Pedro Silva Bustos, a former union leader and regional leader of the Communist Party, was detained by DINA agents on August 9, 1976, in the afternoon, on a public street while he was on his way to his job at the Vega Central, where he worked as a loader.

That same day, other union leaders and members of the Communist Party were apprehended: Víctor Hugo Morales Mazuela, José Enrique Corvalán Valencia, Jorge Orosman Salgado Salinas, and Mario Jesús Juica Vega.

All of them, like Pedro Silva, were forcibly disappeared from Villa Grimaldi, the place to which they were taken and tortured after being detained. Seven days after Pedro Silva's arrest, on August 16, around 1:30 PM, his home on Calle Catedral was raided by three civilians while it was unoccupied.

The individuals broke the latch holding the padlock on the front door and, after searching the premises, asked neighbors about the residents' activities and their arrival and departure times, later stating: "the lady will arrive, but he will not." The agents were traveling in a red Austin Mini car without license plates. One of them had a beard; another was blond.

In the previous month, on July 14 and 17, 1976, the National Directorate of Social Communication (DINACOS) issued two statements in which it indicated "...that the intelligence services resolved to act against 32 'mailbox houses' in Santiago that this aforementioned outlawed Party maintains for liaison between the political commission and the regional leaders of the former PC." Such a statement corroborates the fact of a concerted action by the security services against Communist leaders and militants.

Regarding his time at Villa Grimaldi, the testimony of former prisoner Isaac Godoy Castillo, who remained at that facility from August 20 to 26, 1976, provides an account. The witness states that, after being detained, he was taken to a facility where, upon entering, he heard a gate creaking—he was blindfolded.

They took him out of the vehicle and brought him into a room where they beat him in the ears and asked him for addresses and names of Communist militants. He adds that, after this first interrogation, he was taken to another wooden room that was at a certain distance, where three other prisoners were located.

An hour later, they took him out to a patio, approximately 25 or 30 meters wide with stone masonry; he was also able to notice the existence of a basin where he drank water. He points out that to the right of the dungeon there was a bathroom, and toward the planters there was a staircase with 5 steps, a railing, and a figure on top of it.

A path could also be seen, though it was impossible to distinguish where it led. About 20 to 30 detained people remained in the patio, all silent... The day before (referring to the first Sunday of his detention), several of the detainees were taken to the "cajones" (80 x 80 cm cells), where they were tortured and interrogated.

On Wednesday, they took out several prisoners, including the witness, to clean, forcing them to load a truck with branches and trash. The witness continues to relate that, under these circumstances, an agent came running and signaled to the other guards that he should not be mixed with the other detainees by order of the "Chief." Immediately thereafter, he was taken back to a dungeon.

Upon hearing women's voices in the adjacent cell, he asked for their identities, and a female voice told him her name was María Galindo and that "Martita de Renca" was with her (this refers to Marta Ugarte, murdered by the DINA and thrown into the sea; her body was found on the coast of La Ligua).

When the trash work was finished, the rest of the detainees appeared in the cell, and there he was able to confirm that among them was Pedro Silva Bustos, whom he had known from before; Pedro Silva told him that an empty mattress in the cell belonged to a prisoner named Vizcarra, whom they had been using to strip vehicles.

He spoke on several occasions with Pedro Silva, who told him that the previous Wednesday they had taken Mario Juica out of the facility and he had not returned; on another occasion, he told him that they had asked for his coat to give it to "Chino Díaz" (Víctor Díaz López, the top leader of the Communist Party, detained on May 12 of that year), whom he later saw from afar wearing his coat.

On Thursday, around 11:00 AM, the witness was taken out of the facility and released on a public street. Shortly before, he was taken to a room where there was a piano, black and white tiles, and several tables.

There, the man acting as chief told him: "you are a working man, don't get involved in...", "You have a well-established family, we know it, so you are going to be released," "we warn you that if you fall back in here, you won't get out, because all these men who are here are not going to get out." The witness thinks that this agent knew him from before and that it was Jerónimo Pantoja, whom he met in 1964 when he did work at the paratrooper battalion as a construction foreman.

Pantoja was blond and taller than him. Once free, the witness was constantly harassed by the DINA. In November 1976, he was detained on a public street and forced to sign and write the text of a statement saying that he had not been detained, that he was not a Communist militant, and that he did not know Pedro Jara Alegría.

