This September 23, the day we remember 24 years since the explosive-related homicide of Jaime Orellana and Nelson Lagos in Chillán, scene reconstructions were carried out for the crimes committed by military personnel from the Armed Forces on duty with the CNI, where they proceeded with exclusive dedication to plan and execute homicides, some of them mass killings like that of August 23, 1984.

With a large police deployment involving numerous PDI officers—some strangely hooded as in the dictatorship—and GOPE personnel, the scene reconstruction was carried out under the direction of Judge Carlos Aldana, who, accompanied by his secretary lawyer David Bravo and the lawyer from the Ministry of the Interior's Human Rights Department, Mrs.

Magdalena Garcés, participated in order to clarify the criminal acts in which the leaders of the southern zone of the MIR were executed on August 23, 1984.

In every place where the proceedings were carried out—Hualpén, Concepción, and San Pedro—in addition to their relatives and friends, the Association of Political Executed Persons of the MIR of Concepción and social organizations from Hualpén were present.

A large crowd from the area and press from various media outlets gathered, remaining at a distance—cordoned off by the officers—attentive to the movements that described the events that occurred during those homicides.

Let us remember that on this date, seven comrades, members of the southern leadership of the MIR, were executed in the operation known as Alfa Carbón 1 by the Security Services of that time, whose objective was to eliminate the members of that MIR leadership.

During that simultaneous operation, Nelson Herrera and Mario Lagos were murdered in Concepción, Luciano Aedo Arias in Hualpén, Mario Mújica in Los Ángeles, and Juan José Boncompte, Rogelio Tapia, and Raúl Barrientos in Valdivia.

The perpetrators, members of the CNI, were commanded by Marcos Derpisch Miranda, an Army Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the operation, and seconded by Hugo José Hechenleitner, an Army Lieutenant Colonel, who appeared today at the scene of the events along with five other members of the former CNI to reconstruct the facts at the corner of Grecia and Nápoles streets in the current commune of Hualpén, where Luciano Aedo Arias was murdered.

Some of the names of the death squad that participated in the Alfa Carbón 1 operation in Concepción:

1. Marcos Derpisch Miranda: Army Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the operation. Today he continues to work at the DINE (Army Intelligence Directorate). 2. Hugo José Hechenleitner: Army Lieutenant Colonel; his alias was Antonio Martínez López. 3.

Claudio Rodrigo Rosas Fernandez: Army Lieutenant Colonel. 4. Víctor Manuel Muñoz Orellana: Army Non-Commissioned Officer; his alias was Jaime Ricardo Marinovic Palma, and he was the one who shot Luciano Aedo. 5.

Álvaro Corbalán Castilla (Army Major). Today imprisoned at the Punta Peuco resort. 6. Francisco Zúñiga Acevedo: Army Officer. Now deceased; he left without paying for his crimes. 7. Jorge Mandiola Arredondo: Army Major. 8.

Carlos Palma: Army Non-Commissioned Officer. 9. Leandro Montenegro (Army Non-Commissioned Officer), alias Farias. 10. Jorge Vargas: Civilian. 11. Miguel Gajardo: Civilian. 12. Andres Caris: Carabineros Non-Commissioned Officer. 13.

Egon Barra: Carabineros Corporal. 14. Rosa Humilde Ramos: Army Non-Commissioned Officer. The most feared among her peers. They call her "La Mala" (The Bad One). 15. Teresa Osorio: Navy Non-Commissioned Officer.

These are those who acted in the massacre of Concepción and Hualpén, accompanied by another numerous contingent of CNI, Army, and Carabineros personnel and informants.

In the case of Los Ángeles, where they murdered Mario Mujica, the following participated in the large contingent of evildoers:

1. Bruno Antonio Soto Aravena 2. José Artemio Zapata Zapata.

Currently, it is believed that one of them—it has not been possible to establish which—is living in Los Ángeles and the other in Concepción. They were detained for a brief time and were imprisoned, but of course, they were released shortly after and today enjoy full freedom.

After concluding in Hualpén, the entourage moved to the Vega Monumental sector, where Nelson Herrera and Mario Lagos were executed after having surrendered and descended with their hands raised from the taxi-bus in which they were traveling.

This event is a clear example of how the rights of the detainee were violated; unarmed and without the capacity for armed response, they were riddled with bullets in the presence of passersby and passengers of the bus in which they were traveling, which constitutes a double homicide.

After the reconstruction in Hualpén and Concepción was finished, the Judge and his work team moved to the El Recodo neighborhood on the road to Santa Juana, where the CNI proceeded to raid the home of Nelson Herrera's family, where his wife, Patricia Zalaquet, was detained.

Today, Judge Aldana has obtained, in the presence of the accused, the details and characteristics of these crimes, which were presented at that time to public opinion as "clashes" between terrorists and CNI officials, even though these evildoers had traveled expressly from Santiago to commit the illicit acts.

