The final secret of the Soria crime opens the door to convicting Brigadier (Ret.) Lepe

After nearly 13 years, the best-kept secret in the trial for the homicide of Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria—which occurred on July 14, 1976—has come to an end. And the primary architect of the truth is the visiting judge Alejandro Madrid, who is investigating the case of the kidnapping and homicide of the DINA chemist Eugenio Berríos.

The magistrate, together with detective Nelson Jofré, established that the main witness who confessed to having participated in the Soria crime, Sergeant Major (Ret.) José Remigio Ríos San Martín, was followed and detained in 1993 by agents of the Army Intelligence Battalion (BIE) so that he would modify the statement he had provided to the Investigations police.

But that is not all. Madrid clarified that the order came from the then-Secretary General of the Army, Brigadier (Ret.) Jaime Lepe, who was precisely the active defendant with the greatest prominence in the case. The latter was vetoed for promotion to general by former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle in 1997, following protests by Carmen Soria, daughter of the murdered Spanish diplomat.

But Lepe also participated in a secret meeting together with Commander (Ret.) Patricio Quilhot, another of the defendants in this process. At the meeting, held at the restaurant “La casa vieja” on Calle Chile-España No. 249, the entire conspiracy against Ríos San Martín and the action of justice was woven, the details of which were provided by the BIE’s own operational team in charge of setting up the security ring for the meeting.

Due to these facts, which at the time were not known to the justice system, much less to the Spanish State, which had vainly attempted to have those involved tried, the Supreme Court applied the amnesty law and those responsible remained unpunished, at least until now.

The search The operation was carried out because the military intelligence of the time knew that Ríos San Martín was collaborating with the visiting judge in charge of the case, Violeta Guzmán, and that among the background information he had provided in his confession to the detectives, he not only mentioned Lepe, but also other former DINA members.

This fact worried not only the then-brigadier, but also Pinochet, since the former was very close to the ex-dictator and one of his favorites in the institution.

The statements of the agents who uncovered this historical fact are found in volume XVI of the process substantiated by Madrid.

One of the first to confess this story was the former head of the BIE Counterintelligence Unit, Major (Ret.) Patricio Belmar Hoyos.

“While Commander Fernán González was head of the BIE, I received an order to locate José Ríos San Martín, who was involved in the homicide of Carmelo Soria, and after a few days, with my people, among them ‘el Gitano’, Sergeant Roa Vera, we located him in a sector of Santiago and I proceeded to report his address,” said Belmar Hoyos in one of his police statements on page 5,981 of the file.

The information, however, was not delivered directly to Fernán González, but to the Army General Command, specifically to Brigadier Lepe.

“I remember having gone to the General Command to speak with Commander Jaime Lepe Orellana, who gave me the instructions to locate San Martín. After that, it was my duty to locate him on different occasions. In one of them, it was to inform him that Jaime Lepe and the commander who had already retired, Patricio Quilhot, wanted to talk to him,” the judicial account continues.

There were several meetings between Ríos San Martín, Quilhot, and Lepe, but there was one more important than the previous ones.

“On one occasion, a meeting was held between Lepe and San Martín at the restaurant ‘La Casa Vieja’, where it was my duty, along with my personnel, to provide protection with a security ring, where I found out that Lepe offered him a pickup truck that was delivered to him later,” declared Belmar Hoyos.

The invisible man

Another confirmation was provided by Sergeant (Ret.) Manuel Carreño Arriaza, who recounted how the operation had an error that revealed it. “... I was given instructions to carry out surveillance on this person for several days and for 24 hours, but on one occasion Ríos San Martín realized that he was being followed by us and confronted one of my group, Corporal Cornejo, whom he berated,” he told the police.

Ríos San Martín was a commando, a paratrooper, and belonged to the DINA’s Mulchén Brigade, the author of the Soria crime and, according to the testimony of the former secret service agent, Sergeant Major (Ret.) Luis Herrera Mansilla, he changed his personality abruptly.

“After he retired, since he had a wife and a partner, they took away all his severance pay with which he intended to buy a taxi, but he was left without a cent and made a kind of vow of poverty; he practically didn't eat, he lived in marginal places and frequented the Las Ánimas chapel and bookstores on Calle San Diego.”

For the agents, it was very difficult to follow Ríos San Martín. This is reflected in the testimony of Major (Ret.) Juan Vladilo Villalobos, who also participated in the operation.

“This surveillance was a rather strange situation, since Ríos San Martín knew immediately what was happening. He would go into dead-end streets and disappear, he would get on and off buses, and he would circulate through different sectors of the city,” he said.

Emblematic crime

The crime of Carmelo Soria is one of the emblematic cases of human rights violations, and the statement that Ríos San Martín gave to the police in 1993 was key to trying to judicially establish the facts.

The former DINA agent testified that the members of the Mulchén Brigade were led by the then-Captain Guillermo Salinas Torre. The latter ordered Army officers Jaime Lepe Orellana, Pablo Belmar Labbé, Juan Delmás Ramírez, and Sergeant Pedro Aqueveque to disguise themselves as Carabineros to intercept the Volkswagen car in which Soria was traveling on the afternoon of July 14, 1976.

The DINA suspected that Soria belonged to the Communist Party (PC). Hence the decision to detain him. Once at the house on Vía Naranja in the Lo Curro sector (the same one as Townley), he was tortured and, as he never gave information, they applied Sarin gas. Then, they “broke his neck,” said Ríos San Martín, by leveraging his neck against a bench.

In this way, the testimony provided by the former DINA agent Michael Townley in the United States at the end of 1992 was confirmed by a second statement. It was then that the military justice machine and Army intelligence were unleashed to cover up the facts, because in addition to the surveillance and the meeting recounted above, Ríos San Martín was also taken to military justice.

