Unitary Popular Action (MAPU); and Juan VERA OYARZUN, 53 years old, laborer, Regional Secretary of the Communist Party, union leader, and former councilman of Punta Arenas, were detained in the Argentine border town of Río Mayo.

On September 20, a group of four people, including Juan Vera, crossed the border into Argentina with the intention of requesting political asylum in that country. Two days later, they were handed over to the Argentine Gendarmerie by the owner of a local ranch and taken to Aldea Veleiros and subsequently to Río Mayo.

In this town, they remained under the custody of the Gendarmerie's Squadron No. 38. Furthermore, on September 28, José Rosendo Pérez and Néstor Castillo, who had also arrived from Chile days earlier, were detained at a boarding house in Río Mayo.

The six arrested individuals, having entered Argentina irregularly, remained for nearly 15 days in the Gendarmerie facilities, after which they were separated into two groups assigned to perform different tasks.

The group consisting of Juan Vera, Néstor Castillo, and José Rosendo Pérez performed work at the Río Mayo Municipality and spent the night at Squadron 38, while the group consisting of the other three slept at their workplace, a house under construction.

On October 27, Juan VERA, Néstor CASTILLO, and José Rosendo Pérez were handed over by the Gendarmerie to a group of Chilean military personnel and Carabineros who were traveling in an ambulance from the Coyhaique Hospital, a fact supported by multiple precise and consistent testimonies.

This is the last information available regarding the whereabouts and fate of the forcibly disappeared. There was no official explanation from the Chilean authorities regarding these events, and the national press only reported on the asylum request of the six refugees.

The Argentine press of the time, however, reported the handover of the disappeared to Chilean officials. Investigations into the case conducted by Argentine parliamentarians reached the same conclusion, stating that "the three individuals were effectively apprehended by Carabineros and transferred to Chile." The Commission formed the conviction that the disappearance of the three affected individuals was the responsibility of agents of the State of Chile, based on the following elements:

• The political background of the victims and the validity of their asylum requests in Argentina;
• The circumstance of having remained detained for more than a month in the Argentine Republic, with multiple consistent testimonies regarding the circumstances under which they were handed over to agents of the Chilean State;
• The investigations conducted by Argentine parliamentarians, the complaints from union leaders in that same country, and the information provided by the press regarding this case;
• The fact, reported at the time, that Chilean military personnel and Carabineros could operate on Argentine territory with the acceptance of that country's Gendarmerie; and
• Because since that date, no information has been obtained regarding the whereabouts of the victims.

Source: (Rettig Report)

On October 27, 1973, a group of Chilean military personnel and Carabineros kidnapped three citizens of their country in the Argentine border town of Río Mayo, Chubut: Néstor Hernán Castillo Sepúlveda, regional secretary of the Communist Youth; José Rosendo Pérez Ríos, militant of the Movement of Unitary Popular Action; and Juan Vera Oyarzún, regional secretary of the Communist Party, union leader, and former councilman of Punta Arenas.

The three had crossed the border at the end of September to request political asylum and had been detained by the Gendarmerie for having entered the country "irregularly." Later, they were all housed in the Gendarmerie Squadron, although they were free to go out to work.

Despite having asylum status, one month later the Argentine Gendarmerie handed them over to the Chileans. This is one of the cases of Operation Condor that appears clearly identified in the National Memory Archive.

Documentation provided by the province of Chubut includes the minutes of a secret session dedicated to these events held by the provincial Legislature on November 22, 1973. The deputies had appointed a special commission to investigate the disappearances, as the Gendarmerie argued that on October 27, 1973, the three men had left the squadron and never returned.

The legislators spoke with other refugees and with coworkers of Castillo, Pérez, and Vera, among other witnesses, and ratified the "visit" of the Chilean military in the town of Río Mayo on the same day the three men disappeared.

They concluded that it was a kidnapping that had the collaboration of the Argentine gendarmes. During the secret session, they discussed whether it was appropriate to file a judicial complaint, as several witnesses had indicated that they would not testify before any judge in Chubut because they distrusted the collusion with the Gendarmerie.

Finally, they resolved to inform the governor, the national Executive Branch, and the national Senate.

Source: pagina12.com.ar 3/27/2005

Date: 03-27-2005

By virtue of an arrest warrant issued by the Second Court of Letters of Linares, officials from the Homicide Brigade of this city proceeded to capture a former Army non-commissioned officer, who was convicted for the crime of repeated qualified kidnapping perpetrated in October 1973.

