Chilean Air Force Colonel Horacio Otaíza (also listed as Oteíza) López worked in the Air Force Intelligence Service (SIFA) and, following the 1973 military coup, participated in the interrogation and torture of political prisoners at the Air Force War Academy (AGA).

He was also an enthusiastic participant in Operation Condor, interrogating and torturing political prisoners in Paraguay regarding any matters that might concern Chile.

His role as a torturer is not limited to the claims of Paraguayan lawyer Martín Almada, who asserts he was tortured by him; he is also mentioned in the book by former Communist senator Jorge Montes, "La luz entre las sombras" (Santiago, 1980).

In that book, which collects his personal testimony as a political prisoner at the Air Force War Academy, he narrates a dialogue between Otaíza and a political prisoner who refused to "collaborate" with information:

"You must know that we," he told the detainee, "by one means or another, are going to obtain what we need: information! That is what we want: addresses, names, drop-off houses, plans, everything! And we know that you have that information.

We want to save time and save you difficulties. Because we have the means to make you talk, the hard way, if you continue to resist, do you understand? Our work is dirty work. Very well. That is how it is. It is our turn to do the dirty work. Someone has to do it, right? But know that we do it well. We are professionals. The Air Force intelligence service is the best intelligence service."

Otaíza's name is also mentioned in the case file of the forcibly disappeared José Manuel Ramirez Rosales, who was last seen at Villa Grimaldi. He is named by former DINA agent Osvaldo Romo Mena in judicial statements made in 1992 when he was arrested in Argentina.

For her part, Angela Jeria, widow of FACH General Alberto Bachelet—who was arrested after the military coup and subsequently died while in detention at the Public Jail—recounted to El Mostrador a conversation she had with her husband while he was at the AGA.

According to Angela Jeria, "Beto" told her that while he was held incommunicado at the AGA, Otaíza came to speak with him. When General Bachelet reproached Otaíza for the fact that they were torturing prisoners, he cut him off sharply: "No problem, we put blankets on the windows so the screams cannot be heard," he explained.

Otaíza died of a heart attack on July 31, 1975, in Santiago, at 50 years of age.

Source: El Mostrador, May 18, 2002

Delivered by a Paraguayan lawyer to Judge Garzón. They are linked to Operation Condor, the coordinated repression of Latin American dictatorships. The documentation accuses Pinochet of having organized it.

Judge Baltasar Garzón received a large amount of documentation yesterday regarding the responsibilities of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in Operation Condor, the coordination of repressive activities by Latin American dictatorships.

Paraguayan lawyer Martín Almada also delivered to the magistrate a large quantity of documents revealing the complicity of various sections of Interpol with the dictatorial regimes. Almada was the human rights leader who discovered the so-called "archives of terror," containing five tons of documentation, files, recordings, secret letters, and diplomatic communications.

This material, now guarded by the Paraguayan justice system, was found in a police station in a suburb of Asunción, Paraguay. Several locations concentrated the archive of documents linked to Operation Condor.

He also made known to Garzón a series of proofs regarding detentions, illegal transfers, torture, and disappearances of Argentine, Chilean, Uruguayan, Bolivian, Peruvian, and Brazilian citizens.

Some instruments list the names of military personnel, especially those attached to embassies, who participated in torture sessions, detentions, and transfers. The plaintiff lawyers, at the request of Almada, will request that Garzón send a complete list of South American military attachés in Paraguay between 1970 and 1989 to the Paraguayan justice system. "We have again delivered to Garzón the document that is the birth certificate of the Condor Plan, because now we know much more about its operation and organizational chart.

We have established that Paraguay fulfilled the functions of a data bank, as determined by one of the documents, and that is why there was such a large amount of evidence," Almada pointed out to Clarín.

The complainant added that by special directive of the Condor directorate, all participating countries were required to maintain a detailed microfilmed archive with all orders, communications, background information on detainees, details of operations, interrogations, and the final destination of the hundreds of victims. "Where are these archives that were organized in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil?" Almada asks.

Some plaintiff lawyers are now studying whether it is appropriate for the magistrate to ask the justice systems of those countries to investigate the whereabouts of those archives of terror. "Those five tons of evidence that we found in Paraguay now haunt Pinochet because they demonstrate that he was the one who set Operation Condor in motion, coordinated it, and participated in its main criminal acts," the lawyer added.

The evidence provided by Almada in his previous statements proved to be of great value to Garzón when he had to support his request for the detention and extradition of Pinochet, arrested more than a year ago in London, with solid evidence.

Almada has testified about the archives of terror before the justice systems of Italy, France, and Switzerland. "Now I want to meet with the British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, to deliver all kinds of evidence regarding Pinochet's criminal activities," he noted.

The initial directives of the Condor Plan, which was organized by Pinochet and established its headquarters in the DINA building—the secret service directed by Colonel Manuel Contreras—established that personnel should enjoy diplomatic immunity and be attached to their embassies.

In a word, the military attachés of the different countries participating in Condor were the key gear for coordinating operations. "I was tortured, in addition to by Paraguayan repressors, by the Chilean military attaché in Paraguay, Horacio Otaíza López, a member of the Chilean Air Force intelligence service.