In November 1993, the Second Military Prosecutor’s Office, headed by Sergio Cea Cienfuegos, filed a jurisdictional dispute, which was resolved on the 16th of the same month by the Second Chamber (Criminal) of the Supreme Court in favor of the military justice system. Two days later, Cea himself decreed a prohibition against informing the media.

The government of the time had full knowledge of Ríos San Martín’s statement, and Carmen Soria, daughter of the Spanish diplomat, was pressuring along with the Spanish Embassy for the case to remain in civil justice and for a Supreme Court investigating judge to be appointed.

The context was becoming complicated, but the now-defunct newspaper “La Época”, in its edition of November 22, 1993, broke the prohibition and published, albeit without names, the background information provided by Ríos San Martín. The military prosecutor’s office seized a series of copies to prevent their dissemination.

The issue was settled on December 3, 1993, when the highest court rejected the appointment of a special magistrate for the case in a narrow vote of seven to six. On the 6th of the same month, the military judge of Santiago, Hernán Ramírez, applied the amnesty.

On the 10th, the Supreme Court reversed everything and appointed Judge Marcos Libedinsky to handle the case. On December 30, however, the magistrate again granted amnesty to the case.

The battle continues

But the fight did not end there, because on April 7, 1994, the process was reopened by the First Chamber of the Supreme Court and five proceedings were decreed: confrontations, a statement from the former head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, a request for assistance to the Cuban far-rightist Virgilio Paz, a reconstruction of the scene, and, most importantly, a psychiatric report on Ríos San Martín.

In this last investigation, the hand of the BIE and the main military strategy were present: to disqualify the key witness.

Days later, the lawyer for the Soria family, Alfonso Insunza, presented a friendly challenge to Libedinsky, which the latter accepted. The Supreme Court was then in a position to appoint a new magistrate. And so it was: the responsibility fell to Eleodoro Ortiz, who recently passed away.

Ortiz’s investigation extended until May 1995. On the 25th of that month, the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court indicted Major (Ret.) Guillermo Salinas and Ríos San Martín. One of the dissenting votes was from Judge Roberto Dávila, a former Army auditor with no career in the Judiciary, who stated in his vote that there were no elements of any kind to prosecute them.

In parallel, the military intelligence of the time continued to harass the Investigations officers who were handling this and other cases of human rights violations.

A fact recounted by detective Nelson Jofré Cabello in an investigation order contained on page 6,003 is eloquent: “On September 8, 1995, when police officers from the Homicide Brigade were transporting a relevant witness for the Berríos case, they realized they were being followed by BIE agent, dependent on the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), Víctor Rojas Zúñiga, who was driving a Peugeot 605 vehicle owned by the military institution, assigned to the director of the DINE, General Eugenio Covarrubias, which was involved in a triple collision at the corner of Alameda and Avenida España.

Carabineros and BIE agents took over the procedure and surrounded the place, with the detectives managing to transport the witness on foot to the Sixth Criminal Court, where she testified,” the policeman declared.

Despite these facts, on June 5, 1996, Ortiz again applied the amnesty.

On August 24, as expected, the Second Chamber of the highest court confirmed the decision. The Soria battle was lost, at least in Chile.

What followed The judicial decision provoked a constitutional accusation against the Supreme Court judges who resolved the amnesty ruling, a lawsuit against the State by the Soria family for 2.7 billion pesos, and the commitment of the Eduardo Frei government, seconded by Spain, to provide reparations to the family of the Spanish diplomat.

Lepe continued in the Army as secretary general, but he had already completed his time as a brigadier and was due to be promoted to general. Thus, on November 5, 1997, Frei vetoed Lepe’s promotion. This created a new criterion for promotions: “public and notorious situations that involve the person in such a way as to negatively affect their image before the country or before important sectors of the citizenry.”

Lepe announced lawsuits against the media together with his lawyer Jorge Balmaceda.

The latter also sent a letter to the newspaper “La Época”, where he asserted that the former key witness in the Soria case, Sergeant (Ret.) Ríos San Martín, modified his police statement before Judge Eleodoro Ortiz during the reconstruction of the scene. The latter never recognized Lepe. Furthermore, a report from the Legal Medical Service established that he had an “abnormal personality.”

“Regarding my statements on page 737 and following, I do not ratify them in their entirety, because I believe that I was influenced by Investigations personnel through guidance,” declared Ríos San Martín himself, albeit after the meetings with Lepe.

Balmaceda reached a paroxysm in his writing to the defunct morning paper when he pointed out that “for lawyers, it cannot go unnoticed and it reflects the total tranquility of Brigadier Lepe in his non-participation in the events... since having been investigated by five judges... none of them accused him... consequently, it is absolutely false that there is evidence that incriminates him in any other procedural capacity in the homicide of Carmelo Soria.”

In 1997, the crime of obstruction of justice still existed, and the logic of any investigating judge would have concluded that the conduct of Lepe and the BIE agents was trying to hide something.

Perhaps Balmaceda did not know about the meeting or the surveillance, but the secret that Lepe kept for so many years indicates that his participation in the death of Carmelo Soria was as important as the number of means he used to cover it up.

Source: La Nación, August 21, 2006

Turnaround in the Calama Case: how the CNI tried to finance itself with blood and dynamite

Judge Alejandro Madrid continues to produce surprises. On the verge of finishing the inquiry into the strange death of Eduardo Frei Montalva, he has just concluded an investigation that provides a new version of the robbery of a bank branch in Calama, which ended in 1981 with two employees blown up with dynamite and a $45 million loot gone missing.

The perpetrators, two CNI agents, were executed by firing squad, and their chief, Major Juan Delmas, committed suicide. Madrid’s police team discovered that Delmas was murdered by other men from the repressive apparatus—just like in the best spy stories—to prevent the revelation that the robbery was part of a plan organized by the CNI command itself to finance its operations.

