Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales, 22 years old, married, student, and MIR militant, was detained on February 7, 1975, at approximately 4:00 P.M. at the Estación Central in Santiago. The detention was witnessed by his spouse, Mrs.

Fedora Machuca González, and was carried out by 6 armed individuals in civilian clothing who did not identify themselves. Rodrigo Ugas was forced into a red, C-10 model pickup truck, without license plates and with a white roof, allegedly belonging to the SIM (Military Intelligence Service).

The victim was seen between February 11 and February 28, 1975, at the torture center of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), known as "Villa Grimaldi." This circumstance is corroborated by the statements of Patricia Zúñiga, Nubia Becker, Gladys Díaz, Oscar Hernán Angulo Matamala, and Miguel Angel Montecinos Jeffs, all of whom testified to having seen the victim at Villa Grimaldi.

These individuals were detained alongside him at the aforementioned facility.

On July 22, 1975, the name of Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales appeared on a list of 60 people killed in alleged clashes abroad, as reported by the Argentine weekly "LEA." This information was reproduced on July 23, 1975, by the newspaper "El Mercurio" under the headline "60 Murdered MIR Members Identified." It added that the MIR members had allegedly been eliminated by their own comrades-in-arms.

Regarding this, no authority from the countries where the clashes supposedly occurred—Argentina and Brazil—nor the Chilean government, could officially confirm such information. The weekly "Lea" was published only on that one occasion, without a responsible editor and with a legal address that turned out to be non-existent.

During those same days, the newspaper O'DIA of Curitiba, Brazil, published similar information providing a different list of 59 people. These 119 people had been detained between June 1974 and February 1975, and most had been seen by witnesses in DINA detention centers, from where they had disappeared.

According to the testimony of Patricia Zúñiga Barros, who was detained at Villa Grimaldi from January 29 to February 24, 1975, and who was expelled from the country on September 10 of that same year, Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales was part of the group that arrived on February 11, 1975, at the sector known as "La Torre" within Villa Grimaldi, being the only one who remained there when the rest of the group was taken to Cuatro Alamos on February 24, 1975.

Gladys Díaz, also detained at Villa Grimaldi, states: "At the moment I arrived at the Tower, on February 26, 1975, Rodrigo Ugas was still there." She adds: "He was finally taken out with a group of people who disappeared on February 28, 1975." Gladys Díaz Armijo, while detained at Cuatro Alamos, was brought before the judge of the 11th Criminal Court to testify regarding the kidnapping of Iván Montti Cordero in case file No. 1938.

Mrs. Díaz testified that she arrived at Villa Grimaldi on February 20, 1975.

"On February 24, 1975," she recounts, "I was transferred to the Tower, a place of punishment. In the cell to the left were Juan Carlos Perelman Ide and Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales. I was able to speak with them because they were on the third floor and the guard was on the first."

She continues: "On February 28, 1975, a group consisting of Rodrigo Ugas Morales, Juan Perelman Ide, Iván Montti Cordero, Edgardo Cortés Joo, Alan Bruce Catalán, and Carmen Díaz Darricarre was taken out of the Tower. It was said they were going to Cuatro Alamos to be released, but none of them arrived at that facility. To this day, they remain forcibly disappeared."

His twin sons, Gabriel Bautista and Lucio Bautista, were born after his detention, on May 26, 1975.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On February 12, 1975, a writ of amparo (habeas corpus) was filed before the Santiago Court of Appeals on behalf of Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales (case file No. 288-75).

The writ was rejected after receiving negative reports from the Chief of the State of Siege Zone, Hernán Ramírez Ramírez; from the Investigations Police of Chile, Prefect Julio Rada Jiménez; from the Minister of the Interior, Raúl Benavides Escobar; and from the Combat Aviation Command.

On March 19, 1975, the victim's wife, Mrs. Fedora Machuca González, requested the appointment of a Court Minister to conduct an investigation at Villa Grimaldi. Alternatively, she requested that the DINA and the President of the Republic, as the hierarchical superior of that agency, be officially notified.

