Albano Fioraso Chau, a young teacher at INCACEA and an industrial high school, linked to the MIR, was detained on June 17, 1974, around 10:30 PM, just a few meters from his home located on Calle Maruri in the Independencia neighborhood, together with his friend Francisco Javier Urbina Soto.

The captors were two Carabineros belonging to the 9th Precinct and a civilian neighbor named Luis Eduardo Ortiz Farías, who were traveling in a Chevrolet station wagon, license plate PTS 53 from Algarrobo, owned by the latter.

The young men left Urbina’s home, heading toward Fioraso’s home, located on the same street, with the intention of watching a World Cup soccer match being broadcast on television that night. A few meters from the house, they were intercepted by the police and Ortiz, who forced them into the aforementioned vehicle and took them to a restaurant located at the intersection of Independencia and Colón.

There, they were transferred to a Chevrolet C-10 pickup truck, in which they were taken to the 9th Carabineros Precinct.

At the police station, they remained for several hours in the waiting room, where their personal information was recorded. Under these circumstances, they saw that Ortiz was moving inside the facility with authority, while trying to conceal his presence there.

Around 3:00 or 4:00 AM, they were placed in a cell that was packed with people detained for public drunkenness, vagrancy, and other minor offenses. They remained there until 11:00 AM on June 18, at which time they were taken separately to the Hospital José Joaquín Aguirre for a cursory medical check-up, and then returned to the police facility.

Around 12:30 PM, when there were no other detainees left in the precinct, some civilians arrived and proceeded to take Albano Fioraso out to the courtyard. Along with telling him that they had been looking for him for a long time, they began to beat him.

They accused him of having raided the Renca ammunition depot and distributing pamphlets. After a while, they took him back to the cell, where his friend saw him in poor physical condition. Later, they took both of them out and began to beat the victim again, while Urbina was interrogated regarding Fioraso. On this occasion, a uniformed officer joined in the acts.

Around 2:00 PM, the victim was taken out for the third time, but this time he was loaded into a Fiat van and they left the facility, heading down Avda. La Paz in an unknown direction.

Francisco Urbina was released around 6:00 PM. Before leaving, the Commissioner, Major Luis Zúñiga, told his mother to be careful with her children's friends and became angry with the released man because he tried to refute the accusation of "extremist" that the officer had made against his friend Fioraso.

The victim's mother, María Inés Chau, went to the 9th Precinct the day after the detention, around noon, and was able to see the young men being brought back from their medical check-up, at which time she was told to return in the afternoon.

She returned around 4:00 PM and interviewed Major Zúñiga, who told her that her son had been handed over at 2:00 PM to the Military Intelligence Service (SIM).

The cause of the victim's detention was a report made by a neighbor, Norma Pajkuric, who had conflicts with Fioraso's mother, whom she had threatened using her son. At the same time, she had warned neighbors not to associate with the young Fioraso, otherwise something bad might happen to them. This woman's daughter was friends with Eduardo Ortiz, the civilian who participated in the detention.

In July 1975, the name of Albano Fioraso Chau appeared on a list of 119 Chileans killed in Argentina, according to a news story published in the Brazilian newspaper O'DIA and the Argentine magazine LEA, which was widely publicized by the Chilean press.

Some deaths were said to have occurred in clashes with Argentine security forces, while others were the result of internal MIR infighting. Both Argentine and Brazilian authorities informed the Chilean courts that they were unaware of these alleged clashes, as well as the existence of these publications, which were edited only on that single occasion and for the sole purpose of disseminating this falsehood.

The authorities of the Chilean military government later had to acknowledge that there was no record of these deaths and that the victims mentioned had no record of leaving the country. All those who made up these lists were people who had been detained by Chilean security forces and remain forcibly disappeared, just like Albano Fioraso Chau.

Source: Vicariate of Solidarity, 1990

July 24 marks 33 years since the publication of the so-called List of the 119, the psychological warfare maneuver that the DINA christened "Operation Colombo," yet in only six of the 119 cases of disappearances have the criminals served a sentence already confirmed by the Supreme Court.