It is worth noting, as Judge Aldana himself pointed out to the press, that this judicial case was archived in the Military Prosecutor's Office, from where it was recovered, apparently by the Government's Human Rights Department, to transfer it to the hands of the Civil Justice system, which will now have the task of prosecuting and sentencing, although the Judge himself indicated that he does not rule out further proceedings.

The Relatives of the Political Executed Persons of the MIR in Concepción expect a lot from the Judge; so far, all his conclusions in other cases blame only the material executors, the last link in the chain of command, the one who pulled the trigger, leaving the intellectual authors and commanders who gave the orders to murder unpunished.

That is why we hope that this chain of command reaches the High Commands of the institutions that had intelligence apparatuses with exclusive dedication to commit crimes, and those are even higher up than Álvaro Corbalán Castilla himself (who excused himself from attending, although he participated in the events), because this bandit did not act alone.

Today it transpired that the Judge had indicted the second-in-command of the CNI, whom he had sent as a detainee to the Chacabuco Regiment; at the time of writing this note, it was only a rumor. The orders to murder in a highly hierarchical and centralized armed institution could only come from the Intelligence General Staff with the due approval and authorization of the de facto government of the coup-plotting military.

It is striking that the former leaders of the MIR of that time are once again not present to support the relatives, nor are they becoming parties to the lawsuits for truth and justice, nor are they undertaking initiatives against impunity; it is possible that they are out hunting for votes instead of hunting criminals.

Source: liberacion.cl, September 30, 2009

Judge Carlos Aldana sentences 17 former CNI members for 7 qualified homicides during Operation Alfa Carbón in 1984.

The Magistrate sentenced Marcos Spiro Derpich Miranda and Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla to 20 years in prison as co-perpetrators of all the qualified homicides and 5 years and one day in prison as co-perpetrators of illicit association.

The visiting judge for human rights violation cases of the Court of Appeals of Concepción, Carlos Aldana Fuentes, sentenced 17 former members of the National Information Center (CNI) for the qualified homicides of Luciano Humberto Aedo Arias, Nelson Adrián Herrera Riveros, Mario Octavio Lagos Rodríguez, Mario Mujica Barros, Juan José Boncompte Andreu, Rogelio Tapia de la Puente, and Jaime Barrientos Matamala, which occurred between August 23 and 24, 1984, in the communes of Talcahuano (currently Hualpén), Concepción, Los Ángeles, and Valdivia, within the framework of the so-called "Operation Alfa Carbón."

The Magistrate sentenced Marcos Spiro Derpich Miranda and Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla to 20 years in prison as co-perpetrators of all the qualified homicides and 5 years and one day in prison as co-perpetrators of illicit association.

Meanwhile, Patricio Lorenzo Castro Muñoz must serve a sentence of 15 years and one day in prison for the three homicides in Valdivia, and 5 years and one day as a co-perpetrator of illicit association.

Agent Jorge Camilo Mandiola Arredondo was sentenced to 15 years and one day in prison as a co-perpetrator of the qualified homicides in Talcahuano, Concepción, and Los Ángeles.

Agents Roberto Antonio Farías Santelices and Luis Hernán Gálvez Navarro were sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison as co-perpetrators of the qualified homicide in Talcahuano.

For their part, José Abel Aravena Ruiz, Luis Enrique Andaur Leiva, Sergio Agustín Mateluna Pino, and Patricio Alfredo Bertón Campos were sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison as co-perpetrators of the qualified homicide in Concepción.

José Artemio Zapata Zapata and Bruno Antonio Soto Aravena must serve a sentence of 10 years and one day in prison as co-perpetrators of the qualified homicide in Los Ángeles.

Oscar Boehmwald Soto and Ema Verónica Ceballos Núñez were punished with a sentence of 10 years and one day as co-perpetrators of a qualified homicide in Valdivia.

Finally, Gerardo Meza Acuña and Luis René Torres Méndez were sentenced to 15 years and one day as co-perpetrators of two qualified homicides in Valdivia. For this same event, Luis Alberto Moraga Tresckow was sentenced to 5 years in prison, with the benefit of supervised release granted.

In the investigation stage, Judge Aldana managed to establish that in 1984, the head of the CNI in Concepción, Army Major Jorge Mandiola, received information about the re-articulation of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in the area, managing to detect some of its leaders.

After informing the Army Colonel, Marcos Derpich Miranda, head of CNI Regionals, and confirming the fact, the director of the CNI, General Humberto Gordon Rubio (now deceased), was informed, who determined that Army Major Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, in charge of the Anti-Subversive Division and the head of Regionals, should coordinate the operations to neutralize the members of the MIR who were operating between the Biobío and Los Ríos regions, naming it "Operation Alfa Carbón."

As a result of the above, Corbalán Castilla ordered several teams, integrated by people from the different Brigades of Santiago, composed of two or three people and with mobilization and financing provided by the Anti-Subversive Division, to move to Concepción, Los Ángeles, and Valdivia, so that, in coordination with members of the CNI Regionals of those cities, they could carry out the proceedings that the different headquarters ordered them to do.