The High Court of the Republic did not consider these requests and rejected the amparo, limiting itself to issuing a second official request to the Minister of the Interior on April 8, 1975, with the dissenting vote of Minister Paillás, who had requested a third official notice to the Minister of the Interior.

The Court requested the judge of the 5th Criminal Court, Adela Manquilef Vargas, to initiate a summary proceeding for presumed misfortune. This began on April 14, 1975, under case file No. 100.270-2.

The magistrate sent official requests to the Investigations Police, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (to clarify the newspaper information claiming Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales had been murdered by MIR members), the detention camps of Villa Grimaldi, Chacabuco, and Tres Alamos, the SENDET (National Executive Secretariat for Detainees), the Chilean Air Force War Academy, and Colonia Dignidad.

As she received no response to her official requests from any of the Political Detention Camps, she reiterated the request, bringing this situation to the attention of the SENDET. With the brief negative response from this agency and all others to which requests were sent, she declared the summary closed and decreed a temporary dismissal on April 30, 1976, based on Article 409 No. 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

On June 29, the dismissal was confirmed by the Santiago Court of Appeals.

Numerous administrative efforts were made by Rodrigo Ugas's wife: letters addressed to the Chief of the State of Siege Zone, Sergio Arellano Stark; to the Chief of the Chilean Air Force Command, Carlos Monasterio García; and a letter to the delegate of the International Red Cross; all proved fruitless.

Source: Corporation report

In a unanimous ruling, the Eleventh Chamber of the appellate court—composed of ministers María Soledad Melo, Tomás Gray, and Alberto Amiot—sentenced the following individuals as perpetrators of the crime: Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann to 13 years in prison; meanwhile, Rolf Wenderoth Pozo, Francisco Ferrer Lima, Ricardo Lawrence Mires, Ciro Torré Sáez, and Raúl Rodriguez Ponte must serve a sentence of 10 years and one day in prison; agents Teresa Osorio Navarro and Osvaldo Pulgar Gallardo must serve 5 years and one day, and Samuel Fuenzalida Devia 541 days.

The Santiago Court of Appeals sentenced 17 agents of the defunct Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) for their responsibility in the crime of aggravated kidnapping of Rodrigo Eduardo Ugás Morales, an offense committed starting February 7, 1975, within the framework of the so-called "Operation Colombo."

Likewise, the appellate court sentenced Rosa Ramos Hernández, José Abel Aravena Ruiz, Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo, Rodolfo Concha Rodríguez, Silvio Concha González, and Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel to 3 years and one day in prison for their responsibility as accomplices.

During the investigation phase of the case, the extraordinary visiting minister Hernán Crisosto Greisse established the following facts: "In the afternoon of February 7, 1975, members of (...) the DINA detained Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales, a militant of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), on a public street in the Estación Central sector in Santiago, and transported him to the clandestine DINA detention center known as 'Cuartel Terranova' or 'Villa Grimaldi,' located at Lo Arrieta No. 8200, in the commune of La Reina, which was guarded by armed guards and to which only DINA agents had access."

He adds that "the victim, Ugas Morales, during his stay at the Villa Grimaldi barracks, remained without contact with the outside world, blindfolded and tied, and was continuously subjected to interrogations under torture by DINA agents operating in said barracks for the purpose of obtaining information regarding members of the MIR to proceed with the detention of members of that organization."

"The last time the victim, Ugas Morales, was seen by other detainees occurred on an undetermined day in late February 1975, and he has remained disappeared to this date."

"The name of Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales appeared on a list of 119 people published in the national press after it appeared on a list published in the Argentine magazine 'LEA' on July 15, 1975, which reported that Rodrigo Eduardo Ugas Morales had died in Argentina, along with 59 other people belonging to the MIR, due to internal disputes that had arisen among those members," he adds.

In the civil aspect, the State of Chile was ordered to pay a total indemnity of $240,000,000 (two hundred and forty million pesos) to the victim's spouse and children.