And also by an Argentine police commissioner, Héctor García Rey, with notorious repressive activity during the military dictatorship but also with the Triple A," Almada explained to Clarín.

The lawyer showed this correspondent numerous documents in which hundreds of Brazilian, Uruguayan, Chilean, Argentine, and Bolivian citizens appear. In addition to all kinds of background information, photographs of the people residing in Paraguay are included. Many were arrested, tortured, and handed over to their countries of origin, where they disappeared.

Among the numerous pieces of evidence citing the names of South American military personnel participating in operations outside their countries, José Montenegro and Alberto Stada are mentioned as military personnel of the Argentine SIDE.

Garzón received a document recording the handover of three Uruguayan prisoners and three Argentine prisoners to Corvette Captain José Abdala, pilot of the Argentine Navy twin-jet, registration 5730. Several Paraguayan military chiefs handed the victims over to him to be transferred to Buenos Aires. All of them disappeared.

Source: Clarín Argentina, October 27, 1999

Living with a ghost: being the grandchild of a human rights violator

When Rodrigo Uribe was 11 years old, he performed a Google search that changed his life. By typing the name of his maternal grandfather, Horacio Otaíza, he discovered that he participated in the 1973 coup d'état and was directly related to episodes of torture against Chilean citizens.

Motivated to break the silence and seek justice, Uribe joined a group of relatives of criminals against humanity and set out to contribute from his own trench and stop carrying a guilt that is not his, but which weighs on him. This is his story.

Anthropologist Rodrigo Uribe (26) grew up hearing his family tell him that his maternal grandfather, Horacio Otaíza López, was watching over him from heaven. He never met him, because he died in a plane crash in 1975 during a test to be promoted to General of the Chilean Armed Forces, so he only remembers being accompanied by this protective spiritual figure.

From the naivety of his childhood and the distance of his grandfather's physical presence, he grew fond of him.

Unconsciously, he normalized not having him around, nor hearing his mother talk much about him. And it was not until one of his classmates told him that he only had one grandfather left alive that he understood there should be more information about his tata than he knew. And one afternoon when he was 11 years old, everything he thought about his family changed after a Google search.

With the intention of seeing what entries appeared when he wrote his full name, he became curious about what would happen if he googled his relatives. He started with his closest circle and worked his way up. He wrote Horacio Otaíza López, and the first link was a review where his name appeared on a list of people under the heading "Criminals."

"My grandfather was a torturer and was very involved in Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship," he recounts. But at that moment, being a minor in a military family, he did not understand what he read. About the dictator, he only knew that he had done "bad things," but the dictatorship was never a topic within his home.

When they watched the news of Pinochet's trial in 1999, he asked why it was happening, and his family gave him vague answers.

So when he saw his grandfather's name next to Pinochet's, he knew he had to ask his loved ones. He did so at a meal, and no one answered. The subject became a taboo that for a long time no one dared to speak about.

When he managed to understand the actions Horacio took during the military dictatorship, he thought that everything would be better if he hadn't been born. He felt horrified, but he also reflected: without his grandfather, neither he nor his family would exist.

"How did you get to torture people? How did you get to participate and get involved in a coup d'état? To overthrow a democratically elected president?" he says he asked himself, and that if he could, he would ask his grandfather.

Since then, he has dedicated himself, sometimes on his own and other times together with one of his siblings, to collecting all the possible information about his maternal grandfather. Rodrigo says that he never stops finding stories of what Horacio did in life and that his presence became that of a ghost living in his mind, which has permeated some memories. "I imagined my own birth with a uniformed ghost watching me," he relates.

"One repeats to oneself that guilt is not inherited: what he did is his history and I have mine," he explains today via a Zoom call. But it is difficult to detach oneself from one's roots, or so Rodrigo tells us.

However, when he felt he had to end his grandfather's legacy, he met Historias Desobedientes (Disobedient Histories), a group of relatives of those responsible for crimes against humanity in the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina. Their emblem is: we do not forget, we do not forgive, we do not reconcile.

"We are not in favor of our relatives," Uribe stresses.

"The military has served as an instrument for certain local oligarchies, and my family's role is that: they were involved in that, which does not mean that one cannot break that chain," he maintains. But how to end this cycle in a country with wounds still open?

Rodrigo says that from his activism as a relative of a human rights violator, he wants to contribute to making known the internal and psychological functioning of Armed Forces families in order to "seek a reform that changes that historical role." This is because he considers that "we all potentially can be genocidal, but why do the conditions come together for this person to do it?

And what can we contribute to the public debate to prevent these types of actions from being repeated in the future?" That is his struggle.

When we ask him if he has ever questioned how it would be to tell his own descendants, he pauses to think. "I won't deny that I've thought about it," he says. "What motivates me is that I don't want them to discover it the way I did; I want them to know that there was a dictatorship, that our family participated, and that their grandfather was involved in the management of the coup d'état and, in parallel, planning another." Rodrigo wants to break the circle, but not forget his family past.

Not this time.

by Nicolás Urquiza Zurich

Source: pousta.com, September 10, 2021