To do so, they had to continue killing other agents, crimes that are currently being investigated by a judge in Arica. The common factor: the fearsome Brigada Mulchén, untouchable until now, which remained operational years after its dissolution in 1977.

The official history states that the penultimate time the death penalty was applied in Chile was on October 22, 1982. On that day, CNI agents Gabriel Hernández Anderson and Eduardo Villanueva Márquez were executed by firing squad.

Both had stolen $45 million from the Chuquicamata branch of the Banco del Estado after shooting two executives of that office in the back of the neck and blowing them up in the middle of the desert on March 9, 1981.

Arrested in June of that year, they were convicted and—against all expectations of the time—finally executed by firing squad in the Calama prison. An accomplice to both, Francisco Díaz Meza, was sentenced to life imprisonment and four years ago obtained the benefit of daily release.

The head of the group and of the Arica CNI, Major Juan Delmas, appeared dead in the desert. Suicide, the justice system concluded. With those facts, the case was closed.

But 27 years later, a new judicial investigation reveals that this was much more than a robbery and shocking homicides. With a loot equivalent to $830 million pesos today, it was the first and frustrated attempt of a chain of assaults planned by the CNI to finance repression and the expansion of its operations abroad.

At a time when the economy was collapsing and the opposition was beginning to organize the first protests and a national strike, securing funding to maintain fear was a priority.

The new lead emerged when, while tracking the use of deadly sarin gas by the DINA’s Brigada Mulchén, the strange suicide of the Army Major and head of the CNI in Arica in 1981, Juan Alberto Delmas Ramírez, who was labeled as the leader of the shocking robbery, was investigated—this time for real.

The hidden plot indicates that, because its authors were discovered, the CNI decided to eliminate those who could uncover the "financing" plan. The first on the list was Delmas. The former member of the DINA’s Brigada Mulchén did not commit suicide: he was murdered with a gunshot to the head.

In the days and months that followed, at least three other people were also killed—among them Delmas’s brother-in-law, who was also a CNI agent—in various parts of the country.

This is what Judge Alejandro Madrid discovered in an exhaustive investigation by unveiling the massive, race-against-time human hunt ordered by the high commands of the CNI and the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE) as soon as they learned that Hernández and Villanueva—the two Calama murderers and CNI agents—had confessed to acting on orders from Delmas, their regional chief.

Three days after said confession was made public, Delmas appeared with a perforated skull in the middle of the desert. The "suicide" version left things at that; nothing more would be known about the Calama Case. One loose end remained for the mystery: the nearly $15 million of the loot that never appeared.

What happened between the day of Delmas’s disappearance (June 12, 1981) and the discovery of his corpse (June 15) is the untold story of a secret operation in which some of the most notorious repressors of the dictatorship appear as protagonists: Francisco Ferrer Lima (Tucapel Jiménez case and Berríos case), Marcelo Moren Brito (Caravana de la Muerte and Villa Grimaldi, among others), Carlos Parera Silva (former head of the DINA Foreign Department, Peldehue Boinas Negras case), and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann (former head of the DINA Foreign Department, Brigada Mulchén and Purén, Prats, Leighton, and Dagoberto San Martín cases; for the latter, he was a fugitive for almost two months last year). The cast of a horror story.

The red two-door sports car

When Delmas arrived in Arica as head of the CNI, after the DINA was dissolved in 1977, he was accompanied by a legend. An experienced elite commando, expert in intelligence and explosives handling, in 1976 he was one of the executors of the crime of Carmelo Soria along with his companions from the Brigada Mulchén.

One night in July, he left the DINA barracks in Lo Curro, where Michael Townley and Mariana Callejas lived, disguised as a Carabineros officer and aboard a vehicle—in which Soria’s corpse was being transported—along with the now-former Brigadier Jaime Lepe, who would climb high by becoming private secretary to Augusto Pinochet and Secretary General of the Army in the early 90s.

The Mulchén acquired experience in deaths that leave no trace due to the use of lethal sarin gas. The poison had already been "tested" in the murders of the real estate registrar Renato León Zenteno (1976) and Corporal Manuel Leyton (1977), executed for breaking the pact of silence and airing the DINA’s crimes.

The registered trademark of the Brigada Mulchén had as other victims Delmas himself, the chemist Eugenio Berríos (1993), and Colonel Gerardo Huber (1992). The list keeps adding names. But in Arica, very few knew Delmas’s real name.

Operating under the false identity of "Carlos Vargas Casella," he became known in the area. The alias was a nod to the now-retired Uruguayan Army Lieutenant Colonel Tomás Casella Santos, involved in the kidnapping and murder of Eugenio Berríos in Uruguay.

Many of his subordinates have declared that "Carlos Vargas" had multiple contacts on the border and in Peru and had high influence in the ranks. Some have even said—more than twenty years later—that they considered him their "trainer" and "a leader whom everyone followed." Under his command, they took commando, tactical diver, and infiltration and combat operation training courses, given the proximity to Peru.

"Carlos Vargas" did not go unnoticed. He traveled around Arica and its surroundings in his red two-door Mazda 929 sports car. And eyes focused on his movements when it became known that two of his subordinates—Gabriel Hernández Anderson and Eduardo Villanueva Márquez—were the authors of the robbery of the Chuquicamata Banco del Estado.

Both convinced the branch manager and cashier that they were going to simulate a robbery since a recent theft forced them to increase security measures.

In a judicial statement now forgotten, Hernández Anderson declared on August 3, 1982—a little more than two months before being executed by firing squad—that Delmas visited him in Calama in January 1981 to order him to participate "in an important mission for the benefit and aid of the service." The explanation that Delmas gave him, according to Hernández, was clear: "The CNI was underfunded at the national level, because all the deployment of service agents, including officers, permanent staff, and civilian employees to foreign embassies in different countries had to be canceled by the service itself, even though this was the responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs." He also mentioned that "hiring of personnel, reclassification, and other measures related to the economic order" had been suspended.