In these proceedings, the justice system has only issued final sentences in the cases of the kidnapping and disappearance of social worker María Teresa Bustillos Cereceda; former GAP members Manuel Cortez Joo and Miguel Angel Sandoval Rodríguez; the Chillán brothers Hernán and María Elena González Inostroza; philosophy student Jorge Espinosa Méndez (all of them MIR militants), and high school student Mario Carrasco Díaz, a socialist.

In the case of Espinosa, the only one sentenced is the agent Osvaldo Romo, who died in prison; in the other cited cases, the rulings also implicate the former director of the DINA, General (Ret.) Manuel Contreras, and his general staff.

There are three other cases from Operation Colombo in which the convictions have already been confirmed by the Court of Appeals, and in five of the remaining kidnappings, a first-instance ruling has been issued.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the case of engineering student Luis Guajardo Zamorano. More than 68 of the indictments issued since 2005 are for Manuel Contreras. The dictator himself, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, stripped of his immunity in 2006, was indicted for Operation Colombo by resolutions adopted by special ministers Alejandro Solís and Victor Montiglio, the same judge who recently indicted 98 agents.

But indictments do not always culminate in a sentence. Death arrived sooner for the former dictator, frustrating the expectations of justice for the Chileans who fight against impunity. According to sources among retired military personnel ("Crusade for National Reconciliation") cited in the newspaper El Mercurio on June 22 to call for an end to the trials, the total number of final sentences in human rights cases reaches twenty-two.

According to them, in the more than 300 cases affecting uniformed personnel, 1,165 indictments have been issued. 269 of these are in the investigation stage; and 6 are in the accusation and evidence phase. 14 defendants have appealed the first-instance ruling, and 16 cases are reportedly in cassation (a petition for annulment of a sentence).

Amnesty and strategies

The judicial strategy of the criminals—who use all available legal resources in the old penal system—combined with the lack of will of the Supreme Court to grant exclusivity in the task to judges handling human rights cases, has functioned in several cases as a guarantee of impunity.

The old criminal system remains in force for crimes committed before the enactment of the Criminal Procedure Reform. During 2007, as denounced in its annual report by the Foundation for Social Assistance of the Christian Churches (FASIC), the six criminal courts operating in Santiago refused to receive new cases, did not accept the reopening of summary proceedings, nor did they grant the unarchiving of cases, because they had an expiration date as courts (due to the reform) and could not take on new tasks, the fact constituting a denial of justice.

It is appropriate to highlight that 17 of the kidnappings of the so-called "Operation Colombo" do not currently have active proceedings, which ensures absolute impunity for those responsible (cases of student María Inés Alvarado, bricklayer Eduardo Alarcón, fruit seller Víctor Arévalo, mechanic Bladimir Arias, investigative official Sonia Bustos, biology student Luis Fuentes, accountant Néstor Gallardo, student Jorge Herrera, peasant activist Ramón Labrador, student Sergio Lagos H., secretary of the Society of Theatrical Authors Violeta López, merchant Juan Maturana, union leader Agustín Morales, health official Germán Moreno, Technical University student Ramón Núñez, La Bandera neighborhood merchant Gary Olmos, and student Carlos Salcedo). Another mechanism that delays the processing of cases has been the application by a minority of judges of amnesty, "res judicata," due obedience, and/or the statute of limitations. For example, in cases linked to Operation Colombo, even the first indictments had to be confirmed by the Supreme Court. In Chile, not all court ministers respect and know international human rights law, and there have been contradictory resolutions from the highest court that prove this.

Only after Pinochet's arrest in London did Chilean courts begin to investigate the cases of the forcibly disappeared. The debt of the justice system to Chilean society is still far from being settled, and impunity continues to be the rule in the vast majority of human rights violation cases, despite the constant mobilization of human rights organizations.