The latter witness had declared having seen forcibly disappeared persons at the secret DINA facility of Villa Grimaldi, a statement that a Bishop had sent to General Pinochet as proof of the detention of these people.

His wife carried out multiple efforts to find his whereabouts, but they yielded no results, except for the fact that she was detained, beaten, and received multiple threats and intimidation for participating in demonstrations, along with other relatives of the forcibly disappeared, demanding the freedom of their relatives.

The fate that Pedro Silva Bustos met at the hands of the DINA remains unknown. As a consequence, Violeta Zúñiga Peralta had to leave the country twice for a period of time.

It should be noted that the military government informed the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, in its observations on the report of the ad hoc working group on the human rights situation in Chile in October 1976, that "his identification has not yet been found in the Santiago cabinet." In the respective judicial process for his detention and subsequent disappearance, the respective documents that irrefutably prove his civil identity are on record.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On August 13, 1976, a writ of amparo (habeas corpus) was filed on his behalf before the Santiago Court of Appeals, case file 749-76, which was rejected after the Ministry of the Interior denied the detention of the person in question.

The appellant appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which confirmed the appealed resolution. Although Silva Bustos remained disappeared, the information was not sent to any Tribunal to investigate his disappearance.

On October 10, 1976, Violeta Zúñiga Peralta filed a complaint for alleged misfortune before the 2nd Criminal Court of Santiago, case file 85.589-5, during which the complainant appeared on several occasions, both to ratify the terms of her complaint and to report the acts of intimidation and threats she was subjected to due to her persistent search for her disappeared husband.

In one of these threats, received on December 26, 1979, she was asked to go to a specific place with her lawyer at a specified day and time. They asked her to bring a certain amount of money, and in exchange, they would give her some of her husband's belongings, "such as an Italian-brand watch...".

Indeed, the victim was wearing an Italian-brand watch at the time of his detention. Threats received previously provided a sort of information regarding her husband's whereabouts, "who had been killed" and "thrown into the sea" in April 1977, and that "they had his clothes in their possession." Several of the threats were signed by a self-styled "Comando Carevic."

On the other hand, the investigation order carried out by the Investigative Police yielded no results, and the reports received from the Ministry of the Interior, the Intelligence Services of the FACH and Carabineros, International Police, and the civil and military courts of Viña del Mar were all negative.

The report requested from the DINA was answered negatively by the Ministry of the Interior, adding that, at the request of the Minister of Justice, the Supreme Court had issued instructions regarding the advisability of Courts refraining from requesting reports from the DINA for reasons of national security.

On May 12, 1978, Judge Raquel Camposano Echegaray definitively dismissed the case by virtue of the recently enacted amnesty decree-law of April 1978. That resolution was rejected by the Court of Appeals, which ordered the case to be returned to the summary stage.

However, after new and fruitless efforts, the case was again dismissed, this time temporarily, on the grounds that the crime being investigated was not proven in the records. On this occasion, the dismissal order was approved by the Court of Appeals.

Subsequently, in 1979, the case was reopened and sent to the Visiting Minister Servando Jordán López, who was investigating the cases of the forcibly disappeared in the Department of Santiago. However, the Minister returned the case to the original Court, and it was archived again, with the reopening of the summary being denied two more times.

Regarding administrative efforts, his spouse sent personal letters to General Augusto Pinochet, to the members of the Government Junta, and to several Ministers of State, receiving negative responses from the respective authorities.

The letter addressed to General Pinochet was answered by Enrique Montero Marx, Undersecretary of the Interior, to the effect that there was no information on the affected person. Other requests made by Violeta Zúñiga to different international organizations also did not yield a positive result.

On December 16, 1976, the Bishop of Talca, Monsignor Carlos González C., sent letters to the President of the Military Junta, General Augusto Pinochet, sending him information on the death of Marta Lidia Ugarte Román and the sworn statement of Pedro Rolando Jara Alegría, who was a prisoner of the DINA in Villa Grimaldi and was an eyewitness to the presence of Marta Ugarte and other prisoners in that facility, including Isaac Godoy Castillo, who in turn is a witness to the imprisonment of Pedro Silva Bustos.