Hernández’s statement was not considered by judges or police. And this, despite the fact that at the beginning of 1981 everything indicated that the economy was faltering. Fiscal cuts became widespread, but they did not reach the CNI.

When in 2007 Minister Amanda Valdovinos investigated the flows and uses of reserved expenses managed by the dictatorship, she discovered that in the 1979-1984 cycle alone, some 13 billion pesos were assigned to the repressive agency, according to the statement of former minister Sergio de Castro.

Official reports seized in different proceedings indicate that both Pinochet and the high commands of the CNI knew that the greater the economic crisis, the more important the rebellion that was already beginning to be felt in the streets would be.

With unemployment on the rise, there was no budget that could pay for the informants and supplementary agents that the CNI urgently required to block the national strike that union leader Tucapel Jiménez was organizing in those days.

The need to reinforce repression determined that Pinochet remove General Odlanier Mena—who had replaced Manuel Contreras after the fallout of the Letelier case (thus consummating a fight to the death between both)—from the command of the CNI, and in his place appoint the cold and obedient General Humberto Gordón.

By the time of the Calama events, Gordón had already given a new impulse to repressive action, burying the interdiction that weighed on Contreras’s toughest men.

The above opens new questions for the presiding judge of the 2nd Court of Letters of Arica, Julio Aguilar, who must now conclude the process. And the most important is the destination of the then $15 million of the Chuquicamata bank loot that never appeared, some $278 million today.

The lead that could prove how institutional the decision to illicitly raise funds for the CNI was, or if it was a screen to cover up acts of corruption. On that, Madrid largely paved the way.

The bloody "Teletón" of the CNI

Hernández Anderson and Villanueva Márquez followed Delmas’s instructions to the letter. On the day of the crime, they were accompanied by taxi driver Francisco Díaz, who had only joined the CNI the day before, accepting an old offer.

After blowing up the bank branch manager (Luis Martínez Araya) and the cashier (Sergio Yáñez Ayala), they divided a small fraction of the loot: $200,000 for Díaz, $100,000 for former CNI agent Juan Arenas Cortés, and $300,000 for Delmas.

The two murderers also kept smaller amounts for themselves, gave about $8 million to Villanueva’s brother, and hid the bulk of the money in different places, using canisters.

The group managed to enjoy the secret and the money for little more than three months. During that period, Delmas even received Augusto Pinochet in Arica, who arrived for a visit about 15 days before the crime was discovered: together with CNI personnel, the major formed the second security ring during the three days the dictator remained in the city.

The most well-known version says that Hernández and Villanueva fell due to typical errors: Villanueva spent money on wild parties where he even paid musicians to sing "El Rey" to him, the same song that Pinochet liked so much.

In addition, the rumor of loud music and an orgy with prostitutes in the impoverished town of Chiu Chiu spread quickly. But in his inquiry, Judge Madrid’s team found the surprise that the crime was solved almost by chance.

It was civilian police in Calama who arrested taxi driver Díaz at the beginning of June for a minor matter unrelated to the crime. When searching his car, thick bundles of bills appeared, whose serial numbers matched those already reported stolen from the bank. Shortly after, the detainee confessed and put the names of his new bosses on the table.

Until that moment, the bank employees had been missing for almost three months, as had the $45 million. And according to the press supporting the dictatorship, they were the ones responsible for the robbery.

With Díaz’s confession, the police had two blown-up corpses to find and a fireball in their hands that could cost them their heads. They decided to call the then-prefect Víctor Lillo Monsalve in Arica and drop the bomb using the old trick of "Boss, we have good news and bad news." It was almost 4 in the morning, and on the other end of the phone, the prefect chose to hear the good news first.

• The good news is that we have solved the robbery of the Banco del Estado.
• Excellent. And the bad news?
• It’s that it was the "Charlies" (code for "CNI").

Lillo ordered the investigation to be finished in complete secrecy: he would only notify the CNI when he had everything tied up. For that, it was enough for Díaz to pretend to follow the orders he had been given: that every 15 days he would exchange the money in Peru for soles, and upon returning to the Chilean side of the border, he would exchange it back for pesos to deliver the sanitized loot.

Closely watched by the Investigations police, the taxi driver arrived at the "point," and there Hernández Anderson, head of the CNI in Calama, was caught. Then it was Villanueva’s turn.

Only then did Lillo notify the then-director of Investigations, General Fernando Paredes, and he in turn notified General Humberto Gordón. The alarm was total.

Delmas or Vargas? A goal from midfield

As soon as they learned of the disaster, the commands in Santiago ordered a wide deployment. Gordón instructed Paredes to arrange for two civilian police planes to transport CNI personnel to the north.

A few hours later, Colonel Héctor Bravo Letelier (former DINA), head of the agency’s Regional Brigades, landed in Arica, accompanied by other troops. Bravo arrived with the mission of intervening in the Calama CNI office and finding the loot. Along the way, Captain Juan Vidal Ogueta, head of CNI Counterintelligence, also arrived. The spy of spies.

As border zones, both Arica and Calama were centers for multiple military espionage units, to which were added the "correspondents" that each high officer from Santiago had stationed there. Thus, at the moment of being "intervened," the area was already monitored by the CNI and the Special Intelligence Detachment (DEI), based in Arica; a department of the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE).

To the entire network described, several agents of the DINE Secret Service were added who reported to Santiago.

If, due to the time elapsed, it has become difficult to know exactly who acted first, there is evidence of the major events. One of the first to take action was Captain Vidal Ogueta. Anticipating the interrogations by the Investigations police, he visited the then-recently arrested Hernández Anderson.

The CNI Counterintelligence Chief had two tasks: to get him to say what he knew and had said; and to order him to be silent forever. To commit suicide.