Likewise, he ordered his subordinate Patricio Lorenzo Castro Muñoz to establish himself in Valdivia, in charge of the teams he brought from Santiago, to direct and carry out the operations in that region.

In parallel, and for the same purpose, Marcos Derpich Miranda arranged for the head of the CNI barracks in Chillán, Héctor Reinoso Muñoz, to join his counterpart in Concepción; Mandiola and the head of Puerto Montt, Oscar Boehmwald, along with two agents from his unit, were to report to the head of Valdivia, Moraga Tresckow, to support the respective operations.

Once in Concepción, the teams and heads who arrived in the city, plus those from this region, met in the days close to August 23, 1984, at the CNI barracks located on Avenida Pedro de Valdivia, where they coordinated the actions to be developed, being led by Álvaro Corbalán, Joaquín Molina (deceased), and Marcos Derpich.

In that meeting, the decision was made to carry out various raids and arrests (without judicial orders or judicial proceedings) and that the fate of the detainees depended on the degree of danger to the military regime prevailing in the country, assuming that some of these could result in death. This operation included activities in Talcahuano and Concepción as well as in Los Ángeles and Valdivia.

On the morning of August 23, 1984, several CNI teams detected three members of the MIR at the Plazoleta El Ancla in Talcahuano. One of them, Luciano Humberto Aedo Arias, boarded a public transport bus in the direction of the Hualpencillo sector, where he got off the vehicle and tried to flee on foot, being intercepted by CNI members—around noon—at the corner of Grecia and Nápoles streets, where agent Luis Hernán Gálvez Navarro shot him with a firearm he was carrying, causing him to fall wounded to the ground.

The Santiago agent, Roberto Antonio Farías Santelices, approached and finished him off with a burst from his AK-47 rifle, causing his death due to a transfixing wound to the chest with involvement of the heart and lungs.

The other two members of the MIR mentioned above in Talcahuano, Nelson Adrián Herrera Riveros and Mario Octavio Lagos Rodríguez, boarded another taxi-bus heading to Concepción, which was followed by other CNI operational teams, who coordinated with Carabineros along the way to intercept the bus—which was carrying passengers—in front of the Vega Monumental.

When the vehicle arrived at that location, the CNI members ordered everyone to get off the public transport vehicle, but since some refused, including those being pursued, they threw tear gas canisters.

When they descended, they shot Herrera and Lagos, causing them wounds.

Lagos Rodríguez tried to flee, so an agent shot him with the AK rifle he was carrying, causing a transfixing wound to the chest with visceral involvement, which caused his death.

For his part, Herrera Riveros was apprehended by CNI agents Sergio Mateluna Pino, José Abel Aravena Ruiz, Luis Andaur Leiva, and Patricio Alfredo Bertón Campos, who put him into one of their vehicles and headed to the Regional Hospital of Concepción for the treatment of his wounds.

However, during the journey, Derpich Miranda ordered his execution, so they took him to kilometer 0.9 of the road to Santa Juana, where they took him out of the vehicle and Andaur shot him in the forehead with his revolver, causing a craniocerebral gunshot wound, which caused his instantaneous death.

Around 5:30 p.m. on the same day, once the CNI agents of Concepción, José Zapata Zapata and Bruno Soto Aravena, who were following Mario Mujica Barros, heard the news of the aforementioned events on Radio Bío Bío and following the instructions of their boss Jorge Camilo Mandiola Arredondo, they approached Mujica Barros's home in the Orompello neighborhood of Los Ángeles, ordering him to leave the property.

Mujica refused, so they entered by knocking down the front door, shooting the victim in the head while he was on the ground, causing a gunshot wound to the lateral side of the neck, with sectioning of the trachea and large vessels, hemorrhaging, and anemia, which caused his death.

Meanwhile, at around 4:00 p.m. on August 23, 1984, CNI operational teams that had arrived from Santiago, led by Patricio Castro Muñoz, arrested Rogelio Tapia de la Puente and Jaime Barrientos Matamala near the Las Ánimas Bridge in the city of Valdivia.

Subsequently, they crossed the Calle Calle River on a ferry and transported them to the Estancilla Bridge, located on the road from Valdivia to Niebla, in the Torobayo sector, a place where traffic for all vehicles and people had previously been cut off by Carabineros.

Under circumstances where the detainees were tied by their hands and blindfolded, the agents proceeded to execute them by order of Castro Muñoz, who fired, in addition to agents Luis René Torres Méndez and Gerardo Meza Muñoz.

Likewise, the regional head of the CNI of Valdivia, Luis Moraga Tresckow, who had refused to do so, finished them off after the repeated order of Castro Muñoz. The victims received multiple projectile wounds, some of which impacted Tapia de la Puente and Barrientos Matamala in the skull, causing cranio-encephalo-facial wounds.