On December 6, General Pinochet responded to the Bishop: "the sworn statement is dated November 9, 1976. According to the files of the International Border Control Section, that same day Mr. Jara left the country through Pudahuel, bound for Denmark, which indicates the quality of the person you so kindly welcome. I believe he fulfills what his quality as a communist says."

In his response, the General included a sworn statement from 5 people involved in Mr. Jara's declaration, "who were located after several efforts, and who totally deny what was asserted by Jara. The rest of the people indicated in the declaration do not exist.

It is assumed that they are names invented by the declarant." Elsewhere in his response, the General says, "I am certain that justice, with the appointment of an Extraordinary Visiting Minister, will bring the truth of the facts to light and the guilty will be punished." Among the sworn statements included is that of Isaac Godoy Castillo, who, in his own testimony, expresses that he was released on August 27; "they kept visiting me, the same afternoon I was released they arrived.

They wanted to see if I was at home"; "once they went (November 1976), they stopped me in the street and made me sign and write a text of a statement saying that I had not been detained, that I was not PC, and that I did not know Pedro Jara Alegría."

In conjunction with the judicial actions, Mrs. Zúñiga appealed to multiple authorities of the Military Government, among whom can be mentioned the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Internal Relations, General Pinochet, and the State Councilor, Guillermo Medina.

She also filed complaints with foreign governments and international organizations in charge of ensuring respect for human rights and/or workers' rights, such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization of American States (OAS), Amnesty International, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the International Commission of Jurists.

Despite all this, Pedro Silva Bustos remains in the status of forcibly disappeared.

Source: Corporación report

Like hundreds of families of people detained, tortured, and disappeared during the Chilean civil-military dictatorship, the life of Violeta Zúñiga was dedicated to demanding justice for these crimes against humanity, remaining a member of the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared until her death.

This February 2 marks three years since the passing of Violeta Zúñiga, an untiring defender and fighter for human rights in Chile, violated left and right by the civil-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990.

Violeta Zúñiga fought until the last day of her life to clarify the death of her life partner Pedro Silva Bustos, a union and Communist Party leader, detained and disappeared by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) of the Chilean civil-military dictatorship in 1976.

Through artistic expressions such as "La Cueca Sola," the social fighter captured the horrors and desperation of the families and partners of thousands of people disappeared and murdered during the dictatorship, remaining part of the folk group of the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared until her death on February 2, 2019.

Violeta Zúñiga passed away at 86 years of age, and during that period of time, she never knew where her partner's body had ended up, which illustrates a whole life of struggle seeking a shred of justice.

Since 1978, she danced the "Cueca Sola" together with other women, relatives of the forcibly disappeared, participating in said artistic expression on more than one hundred occasions, thus using a popular Chilean manifestation, such as the cueca, to denounce the horrors of the dictatorship and the constant search for their loved ones.

Source: resumen.cl 2/2/2022 Date: 02-02-2022

The mousetrap set by the DINA on Calle Conferencia to hunt the Communist Party leadership in 1976

In the early hours of April 30, 1976, around 3:30 AM, DINA agents, supported in the vicinity by members of the Joint Command, arrived at the house located at Calle Conferencia 1587, in the southwestern sector of the Santiago commune, where a handbag workshop operated, owned by the leather worker Juan Becerra Barrera.

They told him that his sister-in-law, María Teresa Zúñiga, who lived at Calle Alejandro del Fierro 5113, in Quinta Normal, had suffered a tragic car accident. Becerra agreed to accompany them, getting into the vehicle they were using.

He was immediately handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken to Villa Grimaldi. That was the beginning of an operation designed by the DINA commanders to capture the leadership of the Communist Party. A favorable point for Manuel Contreras's objectives was having achieved the collaboration of Elisa Escobar Cepeda, a liaison for Mario Zamorano, detained by DINA agents at the end of March or the beginning of April 1976.

On April 30, the agents occupied the house on Alejandro del Fierro and held four adults and a ten-year-old child there. Ana María Becerra, Juan's sister, married to Julio Maigret, one of those held in the Quinta Normal house, found out what was happening there and went on May 2 to notify the Vicariate of Solidarity.

There, she met with the auxiliary bishop of Santiago, Enrique Alvear, and told him what was happening with her family. The prelate, carrying some medications required by one of those arrested in the house on Alejandro del Fierro, appeared at the house, questioning the DINA agents about their actions.