But Hernández Anderson, son of a prominent judge from Arica, did not obey Vidal Ogueta’s instruction. And he pressed play. His father played a major role in that decision. And he declared that it was his superior who ordered everything (more than a year later he would say that the major had guaranteed him that the arrest and the first interrogations were part of the show and that everything would turn out fine).

He only kept one piece of ammunition: he said his superior was "Carlos Vargas." In times when it was almost impossible for a judge to obtain the real name of an agent, it is not a small oversight.

Upon learning of Hernández’s confession, Vidal Ogueta telephoned Santiago: there was a major expert in intelligence involved in several previous secret operations, directly accused of the robbery. On the other end, he heard General Gustavo Rivera Toro, second national chief of the CNI, who instantly transmitted the order: "arrest Carlos Vargas." The person who received it, according to several versions, was none other than Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito, head of the DEI in Arica.

Moren, better known as "Ronco" or "El Coronta," transmitted the same order to Prefect Lillo: "Vargas must be arrested."

In 1981, Moren had a long criminal record as a former high command of the DINA and a trusted man of Contreras (he was head of the Caupolicán Brigade and head of Villa Grimaldi). Later, his brutal role in the crimes of the Caravana de la Muerte, Calle Conferencia, and the cases of Alfonso Chanfreau, Lumi Videla, and Alberto Bachelet, among several others, would be confirmed in the courts.

Only now—and thanks to the confession of several protagonists of the time—is it known that it was one of these two phone calls, or both, that allowed Vargas/Delmas to flee. The details of how Delmas found out about the arrest warrant differ.

One of them is even funny: when Prefect Lillo received the call from Moren Brito in his office, he was precisely accompanied by Delmas, who visited him constantly to find out about the progress of the proceedings and offer his help.

But Lillo did not know that Delmas and Carlos Vargas were one and the same. The certain fact is that Colonel Moren ordered the border closed to prevent Delmas from taking advantage of his contacts in Peru.

Be that as it may, the old game of "aliases" had pulled a fast one on half the intelligence apparatus, in the middle of the military dictatorship, and in the most watched area of the country: Delmas vanished.

He took a stack of gasoline vouchers, instructed the telephone operator at the Arica CNI barracks to keep him connected to incoming and outgoing calls, got into his red Mazda, and left. After 8 AM on June 12, 1981, the former Pinochet bodyguard disappeared forever.

Nobody knows who they work for

In Santiago, the alarms remained on. That Delmas was the head of the robbery indicated to Gordón that any effort to capture him was insufficient. And he dispatched another special envoy. So urgent was the CNI director that he even took the head of the ultra-secret apparatus out of his vacation to join the hunt.

Nobody had any idea how or when the then-Major Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima arrived in the area, having just arrived from Buenos Aires, where he had been operating with the Argentine State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE).

Ferrer Lima, alias "Max Lerou," was then an officer expert in espionage, trained in Brazil and at the National Intelligence School (ENI), in addition to having been part of the DINA’s Caupolicán Brigade.

Months later, he would order the murder of Tucapel Jiménez—which cost him an 8-year prison sentence—and would later become head of the DINE Foreign Secret Service, after having been instructed by MI-5 in England as a reward for the services rendered by Pinochet during the Falklands War. Between 1983 and 1992, he was the engine of the "dispatch" abroad of agents involved in trials.

After landing in Arica on a commercial flight, Ferrer moved on his own and settled into a room with a sea view at the Hotel "La Lisera." The next day, he intervened in the local CNI unit. His mission: to find Delmas and the money.

To do so, he was helped, among others, by Sub-officer José Aqueveque Pérez, a former companion of Delmas in Pinochet’s bodyguard and in the Brigada Mulchén, whom Ferrer had fully trusted since the days of the Paratrooper Course.

"Max Lerou" met with his old acquaintance Moren Brito to compare data, and then his trail was lost completely. Later, Ferrer would declare that he returned to Santiago a few days later, which several others contradict.

Arica had become "ground zero" of the dictatorship. The national selection of repression had gathered there: Moren Brito (DEI), Ferrer Lima (DINE), Vidal Olgueta, Bravo Letelier, and Aqueveque (the three from the CNI), in addition to Captain Jorge Camilo Mandiola Arredondo (second head of the DEI in Arica).

As the days passed, Captain Manuel Pérez Santillán ("Las Machas" Barracks, assigned to the "Rancagua" Regiment of Arica, also a former member of the Mulchén), Colonel Carlos Parera Silva ("Dolores" Artillery Regiment), and several others were added.

The mission was against the clock: on the same day of Hernández and Villanueva’s confession, it was made public that CNI people were involved in the Calama crime. So much data was leaked that in Santiago, Gordón had to opt for something unusual: issue a press release with "the bad" news, establishing that Delmas was an accomplice and mastermind of the crime, and that both he and the two compromised agents had been expelled from the ranks.

Each of the officers involved investigated on their own what happened, what was known, and what was at risk of being exposed. Almost everyone operated in a compartmentalized manner. Nobody trusted anyone.

Ferrer Lima and Vidal Ogueta stayed at the same Arica hotel, where they bumped into each other briefly and barely confessed to working in the area, without specifying on what. Sub-officer Aqueveque joined the inquiries without it being clearly known who he worked for: while some placed him collaborating with "Max Lerou," others showed him operating on his own or for someone else.

Recent inquiries establish that very few or none of the participants knew exactly what CNI counterintelligence captain Vidal Ogueta did in the three days the search for Delmas lasted. The same doubts apply to Aqueveque and Ferrer Lima.

While some interrogated unsuccessfully to the relatives of Delmas, others dedicate themselves to "combing" the area from one or more military light aircraft, searching the desert for the major's famous red Mazda 929.

There are no coincidences on this point either. According to local CNI personnel, the agent Carlos Ortega León—a specialist in infiltration on the other side of the border—flies over the area accompanied by a pilot and forcibly accompanied by Aqueveque.