The 119 Collective, which brings together relatives of the fallen, commemorates this year the anniversary of the publication of the list that lied about the final destination of 100 men and 19 Chilean women, with "Video Encounters" that will be held at the former torture house at Calle Londres 38, between 6:00 PM and 9:00 PM, on Wednesday, July 23 ("Evidence: media and journalists at the service of repression"), Thursday, July 24 ("Resisting with the truth and the courage of those who do not stay silent"), and Friday, July 25 ("Justice makes its way: ethical and social condemnation of accomplices and cover-ups"). On Sunday the 27th, the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared, Founding Line, will hold a pilgrimage in the coastal town of Quintero, where it is believed some of the disappeared were thrown into the sea from helicopters. A memorial will be erected there.

Ethics and forgiveness

The Chilean Journalists' Association apologized this year to the relatives of those who fell in two of the dictatorship's propaganda montages, Operation Colombo and Rinconada de Maipú. For Colombo, former media directors Fernando Díaz Palma, of Las Últimas Noticias (part of the El Mercurio chain); Alberto Guerrero Espinoza, of La Tercera; and journalist Beatriz Undurraga Gómez, of El Mercurio, had already been sanctioned with public censure and temporary suspension of their professional membership for the serious breaches of ethics and truth committed in 1975.

The Ethics Tribunal that investigated these events in 2006 considered the directors of El Mercurio, René Silva Espejo, and the evening paper La Segunda—also owned by El Mercurio—Mario Carneyro, not imputable due to their death.

All of them collaborated with the montages devised by the DINA to "inform" in large headlines that 100 Chilean men and 19 Chilean women had died abroad, thus covering up their disappearance and sowing a terror that still leaves traces in the collective unconscious of the Chileans who lived through that era of chilling headlines: "Exterminated like rats," was the headline of the newspaper La Segunda on July 24, 1975.

According to the journalists, the montage was the work of Álvaro Puga, director of Civil Affairs of the dictatorship and head of Psychological Operations of the DINA. In La Segunda, he signed with the pseudonym "Alexis," but he was not a journalist, so he was not included in the sanctions. His name has not appeared until now in any indictment of the case.

The two lists of the dead reproduced in the Chilean press were taken from the single-edition newspapers O Dia, from Curitiba, Brazil, and Lea, from Argentina, which attributed the deaths to clashes with Argentine security forces or internal quarrels.

It was the "white march" of Operation Condor, the mutual aid pact between the police of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil that had already begun. In September 1974, the former commander-in-chief of the Army, Carlos Prats, and his wife Sofía Cuthbert had been assassinated in Buenos Aires by DINA agents in complicity with the Argentine police.

Minister Alejandro Solís—the magistrate who issued the first sentence against former DINA director Manuel Contreras for the qualified kidnapping of one of the 119, Miguel Angel Sandoval—recently pronounced the ruling that sentences Contreras to life imprisonment for the treacherous crime against the constitutionalist military officer.

At the event where the Journalists' Association asked for forgiveness from the relatives, they valued the act, while criticizing the implicated media for not having offered public apologies. They also deplored that in democracy, the practice of presenting uniform police montages through the press and television has been resumed to discredit the struggles of students, workers, and the Mapuche people, and to condemn through the media those who do not have a voice to present their demands and denounce current human rights violations.

Subsequently, on the anniversary of the professional association, during a ceremony that took place last Friday, July 18, the guest speaker, government spokesperson Minister Francisco Vidal, was heckled by young protesters who stood up from their seats to demand the freedom of documentarian Elena Varela, who has been the subject of such a montage and remains imprisoned in the Rancagua High Security Prison, prosecuted under the anti-terrorist legislation of the dictatorship era.

Wearing shirts with allusive slogans, after listening to speeches about ethics and freedom of expression, they shouted at the top of their voices: "How long will you keep staging montages to punish those who fight!"

Sentences by Minister Solís for the 119

Two sentences imposed by Judge Alejandro Solís in Operation Colombo cases were confirmed this year by the Court of Appeals, but the step through the Supreme Court still remains. This is the case of the northern mining engineering student Julio Flores Pérez, where the ruling was 15 years for Manuel Contreras, and 10 years and one day for Pedro Espinoza (former head of Villa Grimaldi), Maximiliano Ferrer Lima (DINA's Caupolicán Brigade), Miguel Krassnoff (former head of the Halcón group), and Marcelo Moren Brito (former deputy head of Villa Grimaldi).

