The passage of the "Caravan of Death" through Calama and Copiapó left a trail of pain and blood due to the large number of people executed in both cities. The officers and non-commissioned officers who committed these treacherous crimes were obeying direct orders from General Sergio Arellano Stark, who in turn had express authorization from Augusto Pinochet.

In Calama, according to investigations, this delegation left a total of 26 leaders executed, whose bodies were initially buried illegally and later, in 1976, exhumed and thrown into the sea. It was the captain at the time, Carlos Minoletti Arriagada, who was in charge of choosing the riflemen and carrying out the executions; there are also testimonies that this criminal proceeded to deliver the coup de grâce to the executed prisoners.

Subsequently, he was the one who participated in the burials of the bodies in clandestine graves and later, at the end of 1976, had the mission of locating the graves to exhume them, load them onto a FACh (Chilean Air Force) plane at the local airfield, and then throw them into the sea.

Retired Major Carlos Minoletti currently resides in the U.S., and his address is: 10833 NW 7th Street, Miami, Florida, in Miami-Dade County, zip code: 33172-3140. Among the criminals guilty of these crimes, in addition to Carlos Minoletti Arriagada, are the retired colonel Eugenio Rivera Desgroux, commander of the Calama regiment at the time of the caravan; retired brigadier Carlos Lange Fonfurstenberg; retired colonel Víctor Santander Véliz; and retired non-commissioned officer Gerónimo Rojo Rojo.

During its passage through Copiapó, the "Caravan of Death," also under the direct orders of General Sergio Arellano Stark, left another trail of pain. A total of 16 people were executed in this city, of whom 13 were found in an illegal mass grave in 1990 and 3 remain forcibly disappeared.

All these people were taken into the interior of the pampa by a group of officers commanded by retired brigadier Patricio Díaz Araneda. This officer, along with colonels Ricardo Yáñez Mora and Marcelo Marambio Molina, plus lieutenant colonel Waldo Ojeda Torrent, were the ones who executed 13 prisoners on October 17, 1973.

The other 3 prisoners shot on the same day were executed by retired general Erwin Gestaer Gálvez and retired officers Fernando Castillo Cruz, Oscar Pastén Morales, and Ramón Zúñiga O.

Source: La Nación; El Mostrador; Memoriaviva Team; Ex-Political Prisoners (U.S.); www.piensachile.com

Thirteen retired Chilean military personnel were prosecuted yesterday, accused of homicide for their alleged participation in 42 crimes committed in 1973 by the so-called Caravan of Death. Among those prosecuted, against whom Judge Víctor Montiglio also issued an arrest warrant, are a general, brigadiers, colonels, and lower-ranking officers, as well as some non-commissioned officers.

The accused were arrested early yesterday and brought before the judge, who ordered their detention at the Military Police Battalion in Santiago. The Caravan of Death was a military delegation that, between October and November 1973, traveled through several Chilean towns, where its members executed at least 75 political prisoners.

Those prosecuted yesterday were not part of the fateful delegation, but belonged to the personnel of the regiments in the northern cities of Calama, where 26 prisoners were murdered, and Copiapó, where the victims totaled 16.

According to Montiglio's resolution, some of those prosecuted participated in the executions, while others handled the clandestine burials of the victims or collaborated, years later, in the exhumation and disposal of the bodies at sea.

Among those prosecuted is retired colonel Eugenio Rivera Desgroux, who in 1973 commanded the Calama regiment and who years later claimed that he tried to oppose the order from the head of the Caravan of Death, General Sergio Arellano Stark, to murder the prisoners.

Among those murdered in Calama were union leaders, professionals, and a journalist, Carlos Berger, who had been sentenced by a war council to only 61 days in prison. Also prosecuted was former major Carlos Minoletti, who directed the regiment's engineer company and was in charge of burying the bodies in the desert.

At the end of 1976, according to the file, Minoletti also directed the exhumation of the bodies so they could be thrown into the sea. The exhumation was carried out with an excavator, and hundreds of bone fragments were left at the site, which allowed for the reconstruction of the events and even the identification of some of the victims in the 1990s.

The Caravan of Death case was previously handled by Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, who in 2001 prosecuted Augusto Pinochet, but the former dictator (1973-1990) was acquitted by the Supreme Court for allegedly suffering from subcortical dementia.

Last week, Montiglio decided to change the charge for which the members of the Caravan of Death are being prosecuted from kidnapping to homicide in the cases of 19 victims, which sparked fear among the plaintiffs that an amnesty ruling for the perpetrators or the statute of limitations for the case might be approaching.

Source: EL PAÍS, April 18, 2006