It was a planned assassination intended to establish within the Navy the principles that would govern the bloody coup d'état of September 11, 1973. The right wing perpetrated the crime; Washington sheltered and financed it. Our memory remains alive.

At midnight on July 26, 1973, the Naval Aide-de-Camp to President Salvador Allende, Commander Arturo Araya Peeters, was assassinated by a sniper who shot him in cold blood from a location in front of his home.

Shortly before, he had arrived at his house after accompanying the socialist president to a reception at the Cuban embassy. One of the criminals who participated in the crime, Guillermo Claverie Bartet, was sentenced to three years in prison.

However, he did not spend a single day in jail serving that sentence. Even while a fugitive, he was pardoned by the dictatorship thanks to a decision by Admiral José Toribio Merino Castro.

It was a planned assassination intended to establish within the Navy the principles that would govern the bloody coup d'état of September 11, and at the same time, a reminder that any member of the Navy who did not agree with the fascist plans of Admiral Merino Castro would be considered a traitor and punished with death. This is what happened to Araya, an honest man loyal to the Constitution.

On the night of July 26–27, 1973, a sniper opened fire on the naval officer while mercenaries from Patria y Libertad created a commotion on the street in front of his house, after firing several shots into the air to induce the presidential aide to step out onto his balcony to investigate what was happening. At that moment, a bullet struck Commander Araya Peeters in the chest.

The crime, which at the time the right wing and naval intelligence services tried to blame on phantom armed leftist groups, was in reality the work of a sordid ultra-right-wing conspiracy with the support of coup-plotting Navy officers.

A total of 32 members of Patria y Libertad, whose founder was Pablo Rodríguez Grez, were arrested and prosecuted by the Naval Prosecutor's Office, but all were released after a mere slap on the wrist. Only one of them, Guillermo Claverie, after having been a fugitive for a time, was sentenced to three years and one day in prison as the material author of the crime—a sentence he did not serve, as all the conspirators were eventually pardoned in 1981 by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, "for services rendered to the Fatherland."

In an interview published by the newspaper La Nación, Claverie swore he was innocent and claimed he was forced to confess after suffering multiple tortures inflicted by Navy and Air Force officers, and that he was apparently chosen as a scapegoat by his superiors in Patria y Libertad, including Pablo Rodríguez.

Although he admitted to having been at the scene, he said he always remained on the street and that the trajectory of the bullet that killed the aide, who was on a balcony, was from top to bottom. He also claimed to have fired his pistol after he saw the man fall from the balcony and that, at that moment, he did not know who it was.

Claverie's statements were part of the appeal presented to the Court of Appeals by Arturo Araya, the victim's son and a plaintiff in the trial.

The planned crime committed against the Navy Commander and aide to President Allende, which occurred on Calle Fidel Oteíza—between Marchant Pereira and Carlos Antúnez—in the commune of Providencia, was definitively and clearly a well-mounted terrorist operation of intelligence and political destabilization, structured by the extreme right together with fascist and ultra-nationalist groups embedded in the armed forces, who had the support and financing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as the U.S. government acknowledged many years later when it declassified its confidential documents.

The coup plotters of the SIN (Naval Intelligence Service) had already been carrying out dozens of attacks and staged bombings, some of which were previously "negotiated," such as the one carried out at the home of the coup-plotting Admiral Ismael Huerta in mid-July 1973 in Viña del Mar, with the goal of building an environment favorable to the upcoming coup d'état.

The "Bataan" submachine gun with which Guillermo Claverie Bartet—a militant of the Comando Rolando Matus and a SIN agent infiltrated into the state company ECOM—shot Commander Araya after setting off a decoy bomb and shooting at the front of the house to make him come out to the balcony, was supplied by the SIN through Mr.

Jorge Ehlers Trostel, a figure who later—in the midst of the dictatorship—would hold a high-ranking position in the sports sector (DIGEDER).

Claverie Bartet had already been detected firing against troops loyal to the Constitution on the day of the tanquetazo (June 1973) from a terrace at ECOM (the guy believed that the Navy was starting a coup that day; this was published shortly before the coup by the biweekly Chile Hoy, directed by Marta Harnecker). He was fired from ECOM, but not turned over to the police... incredibly!!

THE ASSASSINS FABRICATE AN OUTRAGEOUS ALIBI

The then-lieutenant of the SIN, Daniel Guimpert Corvalán, together with the Carabineros Intelligence captain Germán Esquivel Caballero, who would later participate in multiple "disappearances" committed by the Comando Conjunto and the SICAR, was responsible for carrying out one of the dirtiest and most cowardly aspects of the destabilizing plot.

The day after the assassination of President Allende's naval aide—a Saturday—Esquivel and Guimpert toured various police stations looking for a "scapegoat" to pin the crime on. The one chosen was a man imprisoned for public drunkenness who worked at a CORFO company (SEAM) and carried a membership card for a party of the Unidad Popular (the Radical Party).