The other confirmed sentence for the DINA criminals was for the kidnapping of social worker Jacqueline Binfa Contreras. As reported by the judiciary, this is the seventh conviction at the Court of Appeals level for human rights violation cases, out of a total of 58 sentences at that court level from June 2003 to date.

Also this year, Minister Solís issued two new rulings. One is for engineering graduate Osvaldo Radrigán, sentencing Contreras to 15 years in prison. His henchmen, Brigadiers (Ret.) Espinoza and Krassnoff, as well as Colonels (Ret.) Moren Brito and Rolf Wenderoth (of the Villa Grimaldi and DINA management staff), along with Sergeant Major (Ret.) Basclay Zapata (of the Halcón group), received a sentence of ten years and one day each.

Wenderoth was already serving a sentence for Manuel Cortez Joo. The other former officers were also serving sentences for other cases at the Cordillera Prison, dubbed "VIP" by the most informed Chileans because it was built exclusively for officers and has comforts and perks absent from the rest of the penal facilities.

The other ruling prepared by Solís refers to the case of the kidnapping of electronic technician and member of the MIR intelligence structure, Marcelo Salinas Eytel, sentencing Manuel Contreras to another 15 years and one day, and the rest of the DINA executives to ten years and one day.

Similarly, Solís indicted this year for the kidnapping of sociology student Jaime Robotham the entire DINA general staff, Wenderoth, Colonel (Ret.) Eduardo Lauriani Maturana, Krassnoff, and for the first time, detective Valentin Cancino Varas as authors of the crime.

There are also first-instance rulings for Jorge D’Orival and Julio Flores Pérez. For the kidnapping of student Claudio Silva, this judge, who is the one who has issued the most sentences against human rights violators, indicted Pedro Espinoza, Basclay Zapata, and agent Palmira Almuna Guzmán.

Unlike some of his peers, this minister bases his resolutions not only on national legislation but on the doctrine of human rights and current international treaties. He has never applied the statute of limitations or amnesty.

Minister Fuentes has issued first-instance sentences in the cases of Félix de la Jara, Ofelia Lazo, and Sergio Montecinos, in which he has invoked the partial statute of limitations.

Completing the picture

Also this year, visiting minister Víctor Montiglio, who inherited cases initially investigated by former Judge Juan Guzmán, indicted Manuel Contreras along with the DINA general staff and prosecuted a total of 98 repressors, most of them retired non-commissioned officers, who participated in the operational groups or in the clandestine detention and torture centers.

Among the Army officers (Ret.) indicted are Raúl Iturriaga Neumann (General, head of the DINA's Foreign Department, who in 2007 fled for 55 days upon the confirmation of his sentence for the kidnapping of Dagoberto San Martín.

Minister Solís recently sentenced him to 15 years for the homicide of General Prats and his wife). Also indicted were Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko (head of the Halcón Brigade), Fernando Lauriani Maturana, Marcelo Moren Brito (Colonel, head of Villa Grimaldi), Pedro Espinoza Bravo (Colonel, former DINA head), César Manríquez Bravo (General, head of the DINA's Metropolitan Brigade and Contreras's second-in-command), Manuel Carevic Cubillos (Brigadier, deputy head of the Purén Brigade, implicated in another trial for the death of Corporal Rodolfo González); Maximiliano Ferrer Lima (Colonel, Caupolicán Brigade), Gerardo Urrich González (Major, head of the Purén Brigade, serving a sentence for the kidnapping of Dagoberto San Martín), and officer Sergio Castillo González. The indictment of Jorge Andrade Gómez (Colonel, Grimaldi's Aguila Group and CNI's Blue Brigade, already sentenced to five years and one day for the homicide of Paulina Aguirre) was revoked because his assignment to the DINA was reportedly after 1976. The group of the indicted includes Eduardo Guerra Guajardo and Raúl Toro Montes (conscripts and DINA civilian employees), and non-commissioned officers Carlos Bermúdez Méndez, José Fuentes Torres, Jaime Paris Ramos, and Víctor San Martín Jiménez.