Subsequently, weapons were placed in the hands of the deceased to simulate a clash.

The following day, August 24, 1984, around 3:00 p.m., several CNI operational teams, led by Patricio Castro Muñoz, surrounded the home of Juan José Boncompte Andreu, located in the Teniente Merino neighborhood of Valdivia, entering it to arrest Boncompte Andreu, the supposed regional head of the MIR in that city, who tried to flee from his captors, being wounded by shots from Oscar Boehmwald Soto, falling to the ground, where Ema Verónica Ceballos Núñez shot him in the head with her firearm, causing his death.

In the civil aspect, Judge Aldana ordered the State of Chile to pay a total compensation of $810,000,000 to the victims' relatives in the amounts detailed in the sentence.

Source: pjud.cl, May 4, 2018

Alfa Carbón 1: The Operation Albania of the south

The Court of Appeals is about to rule on the expansion of the indictment for "illicit association" against 13 former CNI agents involved in the execution of seven MIR members in 1984—murders that were presented at the time as "confrontations." The judge presiding over the case only indicted two of the accused for "illicit association": Álvaro Corbalán and Marcos Derpich.

The following text was sent to CIPER by the victims' families and reconstructs the events based on statements contained in the judicial file. Its authors aim to demonstrate that the "illicit association" included all the agents who acted in these operations.

The method of fake confrontations to eliminate opponents was a common practice used by the National Information Center (CNI), the repressive agency of the military government. The detention, execution, and disappearance of prisoners—which the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), the CNI's predecessor, used intensely and massively during the early period of the dictatorship—was replaced in later years by the public execution of "internal enemies" and their subsequent presentation as confrontations by the CNI.

The latter would detain and eliminate opponents in chosen locations, where the scene of the alleged confrontation was later staged. Alternatively, opponents were executed in ambushes prepared in advance.

In both circumstances, the press covered the episodes with complicit enthusiasm. The courts of justice ignored the investigations demanded by the victims' families or processed the cases in a foolish and negligent manner; in any case, the country has had to endure decades of proceedings to achieve judicial progress.

What follows accounts for the responsibility of the courts of justice in clarifying the murder of seven MIR members in the cities of Concepción, Valdivia, and Los Ángeles, which occurred on August 23 and 24, 1984, within the framework of Operation Alfa Carbón 1 or, as it has been called, the "Southern Albania," in allusion to the well-known Operation Albania or Corpus Christi Massacre, in which the CNI murdered twelve members of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front in June 1987.

The background information we present below does not constitute, according to the investigating judge in charge of the case, Carlos Aldana Fuentes, sufficient evidence to establish well-founded presumptions that the accused and defendants Hugo Salas Wenzel, Jorge Mandiola Arredondo, Jorge Andrade Gómez, and Aquiles González Cortés, among others, bore responsibility and participation as authors of the crimes committed under the charge of criminal illicit association.

Aldana also dismisses the responsibility as accomplice and accessory after the fact attributed to Miguel Ángel Parra Vásquez, then a lawyer for the CNI and responsible for instructing agents to provide false statements to the courts after the events occurred.

According to Aldana, there is insufficient evidence to consider that these agents participated as authors, accomplices, or accessories in the crimes attributed to them, as required by Article 274 No. 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

On August 23, 1984, the CNI team led by Luís Hernán Gálvez Navarro began the second stage of Operation Alfa Carbón 1. At around 11:00, several CNI teams and a National Television crew arrived in Hualpencillo, now Hualpén.

Luciano Humberto Aedo Arias, a MIR leader in the Southern Theater of Operations, lived at 3346 Nápoles Street. After noon, at the intersection of Grecia and Nápoles, agents Raúl Hernán Escobar Díaz and Roberto Antonio Farías Santelices, along with Gálvez Navarro, got out of the vehicles in which they had been following him for months, shot him in the back, and finished him off on the ground.

Finally, according to witnesses, "after a while, many vehicles began to arrive, they checked his pockets, placed two small weapons near his body, some pamphlets, and some black objects like grenades" (fs. 3907, case file 746-84).

Alfa Carbón 1 had begun at the start of 1984—or perhaps earlier—when Jorge Mandiola Arredondo, head of the CNI in Concepción, informed his superior Marcos Spiros Derpich Miranda, head of the CNI Regional Division, that there was already sufficient data to confirm the presence of a subversive structure in the area: the Southern Theater of Operations (TOS) of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR).

Joaquín Molina Fuenzalida (+), Derpich's second-in-command in the Regional Division, had directed the intelligence work for what would be the definitive dismantling of the MIR leadership in southern Chile.

Derpich and Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, then head of the CNI's Anti-Subversive Division (DAS), based at the Cuartel Borgoño in Santiago, were to command the operation. The report submitted by Mandiola included names, addresses, and organizational charts of the MIR members, among which was Aedo's information.