Since that was not very convincing and was not enough to complete their plans, they fabricated a Socialist Party membership card and "privately" interrogated the employee, who, subjected to savage torture, confessed to having participated in the assassination "together with a PS-Elenos commando" and some Cubans.

The SEAM CORFO mechanic ended up being charged and prosecuted by the Naval Justice system under the direction of Prosecutor Aldo Montagna.

The name of the electrical mechanic from SEAM CORFO tortured by Guimpert and Esquivel was José Luis Riquelme Bascuñán; he was interrogated and charged by the conspiring minister of the Court of Appeals (Abraham Meerson) and by Military Prosecutor Joaquín Erlbaum.

The unfortunate mechanic was tortured so thoroughly that he blamed himself for having participated in the crime with a group of GAPs and Cubans led by "Bruno" (Domingo Blanco), one of the leaders of the GAP.

The following day, opposition media and various politicians—most notably right-wing senators Víctor García Garzena and Fernando Ochagavía, along with Christian Democrat deputy Claudio Orrego Vicuña and the director of the Christian Democrat newspaper La Prensa, Jorge Navarrete—initiated a campaign of insults and accusations against the UP government and the Cuban representation in Chile.

The problem for the conspirators of various stripes and affiliations who coordinated around the false discovery of Commander Araya's assassins was that, a few days later, the Investigative Police arrested almost all the members of the gang formed by elements of the Comando Rolando Matus (CRM), the National Party (PN), Radical Democracy (DR), and Patria y Libertad, who had participated directly in the assassination of the aide.

Among them were: the alleged author of the shots (Guillermo Claverie), a leader of the National Party Youth and the CRM, Uca Eileen Lozano; the "Patria y Libertad" son of the well-known bakery businessman Castaño, Odilio Castaño Jiménez; the Patria y Libertad militant Luis "Fifo" Palma Ramírez, who two years later would have a prominent role in the SIFA and the disappearances of the Comando Conjunto; a CRM nephew of the DINA psychiatrist Laihlacar, surnamed Potin Laihlacar; the DR leader, Guillermo Schilling; and a CRM militant, Miguel Sepúlveda Campos, son of a well-known retired admiral. ()

Those who were not arrested hid on a farm in the Valparaíso Region and surrendered to a Navy commando the day after the coup. Those who were detained and prosecuted in the prisons of Valparaíso and Santiago were taken out of prison on September 12 by SIN commandos and integrated into repressive activities. The crime against Commander Araya remained unpunished and the file disappeared.

Everything changes, everything changes.

Lieutenant Guimpert Corvalán left the Navy in the late 70s and dedicated himself to running an arms sales business near the Armed Forces Building in Plaza Bulnes. He enjoyed release on bail until he was arrested again, accused in more than a dozen cases of forcibly disappeared persons, in some of which he was even pardoned in the early 90s.

His accomplice in the attempt to falsify the assassination of Commander Araya—Guillermo Esquivel—reached the rank of Carabineros colonel in the DICOMCAR and was arrested—for bounced checks—in 1991. He died under strange and never-clarified circumstances in 1993, while he was being denounced in various trials for disappearances and murders.

35 years after the assassination of President Allende's courageous aide, the official version provided by the dictatorship began to crumble in the courts, and the truth emerged: It was a crime planned by the right wing against Commander Araya.

The measure, which the officer's family had requested for the first time in August 2003, was approved following the appearance of new evidence provided by Guillermo Claverie.

On April 28, 2008, the Santiago Court of Appeals ordered the reopening of the investigation into the assassination. Unanimously, the Eighth Chamber of the appellate court determined that the court in charge of the case should proceed with the reopening of the investigation, take testimony from Guillermo Claverie Bartet (now 63 years old), and carry out other proceedings derived from it.

The account that Claverie gave to the journalists of La Nación Domingo a few years ago raises doubts. He asserted that he still felt fear of what the old (and new) members of the coup-plotting brotherhoods could do to him.

"I could never read the statements they made me sign at the Naval Prosecutor's Office. And one day when I started to read one of them, after an interrogation, the secretary of the naval prosecutor Aldo Montagna, the officer Jorge Garretón Iturra, put his hand into his uniform jacket and pulled out a pistol.

And he said to me: 'Hey, you idiot, you're reading too much, be grateful that you're still alive and sign there!' And of course, that's how I always signed everything."

His confessions confirm what the aide's children have been discovering in recent years, digging into the file of the trial initiated by the naval justice system, which culminated in 1980 with a three-year sentence for Claverie as the sole material author, and with lesser sentences for minor crimes for other members of the group that acted that night: "The fact is that that investigation is riddled with flaws," maintains Arturo, the aide's eldest son, who is a lawyer.

With these confessions from Claverie, the aide's children managed to get the Santiago Court of Appeals to order the reopening of the new process initiated from the complaint they filed in 2003, which had been dismissed and archived by the 18th Criminal Court of Santiago.