Source: elmostrador.cl, April 23, 2020

Date: 04-23-2020

Judge Guzmán strikes again at the DINA

In one of the prosecutions that ended up dismantling one of the main fabrications of the past dictatorship, special judge Juan Guzmán indicted ten former DINA agents, several of them from the high command, including former chief Manuel Contreras, for eight victims who were forcibly disappeared in what is known as Operation Colombo.

This is the second indictment issued by Judge Guzmán for this fabrication that took place in 1975, the first being the one decreed on September 2, when the magistrate prosecuted 16 former agents for 37 victims of the Colombo operation.

The resolutions adopted by Judge Guzmán in this episode constitute, as a whole, the most massive prosecution issued to date by this minister, and one of those covering the largest number of victims and defendants in the trials being conducted for human rights violations.

The defendants, all retired and declared prisoners as perpetrators of aggravated kidnapping, are, in addition to Contreras, the former chief of the DINA Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade, General César Manríquez Bravo, brother of Mario, a retired colonel charged as an intellectual author of the crime of Víctor Jara; the former second-in-command of the DINA, Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo; the former chief of Villa Grimaldi, Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito; the former chief of the DINA Cuatro Alamos facility, Gendarmerie officer Orlando Manzo Durán; the former chief of the DINA Halcón group, Brigadier Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko; the former chief of the Army Intelligence Directorate's Secret Service and former member of the DINA high command, Colonel Francisco Ferrer Lima, who is serving a sentence in Punta Peuco for the crime of union leader Tucapel Jiménez; the former chief of the DINA Tres Alamos facility, Carabineros officer Conrado Pacheco Cárdenas; Army non-commissioned officer Basclay Zapata Reyes; and former civilian agent Osvaldo Romo Mena.

The eight new victims of Colombo are: Aldo Pérez Vargas, Roberto Aranda Romero, Jorge Müller Silva, Modesto Espinoza Pozo, Carlos Pérez Vargas, Carmen Bueno Cifuentes, Rodrigo Ugas Morales, and Carlos Gajardo Wolf. The last five appear on the list of the 119 disappeared by this operation, while the first three do not.

The Fabrication

The so-called Operation Colombo was born in the first months of 1975, when the DINA and the former dictator Augusto Pinochet himself, as well as other military ministers, began to spread information that the MIR was preparing "guerrillas" in different Argentine cities to have them enter Chile clandestinely through border crossings to fight the military regime.

The newspapers El Mercurio, La Tercera, Las Ultimas Noticias, and the evening paper La Segunda were in charge of publishing them.

The peak of the fabrication occurred between July 17 and 19, 1975, when the Brazilian newspaper O Dia, which had a short circulation, reported that 59 Chileans had been executed in Argentina by their own leftist comrades, attributing the deaths to political "settling of scores." On the 19th, the Argentine magazine Lea published in its only issue that the same had happened to another 60 Chileans, most of them from the MIR.

In April 1975, a body destroyed by an explosion appeared in a basement in Buenos Aires with a sign that read "discharged by the MIR." It was said to be the forcibly disappeared communist David Silberman.

However, it was not him. On July 12, 1975, two other bodies appeared in Buenos Aires, shot and burned with a similar legend. The dictatorship reported that they were those who had been reported as disappeared in Chile, Jaime Robotham Bravo and Luis Guendelman Wisnik. This also turned out to be false.

On July 24, 1975, La Segunda published on its front page perhaps the most representative headline of the invention: "Exterminated like rats: 59 Chilean MIR members fall in military operation in Argentina."

Objective and Origin of the Action

The objective of Operation Colombo was to make people believe that dozens of people, whom their families, lawyers, and churches in Chile considered to be forcibly disappeared, had actually left clandestinely for Argentina to prepare in guerrilla warfare to return to Chile to fight.

And that in the meantime, they had settled political scores abroad by killing each other or falling in military operations in Argentina, a country that was experiencing political and military upheaval in the final months before the March 1976 coup d'état.

Regarding the origin of the name Operation Colombo, it refers to statements by former DINA civilian agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, who admitted in Buenos Aires in 1978—accused of "espionage"—that in 1975, agent Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann (former chief of the DINA Foreign Department and current retired general) arrived in that capital to make a "Chilean subversive" named "Simelman or something similar" appear dead in Argentina.