They wanted to detain him as well, but one of the group leaders decided to let him go. Alvear communicated in writing to the president of the Supreme Court and the Minister of Justice what he had witnessed.

Notwithstanding that circumstance, five DINA agents installed themselves on May 2 in the house on Conferencia and forced its occupants to pretend they were working in the leather workshop that operated there.

The Communist leaders summoned to the meeting would enter without major precautions, unless a certain handbag hanging in the window was missing, the agreed-upon signal to warn of imminent danger. Becerra had yielded in Villa Grimaldi to torture and confirmed the details of the appointment at his house.

What Becerra did not know was that Víctor Díaz himself was supposed to attend that meeting, scheduled to discuss union issues, but at the last minute, he was sidelined for security reasons and replaced by Jaime Donato, a member of the Party's Union Commission.

On May 3, Elisa Escobar went to the house on Conferencia to warn that Mario Zamorano would arrive the next day with other people. At 7:00 PM on May 4, unaware of the detentions that had occurred in the previous hours, Mario Zamorano, one of the Party's top leaders, appeared at the Conferencia workshop.

Everything was apparently normal, and he entered by pulling the string that opened the door. Two men fell on him; he tried to resist, but they shot him in the leg, and he fell bleeding profusely. They wrapped him in a blanket and dragged him to an inner room.

Only minutes later, Jorge Muñoz Poutays, also a member of the Directorate, entered the trap. That night, a van took the detainees away. The next morning, Wednesday, May 5, Jaime Donato Avendaño, a member of the Central Committee and head of the Union Front, arrived at the house.

Shortly after, Uldarico Donaire, known as "Rafael Cortez," another of the Party's top officials, in charge of the Control and Cadres Commission, appeared. Elisa Escobar returned to the house on May 6, around 1:30 PM.

She asked for Zamorano and, in an evident cover-up operation, was detained by DINA agents. While in the hands of the DINA, Elisa Escobar went on May 8 to the house of Eliana Espinoza, Víctor Díaz's liaison, and not finding her, left a message with her father, asking her to meet at a certain point in Santiago.

Eliana Espinoza arrived at the place but found no one. It was at that moment that the DINA began its surveillance. Meanwhile, Víctor Cantero, also a member of the Party's Directorate, arrived at a meeting of the Santiago regional committees, which Donaire and Muñoz were supposed to attend, but they did not appear.

The meeting was immediately adjourned, and anxiety spread among the leaders. After the apparently failed contact with Elisa Escobar, Eliana Espinoza decided to go see Víctor Díaz to express her concern.

They met on May 11, and at the end of the meeting, she agreed to return to get him out of the place. Víctor Díaz, the head of the local communism in hiding, was detained at 2:00 AM on May 12, 1976, by a large contingent of DINA agents.

Under the name José Santos Garrido Retamal, he was residing with a married couple who were friends, where the head of the house was the engineer Jorge Canto Fuenzalida, on Calle Bello Horizonte, in Las Condes.

Periodically, a woman named "Ana" visited him, who was actually Eliana Espinoza Fernández, his liaison with the PC's top brass. Becerra had been a friend of Zamorano since the early sixties, and in 1974, the Party leader had asked him to use his house on Conferencia to hold meetings every two or three months.

Zamorano also frequently arrived at the home of Becerra's mother, located on Calle Alejandro del Fierro, in the commune of Quinta Normal. Elisa Escobar knew both places and gave their characteristics, as well as the probable dates of the meetings, to the DINA men.

Thus, that night at the end of April, agents of the Purén brigade, supported by other groups from the Terranova barracks, detained several of the residents of both houses, whom they tortured for almost two days before taking them back to their homes and setting the mousetraps in wait for the Communist leaders who would come to the scheduled appointment.

When Eliana arrived to visit him on that day, the 11th, she was visibly upset. They spoke as always in a low voice and in private. She left very soon. That night, around 2:00 AM on the 12th, persistent ringing of the doorbell woke the family.

Upon looking out into the street, the owner of the house could see six armed subjects in civilian clothes, some with long machine guns. One of the agents shouted: "We are from the DINA!" They took Víctor Díaz out of the house around 3:00 AM.