The autopsy report performed by forensic doctor César Reyes Contreras on August 24, 1984, at 8:30, confirmed that Luciano Aedo received seven bullet impacts, four in the back, head, left wrist, and left foot, and defined the precise and necessary cause of death as a projectile fired from a distance of more than fifty centimeters that entered through the back and exited through the chest, compromising the heart and lungs (fs. 234; 292).

Likewise, in his statement on September 13, the doctor noted that the trajectory of the projectile suggests that Aedo was leaning forward, "as when running," and that the wounds in the back must have been inflicted when the thorax was very inclined, "almost horizontal to the ground" (fs. 17954). Luciano Humberto Aedo Arias was 34 years old, a father of four, and a member of the MIR.

Later, at around 16:00, in front of the Vega Monumental in Concepción, driver Pedro Aguayo Aguayo was forced to stop his minibus. About thirty CNI agents and Carabineros personnel had surrounded the area.

In Talcahuano, Mario Octavio Lagos Rodríguez, military head of the TOS, and Nelson Adrián Herrera Riveros, political-military head of the TOS, had boarded the bus. A National Television crew was also taking positions.

Jorge Octavio Vargas Bories, a former Army officer hired as a civilian employee of the CNI and second-in-command of the Special Brigade, ordered the passengers to get off. Only the driver did so. Faced with this, the officers began throwing tear gas canisters into the vehicle, where about twelve people remained.

Ten got off. After a few minutes, Mario Lagos descended through the back door with his hands up. Egon Antonio Barra Barra, a Carabineros corporal and member of the CNI's Special Brigade, got out of the vehicle in which they had followed the minibus, carrying an AK rifle.

Manuel Ángel Morales Acevedo, a Carabineros corporal and member of the CNI's Special Brigade, did the same. As stated in fs. 3646, both fired several shots, "the subject falling face down and dying at that place." They acted under the orders of Hugo José Hechenleitner Hechenleitner, then an Army lieutenant and team leader, before the stunned gaze of about 500 witnesses.

The autopsy report for Mario Lagos Rodríguez revealed that he received two bullet impacts fired from more than fifty centimeters away: one in the left axillary area—which proves he had his arms raised at the time of receiving it—and another in the posterior part of the right thigh. Mario Octavio Lagos Rodríguez was 34 years old, a father of three, and a member of the MIR.

Upon seeing him on the ground, Nelson Herrera tried to flee but was intercepted. The driver, Pedro Aguayo, stated on September 10, 1984: "I went toward him and was a meter away from him. At that same moment, two agents arrived and lifted him by the arms.

The fallen man opened his eyes and looked at me directly. He had no blood anywhere on his body, except for a scrape on the right temple, which could have been caused by the fall or the graze of a bullet [...] The two men who had approached him took him firmly by the arms, lifted him up, and said he was wounded and had to be taken to the hospital" (fs. 18345).

José Abel Aravena Ruiz, a Carabineros non-commissioned officer and member of the Blue Brigade, commanded the team in charge of following Herrera and, together with Sergio Agustín Mateluna Pino, a civilian Army agent and member of the CNI's regional Anti-Subversive Division in Concepción; Luis Enrique Andaur Leiva, a Carabineros corporal and operational guard at the CNI's Cuartel Borgoño; and a fourth agent to date unidentified, whose alias was "Cárdenas," put him in a car and drove him toward Santa Juana.

There, in a vacant lot, Luis Andaur Leiva fired a shot into his forehead.

The autopsy of Nelson Herrera concluded that the cause of death was a craniocerebral wound resulting from a shot fired at point-blank range, which penetrated through the middle nasofrontal region and whose star-shaped appearance indicates it was inflicted at a distance of two or three centimeters.

Furthermore, it revealed the presence of bruising with blood infiltration on his wrists, indicating they were tied at the time of death. Nelson Adrián Herrera Riveros was 30 years old, a father of one daughter, and a member of the MIR.

As stated in fs. 4601—and established in fs. 3089; 3419; 2700 and 2557—the day before the operation, "a meeting was held in which it was said who had to be detained and who had to be eliminated. In that meeting, photographs were placed, and those who had to be eliminated were marked with a cross; among these were Herrera and Lagos." The meeting was led by Derpich and Mandiola, and the entire command participated, that is, in addition to them: Corbalán, Gonzales Cortés, Krantz Johans Bauer Donoso, and "the CNI officer known at the Cuartel Borgoño specifically as 'don Oscar,' who corresponds to Jorge Claudio Andrade Gómez." Krantz Bauer (+) was to be in charge of the teams that were going to operate in Los Ángeles, and for that reason, he moved that night to the regiment in that city.

At around 17:00 on August 23, Bauer Donoso received the order to operate and informed the teams under his command to proceed with the planned actions. Bruno Antonio Soto Aravena, an Army non-commissioned officer and member of the Concepción DAS; José Artemio Zapata Zapata, a civilian Army agent and member of the Concepción DAS; and Rafael de Jesús Riveros Frost, a civilian Army agent and member of the Caupolicán, Red, and Blue brigades, arrived at 841 Bombero Carlos Vyhmeister Street in the Orompello neighborhood, where Mario Mujica Barros, a MIR leader and member of the TOS, lived.