Burning questions.

To make Commander Araya come out to the balcony, Juan Zacconi and Guillermo Necochea (members of 'Patria y Libertad') threw a bomb in front of his house. The aide's arrival at his home was announced to them by another bomb that exploded nearby, thrown by another group.

The second bomb, the one from Zacconi and Necochea, was the signal for the third group, which was supposed to enter through Calle Fidel Oteíza, to commit the assassination.

Ballistic experts detected five impacts on the walls of the naval captain's house. But the shell casings found in front of the house were only four. With the projectile that mortally wounded the aide, and which entered directly without first bouncing off anything, the shots total six.

But the other two shell casings were never found. And ballistic reports established that the shell casings found in the street, corresponding to the shots fired by Claverie, did not belong to the projectile that perforated the aide's body.

That would mean that the commander was assassinated with a different weapon, and they shot at him from another place—presumably from across the street—slightly from above to below. Despite all this evidence, the naval investigation concluded that Allende's aide died from one of Claverie's shots. But he insists on highlighting many questions, all of them without official answers.

Who fired the two shots that several witnesses, according to their statements in the Naval Court process, heard immediately before the aide fired his burst toward the front and minutes before Claverie fired his four shots?

Did the former naval cadet Jorge Ehlers Trostel hire a sniper to assassinate Commander Araya Peeters, taking advantage of the chaos that Ehlers himself ordered the ultra-right-wing group to create that night in the vicinity of the aide's house?

Why did Ehlers literally flee to Germany days after the aide's children filed the complaint in September 2003, taking refuge in that country until today?

Why did no one take into account the statement of two prostitutes that appears in the naval justice file, who claimed that, standing that night on the corner of Pedro de Valdivia and Providencia and seconds after hearing shots, they saw two men running from a place, one of them with a rifle in his hand, and that they got into a pickup truck that had a license plate that looked like a government vehicle?

Torture, pressure, and threats.

Detained preventively in the Santiago Public Jail, one morning—still in the midst of the dictatorship—the guards took Claverie out and led him to the office of the Naval Prosecutor. In that place, Claverie himself told the newspaper La Nación, he was received by the naval officer Germán Arestizábal, who served as a clerk. "He made me get into an Austin Mini, where I recognized the Air Force officer surnamed Schindler, a schoolmate." They blindfolded him and took him to the Air War Academy in Las Condes.

"There they tied me to a cot and started hitting the soles of my feet with a stick or an iron bar. Later they injected into my vein what I believe was pentothal, because they still hadn't gotten my own confession of the aide's crime, as they wanted. I never knew what I answered, but I couldn't have said something that was false," he states.

Days later, upon leaving an office where he had begun to work, a car approached from which an individual he knew descended, forcing him to get into the vehicle.

"It was 'Fifo' Palma (Luis Palma Ramírez, who later joined the Comando Conjunto) and in the car I saw about five submachine guns. The Fifo told me: 'Do you know that now we can kill you for talking, you idiot? You know that people who are now very important are involved in this. Don't you forget it.'"

That last phrase from the so-called 'Fifo' Palma—assuming Claverie is telling the truth—is what the court in charge of the reopening of the case must elucidate, as it is vital to establish the identity of those "people who are now very important." How "important" are those people today?

Parliamentarians? Businessmen? Chilean diplomats abroad? Retired officers of the Armed Forces? Still-active officers? Political leaders? Leaders of business associations? Sooner or later the country will know their names, which will be added to that of Guillermo Claverie, who was indeed in one of the seditious and criminal groups that fateful night.

() THE LIST OF MEMBERS OF THE ASSASSIN COMMAND (published by CAUCE Magazine No. 15, 07/09/1984).

René Guillermo Claverie Bartet Mario Eduardo Rojas Zegers Guillermo Francisco Necochea Aspillaga Miguel Víctor Sepúlveda Campos (son of an Admiral (r)) Uca Eileen Lozano Jeffs (CRM-JN) Guillermo Adolfo Schilling Rojas (cousin of 'Mamo' Schilling, leader of the Socialist Party) José Eduardo Iturriaga Aránguiz Luis Guillermo Perry González Luis César “Fifo” Palma Jiménez (later, he was a member of the Comando Conjunto) Ricardo Vélez Gómez Rafael Mardones Saint Jean (first cousin of José Luis Mardones Santander, President of BancoEstado) Adolfo Palma Ramírez (brother of Fifo Palma) Enrique Quiroz Ruiz Wilfredo Humberto Perry González Odilio Castaño Jiménez (current co-owner of the 'Castaño' bakery chain) Carlos Fernando Farías Corrales Juan Zacconi Quiroz Andrés Pablo Potin Lailhacar Tito Alejandro Figari Verdugo

======================= by Arturo Alejandro Muñoz

Source: elsiglo.cl, July 27, 2023