In addition, seven non-commissioned officers belonging to the Lautaro Brigade are indicted: Hiro Alvarez Vega, Víctor Manuel Alvarez Droguett; Alfonso "Elefante" Piña Garrido, Eduardo Reyes Lagos, Carlos Rinaldi Suazo, Orlando Torrejón Gatica, and Jorge Venegas Silva.

Also indicted were Gustavo Apablaza Meneses (DINA/CNI Foreign Intelligence), Máximo Aliaga Soto, Pedro Bitterlich Jaramillo, Reinaldo Concha Orellana, Rodolfo Concha Rodríguez; Hugo Clavería Leiva, Juan Escobar Valenzuela, and Carlos Letelier Verdugo (the last three, conscripts and DINA/CNI civilian employees); Carlos Miranda Meza, Víctor Manuel Molina Astete, Luis Mora Cerda, Nelson Paz Bustamante, Alfonso Quiroz Quintana (conscript, DINA civilian employee), Raúl Soto Pérez, Juan Suárez Delgado (all non-commissioned officers), Rosa Ramos Hernández (DINA Villa Grimaldi agent); Luis Torres Méndez, and Basclay Zapata.

The indictment of former conscript Samuel Fuenzalida Devia constituted a worrying sign for sectors of the human rights movement, as he is a former guard who deserted early, left the country to save his life, and in Germany provided important information about the functioning of the DINA in the trial against Colonia Dignidad to organizations such as Amnesty International and in the respective trial that took place there.

He later returned to Chile and has testified in many trials for the disappeared. The amparo appeal filed on his behalf by Lutheran pastor Helmut Frenz was denied.

The indicted members of the Investigative Police, all from the DINA, are Eugenio Fieldhouse Chávez (Sub-prefect, Deputy head of the Villa Grimaldi clandestine detention center), Daniel Cancino Varas (Sub-prefect), Risiere del Prado Altez España and Hugo Hernández (inspectors, the latter operated in the Venda Sexy clandestine detention and torture center), Herman Alfaro Mundaca (Commissioner), Juan Urbina Cáceres (prefect), Manuel Rivas Díaz (sub-commissioner), and Osvaldo Castillo Arellano.

The indicted Carabineros

The following are the Carabineros officers and non-commissioned officers (Ret.) indicted: Gerardo Godoy García (Colonel, head of the Tucán Group), Ciro Torré Sáez (Colonel, head of the Domingo Cañas 1367 torture house), Ricardo Lawrence Mires (Colonel, "Cachete," of the Halcón Brigade; Londres 38, already indicted for Calle Conferencia), Luis Zúñiga Ovalle (Colonel); non-commissioned officer Alejandro Molina Cisternas ("El Choco," already sentenced in the first instance for the kidnapping of Mario Carrasco, one of the 119, later a member of the CNI's Green Brigade, and is involved in the murders of Lisandro Sandoval Torres (1981) and of Patricio Sobarzo, Enzo Muñoz Arévalo, Juan Manuel Varas Silva, and Ana Alicia Delgado Tapia (in 1984)); José Aravena Ruiz (Sergeant, Caupolicán Brigade); Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo, Sergio Castro Andrade, José Fritz Esparza, Héctor Lira Aravena, Manuel Montré Méndez, Claudio Orellana de la Pinta, José Ojeda Obando, Claudio Pacheco Fernández, Jorge Sagardia Monge, Camilo Torres Negrier, Luis Urrutia Acuña, Héctor Valdebenito Araya (all of them from the Lautaro Brigade); Pedro Alfaro Fernández, Manuel Avendaño González, Armando Cofré Correa, Gustavo Caruman Soto, Juan Duarte Gallegos, Héctor Flores Vergara, Enrique Gutiérrez Rubilar, Luis Gutiérrez Uribe, Julio Hoyos Zegarra (non-commissioned officers), Guillermo Inostroza Lagos, Nelson Iturriaga Cortés, Eduardo Jaime Astorga, Arnoldo Jara Brevis, Gerardo Meza Acuña, José Mora Diocares, José Muñoz Lea, and Jerónimo Neira Méndez (Sergeants), Nelson Ortiz Vignolo, Sylvia Oyarce Pinto (non-commissioned officer), Claudio Pacheco Fernández (non-commissioned officer), Fernando Roa Montaña (Second Sergeant), José Manuel Sarmiento Sotelo, Rudeslindo Urrutia Jorquera, Luis Villarroel Gutiérrez. And the civilian Luis Eduardo Ortiz Farías.