Another version says there was only one aircraft and that it was used for the same purposes by Moren Brito, who claims to have traveled to Iquique to report. The important thing is that the light aircraft were essential to quickly cover the critical points of Arica, Calama, Iquique, and their surroundings.

Between June 12 and 15, Delmas's fate is a mystery. Only now is it known, through some statements and other indications, that it is highly probable that he took refuge in the "Solo de Saldívar" unit of the "Rancagua" Regiment in Arica.

Better known as the "Las Machas Barracks," it is a redoubt at the northern exit of the city, but hidden among the dunes and the beach. Innocent in appearance, it would end up being key to the story.

While the "Rancagua" was under the command of Colonel Carlos González Coderch, the commander of "Las Machas" was Captain Manuel Pérez Santillán, another former member of the DINA's Mulchén Brigade, and therefore an old acquaintance of Delmas.

There are versions that say that from the aforementioned barracks, they took him out in the early hours of the morning toward the Lluta Plot, which was under the authority of the "Rancagua."

Suspicions also point to Colonel Carlos Parera Silva, then a close friend of Delmas and commander of the "Dolores" Regiment. Among the latest testimonies, some maintain that Delmas went to take refuge by his side and then his trail was lost.

Parera escaped being involved in the Letelier case due to the pact of silence and would become famous in 1990, when, as commander of the Santiago garrison, he refused to ask President Patricio Aylwin for permission to begin the first Military Parade in democracy.

The justice system's thesis is that Delmas must have been located by someone he trusted, with similar training and profile, and that the same person eliminated him. Such parameters leave on the list of suspects Vidal Ogueta (who, if he did not kill him, would have ordered his murder in the last instance), José Aqueveque, and Manuel Pérez Santillán (both his former colleagues in the DINA's Mulchén Brigade).

Ferrer Lima is also mentioned—both he and Aqueveque blame each other in their judicial statements—as is Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, also a former high-ranking DINA and Mulchén official, who was the commander of the Putre garrison at the time.

Regarding the latter, none of those involved know or remember what he did. One of the clues is that the military flight operations log for that area shows that on June 9—two days before the CNI's role in the robbery and double homicide became public—a plane took off precisely bound for Putre, carrying none other than Augusto Pinochet.

Regarding the rest of the loot, the investigations point to Moren Brito. There are testimonies that ensure that "Ronco" kept a bag of money that had been hidden in a dump by a non-commissioned officer of the "Rancagua," who in turn received it from Delmas.

Moren declared that he never saw the bills. But they do not believe him: despite the multiple testimonies and evidence that incriminate him, he has also always said that he never tortured or forcibly disappeared anyone.

One last piece of information regarding the money. Although Aqueveque's statements are contradictory regarding his actions, he does provide a key piece of information about the stolen funds. He says that in 1981 he was in Los Andes and Delmas called him to pick him up at Pudahuel Airport: there he handed him a briefcase full of dollars, which "came from a drug operation and I had to deliver it to the Head of the DINA on Belgrado Street, I left it there and left." Aqueveque adds that the next day Delmas offered him to go work with him in Arica, which he accepted, and "a month later my assignment came out." He ends by saying that on the third day of his arrival at the Arica barracks, he found out what Hernández and Villanueva had done.

Although that testimony has an error—the DINA was dissolved in 1977 and replaced by the CNI—the truth is that many of its former agents continued to call it that. And as for the substance, what Aqueveque declared would indicate that Delmas took the money to Santiago about a month before receiving a bullet to the head.

The trip is confirmed by the major's widow, who declared that "about three weeks" before his death "he had to travel to Santiago, by air, without giving me explanations, it was all quick and he returned about three days later."

"Forgive me mom, forgive me. Forgive me, my general Pinochet"

The unusual hunt ends on the afternoon of June 15. A woman and her son enter and leave Arica on the road to Ticnamar. On both trips, a red flash under the sun catches their attention. They approach and notify the local press: it is Delmas's Mazda 929.

Who found out first? Hernández Anderson, in his 1982 statement, implies that it was the correspondent for La Tercera and director of the Arica newspaper La Defensa, Juan Carlos Poli, "who is also a CNI informant in that city."

The first to arrive are Captain Jorge Mandiola Arredondo (second head of the DEI in Arica), accompanied by two non-commissioned officers, plus the head of the Arica OS-7, Lieutenant Juan Ortega. None of them comply with the rule of notifying the judge, and Mandiola even takes the time to check the car and open the trunk, without finding anything of importance, according to him.

By sunset that day, personnel from Investigations, the CNI, the DINE, and the DEI arrive at the scene, in addition to the military prosecutor of the local garrison, Sergio Rodríguez Moraleda, and Judge Humberto Retamal Arellano.

Mandiola is also the first to see a series of phrases written on the condensation of the Mazda's windshield: "Forgive me mom, forgive me. Forgive me, my general Pinochet. Forgive me, Rosita." As the hours pass, a tumult forms around the vehicle composed of at least the judge, the military prosecutor, Prefect Lillo, inspectors Juan Barrera and Zvonco Tocigl, Captain Vidal Ogueta, Colonel Moren Brito, non-commissioned officer Aqueveque, and CNI agent Carlos Ortega.

The different statements include more or fewer names, specify different times of discovery and conditions of the site, and even express dissimilar suspicions regarding the others present.

Ferrer Lima will only appear there led by Aqueveque when not even the car is left. According to his version, his conspicuous companion will point out excavations that were made right there in search of the loot.

What everyone agrees on is what appears in the press the next day: Delmas was found slumped in the driver's seat, with a gunshot wound to his right temple and the exit wound on the left. In his right hand was his pistol with another bullet chambered—which those who arrived first rushed to fire into the air—and a shell casing on the back seat.

The body was bloated and just beginning to give off a stench. One of them testifies in the recent investigations that Delmas had one of his legs broken.