It was Silberman. According to Arancibia Clavel, Iturriaga told him that it was Operation Colombo, which counted on the collaboration, among others, of the Argentine civilian and member of the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) Martín Ciga Correa.

Source: La Nacion, January 4, 2004

Date: 01-04-2004

Operation Colombo: Supreme Court sentences 30 former DINA agents for the aggravated kidnapping of a young MIR member in 1975

The Supreme Court sentenced agents of the dissolved Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) for their responsibility in the consummated crime of aggravated kidnapping of the student of the Instituto Superior de Comercio de Talca, Francisco Eduardo Ugás Morales, 22 years old, a militant of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), who was kidnapped starting February 7, 1975, in the commune of Estación Central, in Santiago.

The name of Rodrigo Ugás appeared, subsequently, on the list of 119 forcibly disappeared people included in the disinformation maneuver implemented by the DINA and the dictatorship known as "Operation Colombo."

In a unanimous ruling (case file 63-094-2020), the Second Chamber of the highest court—composed of ministers Haroldo Brito, Manuel Antonio Valderrama, Jorge Dahm, minister María Teresa Letelier, and lawyer (i) Pía Tavolari—accepted the appeals for cassation on the merits filed by the plaintiffs and established an error of law in the challenged sentence, issued by the Santiago Court of Appeals in April 2020, annulling and replacing it.

In the replacement sentence, the Supreme Court confirmed the first-instance sentence issued by minister Hernán Crisosto Greisse in June 2015, which sentenced former Army officers and former DINA leaders Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann to 13 years in prison as perpetrators of the crime.

Meanwhile, former officers Rolf Gonzalo Wenderoth Pozo, Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, Fernando Eduardo Lauriani Maturana, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, and Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos, and former agents Pedro René Alfaro Fernández, Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández, José Alfonso Ojeda Obando, Luis René Torres Méndez, Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle, Manuel Rivas Díaz, Jerónimo del Carmen Neira Méndez, Carlos Eusebio López Inostroza, Luis Rigoberto Videla Insunza, Palmira Isabel Almuna Guzmán, Rafael de Jesús Riveros Frost, Leónidas Emiliano Méndez Moreno, Pedro Mora Villanueva, Osvaldo Octavio Castillo Arellano, Víctor Manuel Molina Astete, Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo, Rosa Humilde Ramos Hernández, José Abel Aravena Ruiz, Rodolfo Valentino Concha Rodríguez, Silvio Antonio Concha González, and Roberto Hernán Rodríguez Manquel must serve 10 years and one day in prison as co-perpetrators of the aggravated kidnapping.

In the case of agent Samuel Enrique Fuenzalida Devia, the resolution of visiting minister Hernán Crisosto was confirmed, sentencing him to 541 days in prison, with the benefit of conditional remission of the sentence. At least 11 other agents sentenced in the first-instance ruling died during the course of the process.

In the resolution, the Second Chamber establishes that: "....it is clear that the lower court judges, at the time of resolving the controversy submitted to their knowledge and acquitting the accused Fernando Eduardo Lauriani Maturana, Gerardo Ernesto Godoy García, Manuel Andrés Carevic Cubillos, Pedro René Alfaro Fernández, Claudio Enrique Pacheco Fernández, José Alfonso Ojeda Obando, Luis René Torres Méndez, Hugo del Tránsito Hernández Valle, Manuel Rivas Díaz, Jerónimo del Carmen Neira Méndez, Carlos López Inostroza, Luis Rigoberto Videla Insunza, Palmira Isabel Almuna Guzmán, Rafael de Jesús Riveros Frost, Leonidas Emiliano Méndez Moreno, Pedro Mora Villanueva, Víctor Manuel Molina Astete, and Fernando Enrique Guerra Guajardo, have incurred in the errors of law denounced by the plaintiff, by estimating, in summary, as evidenced by the reasoning that precedes, .... artificially reducing the responsibility attributed to each of them to their status as DINA agents, through an incomplete reproduction of the foundations put forward by the first-instance court....." the ruling maintains.