As stated in the file, the three members of the team commanded by Soto Aravena had arrived in the city of Los Ángeles the first week of August to follow him. On the day of the events, the team waited for him to leave his home, but Mujica did not move.

About twelve agents positioned themselves in front of and on the sides of the house, and once the perimeter was secured, the team initiated the attack by entering the home. Simultaneously, the other teams fired into the air to give the impression of a confrontation.

But, as stated in fs. 309, Mario Mujica was subdued inside his home, forced to his knees, and executed with a point-blank shot. Subsequently, and to continue with the facade, the agents continued firing, climbing onto the roofs of neighboring houses and stationing themselves in the rear alley, while a large number of Carabineros provided perimeter support (fs. 146; 191).

The autopsy report for Mario Mujica indicated as the cause of death a bullet wound to the neck with involvement of the trachea and blood vessels, hemorrhage, and anemia. Likewise, Police Report No. 44 of the PDI's Criminalistics Department indicated that at the time of receiving the homicidal impact, Mario Mujica could have been at a lower height than the person who fired the shot, either crouching or on the floor, or partially with his back turned, with his head and neck inclined (fs. 390).

Mario Ernesto Mujica Barros was 32 years old, a father of one son, and a member of the MIR.

As in Concepción, and as stated in fs. 392; 291, a meeting was held in Valdivia on August 22, 1984, to plan the operation in that city. The meeting was led by Patricio Lorenzo Castro Muñoz, an Army lieutenant and second-in-command of the Yellow Brigade; Luis Alberto Moraga Tresckow, an Army captain and head of the CNI in Valdivia; and Oscar Alberto Boehmwald Soto, an Army captain and head of the CNI in Puerto Montt.

There, the teams that would operate the following day and the day after in the city were assigned.

On August 23, 1984, around noon, the three teams led by Patricio Castro detained Rogelio Tapia de la Puente and Raúl Jaime Barrientos Matamala, MIR leaders and members of the TOS, in the center of Valdivia.

The three groups formed a caravan along with two other teams, one of which was commanded by Moraga Tresckow, and headed along the route to Niebla to the Estancilla Bridge, where they stopped in the middle of an open field.

A red van was also in the caravan. There, one of the vehicles moved about two hundred meters toward Niebla to cut off traffic, while another did the same with the flow coming from Valdivia. The detainees, tied, blindfolded, and gagged, were forced to get out and were immediately murdered by about five or six shooters, the first of them being Patricio Castro.

He was followed by "Miguel Aliaga," Gerardo Meza Acuña, Francisco Orellana Segel, Fernando Ramírez Romero, Alberto Moraga Tresckow, and another agent to date unidentified. Subsequently, these same agents fired at the red van that had been parked nearby to simulate a confrontation.

Ernesto Arnoldo Barría Ordoñez, captain of the ferry Caupolicán, which followed a route on the Valdivia River, noted that on that August 23, from noon on, many vehicles with Santiago license plates began to pass, crossing from Las Mulatas toward Torobayo, and that in the afternoon, some people in civilian clothes who claimed to be from the CNI, accompanied by several Carabineros, approached him.

They asked him to suspend service, and since there were orders from the Maritime Governorate, he had to obey. After approximately an hour and a half, a Carabineros chief told him to cross to pick up a hearse to transport the bodies of two MIR members who had died in a confrontation. "The hearse was black, but it had the Carabineros logo.

I asked a known Carabinero for authorization to see the bodies." There he recognized Barrientos, because they lived in the same neighborhood (fs. 287).

The autopsies confirmed that Rogelio Tapia received six bullet impacts to the face, thorax, and abdomen, and Raúl Barrientos, three impacts to the head and thorax. Rogelio Tapia de la Puente was 31 years old, a father of two daughters, and a member of the MIR. Raúl Barrientos Matamala was 23 years old and a member of the MIR.

The execution of Operation Alfa Carbón 1 culminated on August 24 at 643 Rubén Darío Street, in the Corvi neighborhood of Valdivia. The previous day, most of the teams that had moved to Valdivia were monitoring the home of Juan José Boncompte Andreu, a MIR leader and member of the TOS, waiting for him to leave so they could execute him.

Among them were the chiefs Boehmwald Soto, Ema Verónica Ceballos Núñez, and Luís René Torres Méndez. However, Boncompte did not leave that day. The agents returned on the 24th with orders to enter his home.

Patricio Castro Muñoz entrusted Boehmwald Soto to lead the operation after noon. The team leaders, in addition to agents Patricio Castro, Pedro María Rojas Vásquez, Zinaida Lena Vicencio González, Aquiles Poblete Palominos, and Carlos Alberto Ejía López, among others, entered through the front door, while several teams surrounded the house and the entire block.