In accordance with instructions from this court, the detainee was placed at the disposal of the Gendarmería de Chile yesterday afternoon to serve a sentence of 3 years and 1 day, in relation to the "Coyhaique case" regarding the repeated kidnapping of victims Juan Vera Oyarzun, regional secretary of the Communist Youth; José Pérez Ríos, militant of the Movement of Unitary Popular Action (MAPU); and Néstor Castillo Sepúlveda, Regional Secretary of the Communist Party.

The former uniformed officer, with the initials M.A.R. and 77 years of age, according to judicial resolutions, participated in the events that occurred after October 27, 1973, when the victims were detained in the Argentine border town of Río Mayo.

Source: enlineamaule.cl, July 16, 2015

Date: 07-16-2015

Triple A murders in the 70s reconstructed in Argentina

Buenos Aires, January 31.

During the time that the parapolice Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A) and other complementary organizations operated (1973-1976), several foreign political refugees who sought asylum in the country after the coup d'état in Chile, at the hands of dictator Augusto Pinochet, were disappeared here or in their countries of origin to which they were handed over.

Two research teams from the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Peoples of Chile (Codepu) managed to reconstruct the fate of several Chileans murdered and disappeared here or handed over to the Pinochet dictatorship.

Thus, it reports that on October 27, 1973, three Chilean citizens who had arrived fleeing from Coyhaique to the town of Río Mayo in the southern Argentine province of Chubut were handed over to military personnel from their country.

They were Juan Vera Oyarzún, Néstor Hernán Castillo Sepúlveda, and José Rosendo Pérez Ríos, detained in an Argentine gendarmerie squadron after being turned in by the owner of a farm where they asked for help.

The Chilean military murdered them on the return trip, and their remains were never found. On September 30, 1974, the assassination of Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía was perpetrated in Buenos Aires, marked by the complicity of the DINA, the US CIA, the Triple A, and other organizations.

The DINA spy who participated in the crime, Enrique Lautaro Arancibia Clavel, is convicted and detained, but nothing has happened to the local perpetrators, despite several having been identified. On November 2, 1974, Guillermo Roberto Beaussire Alonso, a Chilean-British engineer whose sister was married to Andrés Pascal Allende, a leader of the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), was detained at Ezeiza airport.

Three days later, he was handed over to DINA military personnel who took him to clandestine centers in their country, where he was disappeared, as was, subsequently, Leandro José Lacaleo Calfulén, who had arrived from Chile in 1974 to Mendoza.

In January 1975, Sergio Eduardo Montenegro Godoy, a refugee under UN protection, was murdered in Buenos Aires. His killers could have been Chilean but had local support and protection. By May of that year, one of the most serious events among the so-called joint actions would occur with Operation Colombo, a precursor to Condor, the coordinating body of the Southern dictatorships.

Codepu had already investigated and written about Operation Colombo, created so that Pinochet could justify the disappearance of 119 people to the United Nations. It was a coordinated criminal action by the DINA, Triple A, and Argentine security and police sectors, which also involved certain press outlets and consisted of making burned and decapitated corpses appear, to which they attached false documents of some of the Chileans who appeared on the UN list to argue that the disappeared were actually "killing each other outside the country due to political differences." The case was documented by the recovered reports that the spy Arancibia Clavel sent from Buenos Aires to his superiors, where the names of local supporters appear. But the scandal did not stop the offensive. On June 2 of that same year in Buenos Aires, Juan Carlos Martín Zuñiga was detained and disappeared, and only a month later, another Chilean, Víctor Eduardo Oliva Troncoso, who was a refugee under UN protection, was kidnapped in Bahía Blanca, in the south of the country. His body was found with 35 bullet wounds, as was the mark of the Triple A at the time. The saga of death would claim other victims with the disappearance of Francisco Eduardo Gotschlils Cordero on July 5 and Jaime Manuel Gomez Roger on September 19. On the first day of November 1975, at the Liberty Hotel in this capital, Jean Ivet Claudel, a French-Chilean chemist and MIR militant, was kidnapped and murdered at the end of that month, according to the information sent to his superiors by Arancibia Clavel from Buenos Aires on January 8, 1976, where he clarified that the detainee was already "rip" (dead) 40 days earlier. Another case cited by Codepu is that of Ismenia del Rosario Hinostrosa Arroyo, detained and disappeared between December 10 and 15, 1975, in Hurlingham, Buenos Aires province, noting "that she is the first Chilean woman disappeared in Argentina."