The members of the Air Force indicted are Delia Gajardo Cortés and Germán Avalos Muñoz (DINA civilian employees). From the Navy, DINA agent Teresa Navarro Osorio (non-commissioned officer) was indicted. From the Gendarmerie, Major (Ret.) Orlando Manzo Durán (former head of the Cuatro Alamos concentration camp) is indicted.

However, all those indicted—the majority—who were not in prison for previous cases are already on conditional release (since June), which generated frustration among relatives and human rights defenders.

The number of indictments by Minister Montiglio broke the communication blockade that normally exists on human rights issues. The 119 Collective, which brings together relatives of those who fell in this dictatorship montage, valued this progress at the time, but the organization maintained: "It is appropriate to pursue the responsibility of those civilians who planned the communication montage of the 119 lists or who assisted in its implementation.

The hitman cannot be punished and not his associate in the crime. We reclaim the commitment and the project embodied by these 119 comrades, our relatives, and by all those who were repressed by the Dictatorship.

To refound this country under the principles and the neoliberal model, the Military Dictatorship implemented these brutal repressive methods against our relatives and created structures that today violate the human rights of our people. To restore popular sovereignty and rebuild the hope of another Chile, we will continue to seek more justice in the courts and in the streets."

For his part, former judge Juan Guzmán on September 2, 2004, had ordered the arrest of Contreras, the members of the DINA, and agents Basclay Zapata and Osvaldo Romo (who died in prison) for the qualified kidnapping of 16 of the fallen in Operation Colombo.

He indicted Conrado Pacheco, Manuel Carevic, Francisco Ferrer Lima, and lieutenants Ricardo Lawrence and Gerardo Godoy, as well as Gerardo Urrich, Brigadier (Ret.) Fernando Lauriani, and General (Ret.) Raúl Iturriaga.

The "penguins" of yesterday

Many of the 119 were students or teachers or had left their work to dedicate themselves to the tasks of organizing the resistance. But before their detention, they had been (or were) teachers, like Arturo Barría, who taught classes at the Liceo Darío Salas, where Música Sepúlveda now studies, the student who cleaned the face of the Chilean Minister of Education with pure water, demanding that the youth be heard.

María Elena González had been the director of a rural school. Six of those who fell in 1974 were former students of the Liceo Experimental Manuel de Salas—María Inés Alvarado, Martín Elgueta, Luis Fuentes, Jaime Robotham, Jaime Buzio, and Edwin van Yurick—and there was one student from the Instituto Nacional (Mauricio Jorquera) and one former student from the Liceo 7 (Bárbara Uribe).

Four of the 119 were detained when they were still high school students, two of them at the Instituto Comercial No. 2 (Alejandro Espejo and Mario Carrasco) and Jorge Antonio Herrera at the Liceo 6 in San Miguel, which in the time of President Salvador Allende was called Liceo Che Guevara.

There were two tailors, Miguel Angel Sandoval and Pedro Merino, and two concert musicians: Patricia Peña (piano) and Luis Jaime Palominos (French horn). Others were mechanics, veterinarians, engineers, topographers, bricklayers.

Eugenia Martínez was a textile worker and lived in La Legua. Several were journalists, mechanics, secretaries, sales clerks, public employees, architects, agricultural technicians, or gardeners. The list included a former detective, Teobaldo Tello, a Civil Registry employee, Mónica Llanca, and one from the Investigative Police, Sonia Bustos, who worked in the resistance network providing information and materials to make identity cards in clandestine workshops.

In the group, 102 detainees were between 18 and 30 years old, and 13 of them were between 30 and 40. The majority were militants in the MIR, but there were also socialists, communists, MAPU members, and independents. Together they had 84 children at the time of their detention, and another 13 children were on the way. Many had been student, union, or community leaders before 1973.