Eladio Washington Ilabel Poblete, a neighbor in the sector, noted that on the day of the events, he saw a black taxi park in front of Boncompte's house. Four individuals got out, knocked on the door, and entered.

After one or two minutes, he heard several shots: "Out of curiosity, I climbed onto the roof of my house and observed a man running toward the lot (backyard) and he was riddled with bullets by several people, as many were coming from the front of the house.

I also remember that an armed woman approached the body of the person who had been shot and lifted his nose, and I heard her say: 'He was a pretty guy,' as if laughing, and then she shot him with her weapon" (fs. 286).

According to the autopsy, Boncompte had 22 bullet impacts: nine in the thorax, four in the arm, and two in the right forearm; three in the right thigh, three in the left leg, and one in the face. Juan José Boncompte Andreu was 31 years old, a father of two children, and a member of the MIR.

Narda Flandes, also a neighbor of Boncompte, noted in fs. 279 that one of the subjects who shot him turned him over with his foot so he would be face up and, along with others, "threw his body into a bag. I left the place, running toward the corner to keep watching. In that interval, I saw when they took out a pregnant girl and put her into the van."

In the statement she provided on October 5, 1990, for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Inés Díaz Vallejos noted:

I, Inés Díaz Vallejos, born in Quillota, Chilean citizen, with date of birth April 25, 1952, identity card 7.152.059-5, Santiago, by profession a teacher, with current address at Sodra Ledningsgatan 39, Lilla Edet, Sweden, come to declare that:

1) Approximately at 16:00 on that day, a group of people dressed in civilian clothes appeared at our home. Some wore an armband that identified them as members of the Army. Those people entered our house when I opened the door.

My partner, Juan José, remained in the bedroom. I was assaulted by four or five of the people who entered and was thrown onto the floor of the living room. While lying there, I heard firearms being fired inside the house.

At those moments, I was subjected to mistreatment by a group of those individuals. They demanded answers to questions about where there were weapons, explosives, etc. I replied that I had no knowledge of those things.

These people insisted that I answer, and for that, they subjected me to beatings and kicks all over my body. I must highlight that when this happened, I was 28 weeks pregnant. I lived with Juan José and he is the father of my daughter.

After a while, I was removed from the house and taken to police facilities in Valdivia. That same day, almost at dusk, I was transferred again, this time to the men's prison in Valdivia. There I remained, always incommunicado. This lasted six days (although I remained) detained until the week of the birth in November 1984, without being accused or convicted.

2) On November 28, 1984, my daughter Javiera was born, affected by generalized spastic tetraparesis. This implies a state of total physical impairment that is irreparable. My daughter is not in a condition to use her legs or arms, nor can she speak.

The impairment is physical in nature. My daughter's mental capacity is intact, with an evident degree of intelligence. All medical evaluations indicate without a doubt that the physical disability is due to the mistreatment I received on August 24, 1984.

The judicial history of this case begins on that same August 23, 1984, in the military prosecutor's offices of Concepción and Valdivia with proceedings against the 16 MIR members detained in both cities and those responsible for the "unnecessary violence" that caused the deaths of Luciano Aedo, Mario Lagos, Nelson Herrera, Mario Mujica, Rogelio Tapia, Raúl Barrientos, and Juan José Boncompte.

That same year, Monsignor José Manuel Santos, Archbishop of Concepción—whose denunciations were picked up by Cauce magazine in a report titled "I Accuse" (http://saladehistoria.com/Revistas/Cauce/pdf/Cauce021.pdf)—requested an investigating judge from the Court of Appeals and, faced with its refusal, presented all the background information he could gather to the Supreme Court.

But the case remained in the military justice system, most of the time in the charge of prosecutor Pedro Marisio, the same one who took statements from the detainees when they left the CNI barracks and went to prison.

Marisio interrogated six agents knowing that they were using false names instructed by the lawyer Miguel Ángel Parra. Claudio Rodrigo Rozas Fernández, Antonio Martínez López, Jaime Marinovic Palma, Juan Machuca Fuenzalida, Ricardo Labórquez Maturana, and Raúl González López are the "aliases" they used.

In 1998, prosecutor Marisio dismissed the case, declaring that it was not possible to find the true identities of those responsible. The lawyer representing the families of the MIR members murdered in Concepción and Hualpencillo appealed, but the Martial Court confirmed the dismissal.

The lawyer then filed a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court, which ordered the investigation to continue. Only in 2003 did military prosecutor Fernando Grandón, faced with a new attempt at dismissal, request that the Fifth Department of the PDI be officially tasked to investigate.

It was the detectives of this brigade who found the first two names: Hugo José Hechenleitner Hechenleitner and Víctor Muñoz Orellana. Finally, in 2007, lawyer Magdalena Garcés took over representing the majority of the victims' families and succeeded in having the case transferred to the civil justice system.