Source: jornada.com.mx 2/1/2007

Date: 02-01-2007

Coyhaique Court confirms prosecution of former Army doctor for human rights violations

By three votes to one, the Coyhaique Court of Appeals confirmed the indictment of former Army official José María Fuentealba, implicated in the disappearance of three people in October 1973. The defense requested the release of the former doctor of the military institution last week, which was denied by the appeals court, and it has now also decided to indict him.

Fuentealba participated in the military delegation that, after the coup d'état, traveled to Río Mayo, Argentina, to capture Juan Vera, Néstor Castillo, and José Rosendo Pérez, who were being held by the Argentine Gendarmerie when they escaped to that country in search of political refuge.

The delegation was composed—in addition to Dr. Fuentealba—of Army Captain Joaquín Molina, a Carabinero with the surname Salinas, and non-commissioned officer Evaldo Reidlich Hains, according to the website www.memoriaviva.cl.

The three prisoners were loaded into a vehicle with the insignia of the Coyhaique Regional Hospital and transported in the direction of Chile, where their trail was lost. "The military personnel told them that their families were waiting for them at the border.

Once in Chilean territory, the military patrol forced the group to board a pickup truck and began the return toward the Las Bandurrias prison camp. Hours later, the vehicle arrived at the military facility.

Only the two uniformed officers and the doctor were traveling inside," the report adds. This weekend, an ocular inspection of the Coihaique Forest Reserve of the El Claro Cemetery was carried out, with the presence of the accused Evaldo Reidlich and Fuentealba, to verify information related to the case.

Lawyer Rafael Alvarado, defense attorney for Juan Vera, one of the three who disappeared after being handed over to Chilean military personnel by Argentine gendarmes, announced that new proceedings would be ordered to identify the rest of the members of the army patrol that participated in the event.

Source: Primera Linea May 14, 2002

Date: 05-14-2002

Reconstruction of the scene for disappearances in Coyhaique

The judicial proceeding was supervised by the magistrate of the First Criminal Court of Coyhaique, Luis Sepúlveda. The former uniformed officers José María San Martín and Evaldo Redlish participated in the reconstruction.

A strong contingent of police officers guarded the area. The area that served as the scene for the reconstruction is located in Las Bandurrias, about 20 kilometers from the city. The objective of the investigation is to clarify the circumstances of the disappearance of three people, Juan Vera Oyarzún, José Rosendo Pérez Ríos, and Néstor Castillo Sepúlveda, whose trail was lost after they crossed the border following the military coup and were returned to Chile by the Argentine Gendarmerie in October 1973.

The participants in the reconstruction were part of the military patrol that received the detainees. The case file is said to contain well-founded presumptions that the accused participated in the capacity of perpetrators.

Source: El Mostrador May 10, 2002

Date: 05-10-2002

Testimony received by memoriaviva

Transcription of the statement sent to Judge Sepúlveda by an official of the Coyhaique Regional Hospital, whose Director at the time was Mr. Jorge Luis Montecinos Soto, current Director of the Aysén Health Service:

“I remember

It is very difficult for me to remember these moments, because the reason for this is very unpleasant, as it dirties or tarnishes the precious childhood that we all have or had one day. Unfortunately, I do not remember the exact date, because many years have passed, but I can tell you that, one night in the early morning (1 or 2 in the morning), Dr.

Fuentealba ordered me to help unload some bodies that were wrapped in army blankets from a Mercedes Benz truck (UNIMOG) (there were about six corpses). They were then left in the Coyhaique Hospital morgue, and out of curiosity, a colleague and I checked the bodies one by one, in which I recognized a man with the surname Mansilla (in his personal statement he changes this name to Vera) and a classmate of mine for more than six years, José Rosendo Perez azocar, if I remember correctly (40 years ago).

At that moment, Dr. Fuentealba appears, puts his pistol to my colleague's chest, and says: 'You didn't see anything here!' And we went back to work. Subsequently, upon returning the next day, the bodies were no longer there.

It should be noted that Dr. Fuentealba was dressed in army clothing (camouflage clothing) and had a CIG rifle plus the pistol, just like the other military personnel who accompanied him, all armed, except for the CNI officials.

That is all I remember, I hope these details are of some use. Thank you.” This testimony, provided first in writing, was ratified by the witness before Judge Sepúlveda, specifying some background information.

The events occurred during the period when the current Service Director, Jorge Montecinos Soto, was Director of the Hospital, according to a curriculum vitae prepared by him, in which he avoids any relationship with both Fuentealba and the events in a statement prior to that of the witness.