He was dressed in his pajamas, with shoes without socks and a jacket thrown over his shoulders. His hands were tied behind his back, and because of the strong and numerous blows, he had one eye half-closed, his lower lip swollen, he was breathing with difficulty, and he was walking and limping more than usual.

The next day, the DINA's offensive continued with the detention of Fernando Lara Rojas, 27, a regional PC leader in Talca who had been collaborating with a Party team in Santiago since 1975. On May 19, following a call from Eliana Espinoza to meet, César Cerda Cuevas, 47, a construction worker, national leader of the CUT, and member of the Central Committee, was detained on the street.

He was last seen at Villa Grimaldi in September. At the end of May, it was known in the regional committees that the entire Party Directorate had fallen. Only Víctor Cantero and Inés Cornejo were safe, the latter having been removed from the organization for health reasons.

The DINA wanted Cantero, the man they presumed responsible for the money. In the pursuit, the agents kidnapped the brothers Julio and Eduardo Budnik. Next, Eduardo Cantero and Clara Cantero, 22, brother and daughter of Víctor, respectively.

Eduardo's remains were found in 1990 at the Las Tórtolas estate, which had been military land. Nothing has been found of Clara yet. She disappeared from Villa Grimaldi. In mid-July 1976, the National Division of Social Communication, DINACOS, reported that security agencies had managed to dismantle 32 "mailbox houses" of the Communist Party, which served as a liaison between the Directorate and the regional branches of said party.

The officers who commanded the direct repression against the PC took the Communist leaders to secret detention centers. From Villa Grimaldi, they took them to the Simón Bolívar barracks, where they were subjected to fierce torment and also used as guinea pigs by Michael Townley, who sought to test on humans the effects of the sarin gas that the chemist Eugenio Berríos had managed to produce.

In the last days of that month of July, what remained of the PC Directorate instructed Víctor Cantero and Inés Cornejo to leave the country and hand over the Party's leadership to another team. Before that, at the end of May and after a quick consultation among the survivors of the Central Committee, it was agreed that the chosen one should be Fernando Ortiz Letelier, a university professor and member of the Central Committee.

In the midst of dramatic conditions, where every day some leader disappeared, Fernando Ortiz assumed the leadership of the PC, seconded by Waldo Pizarro, Horacio Zepeda, and Fernando Navarro. At the end of October, Cantero and Cornejo took asylum in the Italian embassy.

Luis Canales, Virginia González, and Víctor Galleguillos were also ordered to do so. At the beginning of August 1976, another devastating blow against the PC's Organization apparatus began. At noon on August 4, Hugo Vivanco Vega was detained on a public street, very close to his house; shortly after, they captured his wife, Alicia Herrera, at their home.

On the 5th, at his house, Oscar Ramos Garrido, former intendant of Llanquihue, member of the Central Committee and head of Organization, and his son Oscar Ramos Vivanco were arrested. On the 9th, Víctor Morales Mazuela, José Corvalán Valencia, Mario Juica Vega, Jorge Salgado Salinas, and Pedro Silva Bustos were detained, all intermediate leaders linked to the Directorate bodies.

On the same 9th, they seized Marta Ugarte Román, a member of the Central Committee. On August 10, Nicolás Vivanco, Hugo's son, fell. On the 7th, Manuel Vargas Leiva, former mayor of Tiltil and member of the Central Committee, had disappeared.

On August 11, Miguel Nazal Quiroz, member of the Central Committee and secretary of the San Miguel regional branch; and Carlos Vizcarra Jofré, former leader of the Jota (Communist Youth) who had moved to the Party; on the 16th, Julio Vega Vega, union leader; on the 18th, Nelson Jeria, secretary of the Northern Regional of Santiago; on the 26th, the Joint Command detained Víctor Cárdenas, and the DINA detained Gabriel Castillo Tapia and Pedro Silva Bustos, members of the Organization team who maintained contacts with the regional branches.

On September 12, 1976, a French citizen was admiring the surf at La Ballena beach, in the Los Molles resort, near La Ligua, when among the rocks he saw the tied body of a woman who had been thrown by the sea.

It was Marta Ugarte, the PC treasurer, kidnapped at the beginning of August before arriving at her house. In the previous weeks, several disfigured bodies had appeared on the banks of the Maipo River. They showed signs of bullet wounds and were tied with wire from the neck to the legs, inside potato sacks.