"That on the other hand -it continues-, as has already been outlined, in addition to said legal qualification, the sentencers estimated...., that the acts were committed in a context of systematic or generalized attack against the civilian population, which determined that the established illicit act was, in addition, considered as crimes against humanity, for violating ius cogens norms of International Humanitarian Law, and for the same reason, subjected to said international legal statute."

Villa Grimaldi In the first-instance sentence, the visiting minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Hernán Crisosto Greisse, established that in the afternoon of February 7, 1975, members of the DINA detained Rodrigo Eduardo Ugás Morales, a militant of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), on a public street in the Estación Central sector in Santiago, and transported him to the clandestine DINA detention center known as 'Cuartel Terranova' or 'Villa Grimaldi,' located at Lo Arrieta No. 8200, in the commune of La Reina, which was guarded by armed guards and to which only DINA agents had access.

The detainee Ugás Morales, during his stay at the Villa Grimaldi barracks, according to testimonies of survivors, remained without contact with the outside world, blindfolded and tied, and was continuously subjected to interrogations under torture by DINA agents operating in said barracks.

The last time Rodrigo Ugás Morales was seen by other detainees occurred on an undetermined day in late February 1975, and he has remained disappeared since that date.

Source: resumen.cl, February 23, 2024

Epistolary of Memory, Letter to Rodrigo Ugas Morales

Hello Grandpa, how are you? We hope you are well; we are here enduring the quarantine. When it started, the first two weeks... HA, we thought it was a vacation, how naive, :( anyway, we have done our homework and at least I (Manu), who have had online classes, have gone to almost all of them.

This year we haven't learned anything; the only thing we've done is slack off and... that HAHAHA. Hopefully, all this coronavirus stuff ends quickly so we can return to our normal lives. We are actually quite bored. Something more or less similar to the dictatorship is happening here, a SOCIAL UPRISING, and well, it has been quite interesting; before the quarantine, everything was a mess.

The two weeks I was at school (Manu), I don't know if you knew, but I moved up to high school and everyone there is super motivated by all this; we held many assemblies and one day they even knocked down the gate and some escaped, also one day they made barricades and the cops arrived...

Those two weeks were quite interesting; I liked high school a lot. I hope the quarantine ends soon so I can go and continue protesting and demonstrating for our rights. What motivated you to fight for our country?

We want to ask you, what did you like about Grandma Fedora and how did you fall in love? Because there must be many things you liked about her and that you would like to tell us. We have a great time with her; we cook many delicious things, play cards, and watch movies.

Also, for two years we went on vacation to Chiloé with Grandma Fedora, Uncle Simón, and our dad, to see and accompany Uncle Roro who was working there, and we had a great time celebrating Christmas and New Year's, besides the fact that we walked a lot and visited many beautiful and fun places.

We also go to Horcón sometimes and get in the pool with Grandma. They call us the queens of the pool because since we were little, we have always liked to swim, and we also have swimming competitions with my dad. I (Mica) get tired very quickly, but Manu WINS MANY TIMES!! And she can also go from one end to the other underwater WITHOUT BREATHING! I (Manu) love to swim.

I went to swimming workshops for a few months and I was the best and the fastest, but I quit because I didn't have much free time, and now in quarantine, I miss it a lot. Mica also went to swimming, but she got bored and joined gymnastics workshops, but the teacher was very mean and she quit. What did you like to do at our age?

We love you and we know that you have always been taking care of us from somewhere in the universe because we feel it in our hearts. Thank you for being who you are and fighting for your own, for being an exemplary man.

We will always be very proud of you and to be able to say that our grandfather was named Rodrigo Ugas, husband of our grandmother and father of our dad and uncle. We promise you that we will always fight for justice to be done for you and for all the forcibly disappeared and political execution victims, like our other grandfather Sergio Peña.

Greetings and a big kiss and hug from your granddaughters Manuela (13 years old) and Micaela (11 years old) Ugas Peña.

Santiago de Chile 07/30/2020

Source: epistolariodelamemoria.cl, July 30, 2020

Date: 07-30-2020