In 2009, Judge Aldana reopened the case for the death of Mario Mujica—which had been dismissed in 1998—and in 2011, he consolidated the three cases (Valdivia, Concepción, and Los Ángeles) into one (12-2009 of the Concepción Court of Appeals) for qualified homicide and illicit association against Marcos Derpich, Álvaro Corbalán, and others.

On June 20, 2012, Judge Aldana resolved to indict only ÁLVARO CORBALÁN CASTILLA and MARCOS DERPICH MIRANDA for illicit association and, for qualified homicide, in addition to them, 13 agents (see list below).

At the beginning of 2013, Magdalena Garcés and Patricia Parra (a lawyer for the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior, who also became a party to the process) presented two requests to expand the indictment.

The lawyers' requests are for the judge to expand the indictment for the crime of illicit association and to indict: JORGE CLAUDIO ANDRADE GÓMEZ and AQUILES MAURICIO GONZÁLEZ CORTÉS as authors of the qualified homicide of all the victims; JORGE CAMILO MANDIOLA ARREDONDO as author of the qualified homicide of Luciano Humberto Aedo Arias, Mario Octavio Lagos Rodríguez, Nelson Adrián Herrera Riveros, and Mario Ernesto Mujica Barros; HUGO JOSÉ HECHENLEITNER HECHENLEITNER and EGON ANTONIO BARRA BARRA as authors of the crime of qualified homicide of Mario Octavio Lagos Rodríguez; RAFAEL DE JESÚS RIVEROS FROST as author of the crime of qualified homicide of Mario Ernesto Mujica Barros; FRANCISCO JAVIER ORELLANA SEGUEL and JORGE FERNANDO RAMÍREZ ROMERO as authors of the qualified homicide of Rogelio Humberto Tapia De la Puente and Raúl Jaime Barrientos Matamala; and agents CARLOS ALBERTO EGUÍA LÓPEZ, LUIS RENÉ TORRES MÉNDEZ, PEDRO MARÍA ROJAS VÁSQUEZ, ZINAIDA LENA VICENCIO GONZÁLEZ, and AQUILES POBLETE PALOMINOS as authors of the crime of qualified homicide of Juan José Boncompte Andreu.

An illicit association composed of only two people, as Judge Aldana intends, is laughable in this context. Indeed, Article 292 of the Penal Code provides that any association formed with the object of attacking the social order, good customs, persons, or property constitutes a crime that exists by the mere fact of organizing.

Likewise, Article 293 of the Penal Code sanctions with the penalty of major imprisonment in any of its degrees the leaders, those who have exercised command, and their instigators when the agreement of wills has had as its object the perpetration of crimes, as occurs in this case.

Added to this, Judge Aldana has decided to prosecute only the "material" authors of the case, ignoring both the rationality and hierarchy with which the repressive apparatuses functioned in Chile, as pointed out by the progress of jurisprudence in this regard.

To be able to judge the crimes committed by the Nazis, international jurisprudence replaced the distinction between material author and intellectual author with one that allowed for accounting for the way complex organizations operate.

Currently, a distinction is made between the immediate author and the mediate author, who is, in short, the one who gives the order and "has control over the act." For this reason, the fact that Hugo Salas Wenzel (second head of the CNI), Jorge Mandiola Arredondo (head of the CNI in Concepción), Jorge Andrade Gómez (second head of the Anti-Subversive Division commanded by Corbalán), and Aquiles González Cortés (head of the Blue Brigade in charge of the extermination of the MIR) are not being prosecuted in this case, when their participation in the crimes is proven, constitutes sufficient proof to affirm that the courts lack the will and conviction to effectively investigate and punish the State agents who committed criminal offenses during the dictatorship.

The set of statements from witnesses, agents, and survivors is not sufficient for the judge, who seems to ignore that in human rights cases, obtaining the confession of the accused is almost impossible.

Therefore, convictions in these cases are based not on conviction, but on the configuration of well-founded presumptions: the immediate and mediate authors have not confessed and will not confess their crimes, so if there are two or more statements indicating that an agent presided over a meeting and showed photographs marked with crosses; commanded a team and gave the order to execute; fired at a man who was on the street or inside his house, or occupies a place in the organizational charts that the agents themselves have drawn up to map the operational command of the CNI—as happens throughout the 20 volumes that make up the case—that person should be being prosecuted for both illicit association and qualified homicide.

Finally, even if Judge Aldana were to indict all the most obvious commanders and immediate authors, as lawyers Garcés and Parra request, the convictions would be insufficient. Operation Alfa Carbón 1 involved around one hundred agents from Santiago, Concepción, Valdivia, Puerto Montt, and other cities in the south of the country in a massacre that ended the lives of seven people and for which only 15 individuals are currently being tried.

What do the judge and the Chilean justice system need to recognize the logic of extermination that prevailed in Chile between 1973-1990 and proceed accordingly?

Source: Ciperchile.cl, 04.06.2013