It was enough to observe his corpse for numerous doubts to arise, several of which were immediately leaked to the media. A red car like that was easily visible from the road in daylight; in the middle of the desert, the bodywork was impeccable and dust-free.

In the back seat was a parka splattered with blood, which was never forensically examined. The most serious thing is that the bullet does not appear anywhere and that the first expert reports indicate that the shot was fired from about 65 centimeters away (the autopsy would later say it was at point-blank range). To top it all off, Delmas was left-handed, even when shooting.

In a few days, even the pro-government press will say that the officer has been murdered. A rumor paralyzes the comments: the recently buried corpse had been mysteriously removed from the Arica cemetery.

The CNI is forced to issue a new statement: the major was ambidextrous, the local climate prevented the formation of the dust that everyone missed, Delmas had committed suicide, and there was nothing more to investigate.

The forensic proceedings did not contribute much. The police officers who arrived at the site now acknowledge that they did not examine the corpse and did not even perform the basic nitrate residue detection test on the hands, necessary to confirm or rule out whether someone fired a weapon or not. The explanation: "they lacked a laboratory."

Nor can one speak of an autopsy. The forensic doctor who performed it, Carlos Villavicencio, recently recalled that he did not examine gunpowder residue on the hands either because Judge Retamales not only did not instruct him to do so, but also ordered him that "everything had to be done quickly." The death certificate sets the date of death as June 13, that is, two days before its "discovery" and the day after his mysterious disappearance.

All the information gathered by the police team working with Judge Madrid has formed the conviction that the CNI major was murdered and then placed in a site fabricated to make it look like a homicide.

The magistrate referred the Delmas case to the Arica Court of Appeals, and it left the case in the hands of the incumbent of the 2nd Civil Court of that city, Julio Aguilar. He has carried out several proceedings, including various letters rogatory that he sent to the rest of the country last October to gather new testimonies; he has already received four.

The blood continues to flow

The deaths did not stop there, and at the time they were only mentioned and linked by Revista Cauce, which opposed the dictatorship. One of the first is uncovered four days after the discovery of Delmas. That day, Mario Barraza Molina, one of the informants closest to the major, was found floating in the sea.

On October 31 of that same year, José Rienzi Zumaeta Dattoli, manager of a local poultry distributor, was murdered by a gunshot to the forehead at the entrance to his house. The new victim was also very close to Delmas.

By then, panic had gripped the lower-ranking CNI officials in Arica and Calama. Some were transferred. One of them was Delmas's second-in-command at the Arica CNI, Captain Sergio Saldivia Millar: he was assigned to Puerto Montt as head of the local CNI.

On the night of October 26, 1982, he went out in his official vehicle and hours later died in a strange traffic accident that is currently being investigated. But the darkest case is that of Delmas's brother-in-law, Gonzalo Fort Arenas, a CNI agent in Arica who was transferred to Antofagasta and later to Osorno, against his will.

His close associates have declared that his new assignment was the result of strong pressure from non-commissioned officer José Aqueveque. In the south, Fort became obsessed with finding out what had really happened to Delmas and also heard—among others—the stories that linked his deceased brother-in-law to Colonel Parera.

He could not continue his investigation. On April 27, 1984, Fort was at his home. Between 2:00 and 2:30 AM, his wife found him lying on a bed, with a gunshot wound to his chest and a crumpled photo of Juan Delmas on top of it; in his hands was a piece of paper and a pencil.

The house phones were cut. The case was labeled a suicide. Years later, the CNI agent's case was proposed to the Rettig Commission, which, after investigating it, declared it "without conviction."

Up to that point, part of the dark plot discovered by the police team working under the orders of Judge Alejandro Madrid. The magistrate managed to determine that, despite the dissolution of the DINA in 1977, the Mulchén Brigade remained operational for several years afterward.

Its last operation was the harassment and duress exercised against one of its members, Remigio Ríos San Martín, until forcing him to change his judicial testimony in which he had revealed the details of the assassination of Carmelo Soria, in order to avoid prison.

And they succeeded because the crime was amnestied. A crime that involved Pinochet's most select group of bodyguards, men who knew all his secrets. Like Brigadier Jaime Lepe, who was also a bodyguard for Lucía Hiriart and who most likely will not be able to escape prison now.

The hidden power and the crimes of the Mulchén Brigade

Few repressive units of the dictatorship have remained secret for so long, still preserve hidden crimes, and will continue to give so much to talk about. Known as one of the most select lethal devices of the DINA, the history of the Mulchén Brigade—baptized with this name of Mapudungun origin, like the "Caupolicán" and the "Lautaro"—began its bitter fame with the assassination of the CEPAL official and Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria (1976).

Members of the "Quetropillán" cell also participated in the torture and homicide of Soria, "the devil who kills" in the Mapuche language, although others translate it as "God volcano," possibly in reference to the inactive 2,360-meter crater located on the border of the Araucanía and Los Ríos regions.

As an appendix to the Mulchén, the Quetropillán operated basically in the hands of Michael Townley and Eugenio Berríos ("Hermes") in the DINA house that the former inhabited, at Vía Naranja # 4275, Lo Curro.

A chemical laboratory operated there in which both developed the Chilean version of sarin gas and other poisons, such as botulinum toxins. In the cold formality of paper, the group appeared as the "Quetropillán Technical Research and Development Center."

The mere mention of Townley and Berríos links the Mulchén to the assassinations of Orlando Letelier (Washington, 1976), General Carlos Prats and his wife (Buenos Aires, 1974), and Berríos himself (Uruguay, 1993).

Another of its groups—"Alacrán"—eliminated, using sarin, the real estate registrar Renato León Zenteno (1976) and Corporal Manuel Leyton (1977). To this day, one of its main leaders, the high-ranking Army officer Guillermo Salinas, remains far from any prison. But it will be for a short time.