The second PC leadership began to fall on December 9, when Armando Portilla Portilla, a member of the Central Committee, was detained. On the 13th, on a public street and before numerous witnesses, Fernando Navarro Allende, also a member of the Central Committee, was captured.

Two days later, on the 15th in the morning, Horacio Cepeda Marinkovic and Lincoyán Berríos Cataldo were detained at the Lo Plaza roundabout in Ñuñoa. That same afternoon, Fernando Ortiz Letelier and Waldo Pizarro Molina fell on Calle Larraín, and in other neighborhoods of Santiago, Héctor Véliz Ramírez, Luis Lazo Santander, and Reinalda Pereira Plaza, 29, five months pregnant.

Three days later, Lisandro Cruz Díaz and the MIR member Carlos Durán González were kidnapped by the DINA. On December 20, with the detention of Edras Pinto Arroyo, former secretary of the PC deputies, the DINA's offensive against the communists ended.

The detainees were tortured until they died. They were injected with cyanide and other lethal substances. The gold fillings that some possessed were ripped from their mouths. Their bones were broken. They were suffocated with plastic bags.

Experiments were conducted on them with sarin gas. A blowtorch was applied to them to erase their faces, scars, fingerprints, and any other trace that would allow them to be identified. Finally, their bodies were placed in potato sacks, with pieces of rail tied with wire, loaded onto Army helicopters, and thrown into the sea along the central coast.

At the beginning of 1977, the DINA had almost completely achieved its goal: to exterminate the PC Directorate. It had also managed to accumulate a large amount of information about the internal organization and the support networks built abroad by the communists.

They then focused on another of the priority goals: to identify and capture those in charge of finances and to appropriate the funds that came from Europe and those that, very secretly, some local financial operators managed in Chile.

Source: interferencia.cl 5/5/2021 Date: 05-05-2021

Villa Grimaldi: Supreme Court confirms conviction for kidnapping and disappearance of union leaders in 1976

The Second Chamber of the highest court confirmed the appealed sentence that sentenced Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Carlos López Tapia, Rolf Wederoth Pozo, Juan Morales Salgado, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires to 10 years and one day in prison.

Meanwhile, the State of Chile must pay a total compensation of 700 million pesos to the victims' families. The Supreme Court rejected the cassation appeal and confirmed the sentence that convicted five agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) for their responsibility in the crime of qualified kidnapping of union leaders Jorge Corvalán Valencia, Jorge Salgado Salinas, and Pedro Silva Bustos, crimes perpetrated starting August 9, 1976, in Santiago.

In a split decision, the appealed sentence was confirmed, which sentenced Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Carlos López Tapia, Rolf Wederoth Pozo, Juan Morales Salgado, and Ricardo Lawrence Mires, all of them belonging to the "Caupolicán" Brigade, to 10 years and one day in prison.

In the investigation stage, the visiting minister Leopoldo Llanos managed to establish that the events occurred at the clandestine detention center known as "Cuartel Terranova" or "Villa Grimaldi," located at Avenida José Arrieta No. 8200 in the commune of Peñalolén in the Metropolitan Region.

A group of agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) operated there, whose Director was Colonel Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda, under whose hierarchical dependence were several officers and other officials from the different branches of the Armed Forces, Carabineros, and Investigations, as well as some civilians.

All of them—some ordered and others executed—carried out the capture of people who were militants or sympathizers of political parties or leftist movements, whom they illegally locked up in the place, breaking them under physical torment of various kinds, with the aim of making them provide information about other people of the political left in order to apprehend them.

The first detainees arrived in mid-1974 at Villa Grimaldi, and in January 1975, it became the operations center of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade, which exercised the function of internal repression in Santiago.

The detainees were kept blindfolded the entire time, in deficient hygienic conditions, and with scarce food, which they did not receive during the first three days. The most characteristic places where the detainees were kept were called "La Torre," "Casas Chile," and "Casas Corvi." "The consequences of these detentions is that the aforementioned persons are in the status of disappeared, since, deprived of liberty, they have not made contact with their relatives; nor have they carried out administrative procedures before State agencies or private organizations, nor do they register entries or exits from the country, with their death also not being verified," reads the resolution. The State of Chile must pay a total compensation of 700 million pesos to the victims' families.

Source: elmostrador.cl 15/12/2016 Date: 15-12-2016