Forty-three of them were students/teachers or graduates of the University of Chile, among them Francisco Aedo, a prominent socialist/MIRista architect and academic at that institution, who was already retired.

Ten were graduates of the current University of Santiago, which was previously called the State Technical University, and nine were from Concepción. Only three were from the Catholic University, among them actress Carmen Bueno ("A la Sombra del Sol" and "La Tierra Prometida"), who studied at the School of Art and Communication and was the partner of Jorge Müller, a cameraman for The Battle of Chile, who disappeared like her.

Mario Calderón, a journalist, was from Valparaíso. Violeta López acted in the Railway Theater group and after the coup worked at Cecinas Loewer as a laborer. Jacqueline Drouilly was pregnant and it was never known what happened to her child.

Several were from Santiago, from neighborhoods located in Ñuñoa/Peñalolén, in Villa Francia, in the José María Caro neighborhood. But others had arrived in the capital eluding repression from Temuco, Valdivia, or Concepción. Some were from the north, like the Andrónicos Antequera brothers, in whose home the first experiments in manufacturing a clandestine radio station were carried out.

Two of the disappeared—Miguel Angel Pizarro Meniconi and Rodrigo Ugas—had posthumous twin children. The children of Manuel Cortez Joo, Luis Guajardo, and Washington Cid were born in prison. Their mothers survived.

The indictments by Minister Montiglio refer to the kidnappings of Francisco Aedo Carrasco, the brothers Jorge and Juan Carlos Andrónicos Antequera, Jaime Buzio Lorca, Cecilia Castro Salvadores, Alejandro Espejo Gómez, Agustín Fioraso Chau, Gregorio Gaete Farías, Mauricio Jorquera Encina, Mario Calderón Tapia, Isidro Pizarro Meniconi, Marcos Quiñones Lembach, Sergio Reyes Navarrete, Gilberto Urbina Chamorro, Miguel Ángel Acuña Castillo, María Angélica Andreoli Bravo, Rubén Arroyo Padilla, Arturo Barría Araneda, Francisco Bravo Núñez, Carmen Bueno Cifuentes, Juan Chacón Olivares, Darío Chávez Lobos, Washington Cid Urrutia, Bernardo de Castro López, Luis Durán Rivas, Héctor Garay Hermosilla, María Cristina López Stewart, Zacarías Machuca Muñoz, Jorge Olivares Graindorge, Vicente Palominos Benítez, Juan Carlos Perelman Ide, Carlos Pérez Vargas, Asrael Retamales Briceño, Ariel Salinas Argomedo, Teobaldo Tello Garrido, Enrique Toro Romero, Rodrigo Ugas Morales, Eduardo Ziede Gómez, and Héctor Cayetano Zúñiga Tapia.

The voice of a daughter

In April 2008, at a tribute event held at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Chile, Natalia, daughter of Alfonso Chanfreau, expressed (in edited paragraphs of her speech): "to this day we must face a society that functions as if this had not happened.

The places identified as sites of memory can be counted on the fingers of one hand. How many torture houses have been officially handed over, perhaps simply with a little plaque that says: 'torture happened here'? where not only the horror is made visible but also its victims, in all their dimensions...

One manages to move through the world with a certain normality until the real weight of the disappearance falls again on our bodies and tears us to pieces, and we ask ourselves again how to handle so much pain, how to handle so much daily impunity.

But finally, we manage to surface again... I can tell you that my dad was lovely... with a particular voice, tall, a studious militant, a beloved son, a comrade... The whole of Chile has been and will continue to be marked by what the dictatorship was and these years of impunity, in the lives of my children and in that of all those who will grow up in this country.

The trial we are waiting for in France is a tremendous wake-up call regarding what is happening here in Chile. It cannot be that the sentences are so low, that the trials drag on for years and years without significant progress for the majority, it cannot be that this country plays deaf and blind to it.

This is a wake-up call to each one of us not to lower our guard, not to forget. Truth and Justice now, not halfway, not in parts, but all of it, nothing more and nothing less!"

Source: piensachile.com, July 22, 2008