It has not been easy for any judge to compile the list of members of the Mulchén Brigade. What is a certain fact is that the worst thing that can happen to an active Army officer today is to be put on the list.

This is what happened to General Eduardo Ludovico Aldunate Hermann when he was in command of the military mission in Haiti. In the end, it turned out that Aldunate did not pass through the Mulchén, but he did pass through the Pinochet escort group that was at its origin. He also served in the CNI. Aldunate retired recently.

The importance of determining without a margin of error whether former President Eduardo Frei Montalva was eliminated with toxic substances manufactured by the DINA forced the visiting minister Alejandro Madrid to delve into the history of the Mulchén and its crimes.

On that basis, it is known so far that among those who passed through its ranks are the then-officers Guillermo Salinas Torres (its first commander), Pablo Belmar Labbé, Jaime Lepe Orellana, Raúl Eduardo and Alfredo Iturriaga Neumann, Patricio Quiloth Palma, Manuel Pérez Santillán, Juan Delmas Ramírez, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, and the non-commissioned officers José Remigio Ríos San Martín, José Aqueveque Pérez, Jorge Hernán Vial Collao, and Bernardino del Carmen Ferrada Moreno (in active service in 1992).

Over time, several of its members ended up being promoted and obtained the broad trust of Augusto Pinochet, to whom they provided security in the rings closest to the general.

From the previous list alone, four members of the Mulchén appear implicated in one way or another in the crime of the Calama Case: Delmas, Iturriaga, Pérez Santillán, and Aqueveque.

Madrid is interested in determining whether or not the Mulchén remained operational after the dissolution of the DINA (1977). In addition to the Calama Case, there are other facts that show that the old companions continued, at least until well into the 90s, erasing traces, obstructing judicial investigations—for which they counted on prosecutor Torres Silva, who had a seat on the Supreme Court as Army auditor until the end of that decade—and ensuring that no one put them as accused in front of a court.

This is precisely what happened with the Soria case in 1993, when the former Mulchén members found out through one of their infiltrators in Investigations that one of them, José Remigio Ríos San Martín, had confessed the details of the crime to two detectives.

Knowing that for the statement to be valid it had to be ratified before the judge, they began the hunt led by Brigadier Jaime Lepe, from his privileged position as secretary general of the Army. Both Lepe and Patricio Quiloth, then in the Army Intelligence Battalion (BIE), had to use all the means at their disposal to find him and pressure him to change his testimony.

They only didn't kill him because the hand of its authors would have been too evident.

There was urgency. Not only because it implicated the ring closest to Pinochet, but also because of a paragraph in Ríos's confession: "The same day they detain and kill Soria, Commander Guillermo Salinas introduced me to a visitor at the Lo Curro house; subsequently, Mr.

Quilot informed me that it was the Cuban Virgilio Paz (who assassinated Orlando Letelier in Washington). I know Eugenio Berríos, alias 'Hermes'. I used the alias ALBERTO ARROYO QUEZADA until mid-'82 when I was his bodyguard."

In a restaurant in Ñuñoa, the meeting between Ríos and his former companions finally took place. Outside, Pinochet's bodyguards were watching. Every detail was like a spy movie. Ríos left there with a new pickup truck and a pension.

Days later, he would change his judicial version of the Soria crime. Although Ríos later acknowledged it before a judge, that did not manage to change the fate of the Soria Case: the Amnesty was applied in 1996. But Lepe could not manage to join the body of generals, as was his dream. President Eduardo Frei refused to promote him and he was discharged as a brigadier.

Source: Ciperchile December 15, 2008

Generals and officers implicated in the assassination of Carmelo Soria prosecuted in Spain

The (R) Generals of the Chilean Army Hermán Brady Roche, Cesar Raúl Benavides Escobar, Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Jaime Enrique Lepe, Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neuman Orellana; the former Undersecretary of the Interior, Navy Captain Enrique Montero Marx; the officers Jorge Remigio Rios San Martín; Guillermo Humberto Salinas Torres; Pablo Belmar Labbé; René Patricio Quilhot Palma; Rolf Wenderoth Pozo; Ricardo Lawrence Mires, have been prosecuted by the Central Court of Instruction No. 5 of the National Court of Spain for their participation, mediate or immediate, in the kidnapping, torture, and assassination of the diplomat Mr. Carmelo Soria.

In the Order of November 17, 2009, which EL CLARIN will soon publish in full in the "Pinochet Case" section, the Judge and the Public Prosecutor's Office have accepted the expansion of the complaint filed on January 23, 2007, by the President Allende-Spain Foundation and the widow of Mr.

Carmelo Soria. They had also requested the prosecution of the Minister of the Interior, Sergio Fernández, and the Minister of Justice, Mónica Madariaga, for having signed the Amnesty Decree in 1978, in the application of which the Supreme Court of Chile ordered in 1996 that this crime not be prosecuted in Chile.

The Spanish judge has denied the prosecution of these Ministers of the Dictatorship "at this moment, because the fact that they had signed the Amnesty Decree in 1978, which served to confer impunity on the authors, accomplices, and cover-ups, is insufficient to do so, because for that reason the other members of the government and all those who applied the rule subsequently would also have to be, especially after the pronouncement on such types of rules by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Therefore, and as long as a different participation in the events is not proven, the complaint against these two people cannot be admitted for processing."

The Order of November 17, 2009, agrees, among other proceedings, to inform the Secretary General of the United Nations, in application of Article 11 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons of December 14, 1973, of the admission of the complaint against those allegedly guilty of the torture and assassination of Mr.

Carmelo Soria Espinoza and that the final result will be communicated in due course.

Spain assumes the jurisdiction to prosecute this crime by virtue of the principles of universal jurisdiction and to avoid impunity, after the Supreme Court has agreed that it cannot be prosecuted in Chile, a country whose jurisdiction Spain considers preferential by virtue of the principle of territoriality.

Source: El Clarin Friday, November 20, 2009