They are not on the official calendars of memory, nor are there hymns in their name. Those executed in the first months of the dictatorship in Chile were, in many cases, poor citizens from the popular shantytowns—one of the main bastions of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular—who held no political affiliation.

Their murders have remained in impunity and are only now beginning to be brought to justice.

Once the coup d'état in Chile was carried out, the civilians and military officers who overthrew Allende focused on consolidating their position and legitimizing their power through repressive measures and policies.

Among these were the closure of the National Congress and a battery of decrees that established a state of siege and a state of internal war. This provided the justification for the "internal enemy" to be targeted by terror tactics such as detention camps, deaths, the "law of flight" (ley de fuga), torture, raids on homes and neighborhoods, extrajudicial executions, and forced disappearances.

"Unfortunately, despite having filed more than a thousand lawsuits, there is a tendency to highlight and cover only 6 to 8 cases, leaving countless cases of peasants, residents, children, and housewives in oblivion," explains Nicolás Pavez, a lawyer representing the Association of Relatives of Political Executed (AFEP).

The association has brought thousands of cases to court in which not only are the culprits unknown, but the relatives—due to a lack of networks, police intimidation at the time, or simply fear of the dictatorship—did not file complaints.

In February 1992, Law 19.123 was enacted, creating the National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation, which, among other tasks, established the Rettig Report. In its Article 6, the aforementioned law established that "The location of persons, as well as that of the bodies of executed persons and the circumstances of said disappearance or death, constitute an inalienable right of the victims' relatives and of Chilean society." However, for Alicia Lira, president of the AFEP, there is a vast field of cases that have not been investigated or clarified: those that are not considered "emblematic."

Thus, for example, according to a 2012 investigation by Pascale Bonnefoy and John Dinges, after September 11, the Santiago morgue, which was accustomed to receiving an average of fewer than 10 bodies per day, faced a collapse: in the first month of the dictatorship alone, 588 bodies arrived, 397 of which had died from gunshot wounds.

Many of these occurred due to the repression unleashed in the popular neighborhoods and shantytowns through tactics such as indiscriminate bursts of gunfire against inhabited areas and random detentions and raids.

"In public, on several occasions, when he went out with me, he would fire shots into the air; he even ordered us to fire in the same way, without any justified motive, a situation that could not be challenged because he was the officer.

Furthermore, when he went out to patrol, I occasionally remember that he did so with a tennis racket, dressed in institutional uniform, with riding boots," recounted the accused Enrique Romero Jara, a now-deceased carabineros officer who was known as "Hilton 100," regarding his direct superior, Lieutenant Oscar Patricio Ibacache Carrasco.

Both are being investigated for the death of several neighbors of the Población Los Nogales in the first months after the coup, charges for which Juan Eliecer Ponce Manivet is also accused. Lieutenant Oscar Patricio Ibacache Carrasco himself attributed his nickname "Crazy Lieutenant" to his "eccentric dress, according to the word used by my friends in the neighborhood, because I wore boots and riding breeches."

The "strange" lieutenant commanded a Carabineros station that, in practice, operated as a death squad for the residents of Estación Central, taking particular cruelty against young residents and laborers, most of whom had no known political affiliation or participation.

As early as September 16, 1973, carabineros from the Los Nogales station violently entered the home of three brothers: Hernán Rafael (28), Juan Manuel (25), and Ricardo del Carmen Sepúlveda Bravo (16).

They took them into custody to the corner of Uspallata and Antofagasta streets, where they executed them in view of numerous people from the Los Nogales neighborhood. Hernán and Juan Manuel died on the spot. The teenager Ricardo del Carmen was taken to Posta Nº3, where he died.

"It was the Crazy Lieutenant," carabineros officer Jaime Reyes Godoy told his co-father-in-law, Eugenia Rodríguez, when she asked who had detained her husband. One day after the murder of the Sepúlveda Bravo brothers, the Los Nogales station—also known as the Cabo Tomás Pereira station—continued with the executions.

Thus, on September 17, 1973, riding in an ambulance from the clinic next to the police unit, the officers entered the family home of Luis Alberto Lobos Cañas (31), a communist militant who worked as a driver for the party. On September 18, his lifeless body, bearing two gunshot wounds, was found in the Mapocho River, near the Bulnes bridge.

During those days, the carabineros of the Los Nogales station also executed, in the same neighborhood, Víctor Galvarino Silva López (20), a shoe store worker with no political affiliation, who was detained on September 16, 1973, and thrown into the Zanjón de la Aguada already dead.

That same day, Roberto Enrique Anfrens Fuentes (26) left his house to go to work and never returned. His widow was notified on September 17, 1973, that his body was in the Zanjón de la Aguada.

October 1973 arrived with a massacre that shook the already battered population. On the first day of that month, Carabineros from the local station forcibly removed three teenagers from a place where they were playing foosball.

In the presence of neighbors, Miguel Angel Ríos Traslaviña (16), Rogelio Gustavo Ramírez Améstica (18), and Marco Orlando Ríos Bustos (15) were severely beaten in the street. Various witnesses testified before the Rettig Commission that the carabineros forced the children to run, shooting them in the back multiple times.

Miguel's lifeless body had 18 bullet impacts, while Rogelio's had 12. Only the youngest of the three, Marcos, managed to run through the burst of gunfire from the Carabineros, reaching the Iquique bridge in Estación Central. There, between the train tracks, he encountered another military patrol that was carrying out a "pincer" movement in the area. They shot him three times.

On October 20, Juan Manuel Pinto Godoy (33) was detained at a neighbor's house in the Kennedy neighborhood while the curfew was already in effect. Carabineros from the Los Nogales station raided the house, supposedly in search of two criminals.

Juan Manuel tried to flee by jumping over a fence, but a bullet in the pelvis prevented his escape. Once dead, he remained lying in a vacant lot until the carabineros themselves took him to the Legal Medical Service.

That same day, the carabineros of Los Nogales returned to patrol in the ambulance from the clinic next to the station. In the sector known as Campamento 18 de Septiembre, numerous witnesses saw how they detained José Tomás Beltrán Bizama (25), a laborer with no known political affiliation; Eduardo Antonio Fonseca Castro (26), a street vendor who was also not a militant; and Hernán Anselmo Cortés Velásquez (26), a laborer who, like the other two victims, had no known political or social activity.

The three bodies were abandoned in Lo Errázuriz (Maipú), all dead from a gunshot to the head.

In response to requests for information, such as the complete list of personnel pursuant to a lawsuit filed in 2010 by the Association of Relatives of Political Executed, the Human Resources department of the Carabineros of Chile responded that "it was not possible to locate or find documentation corresponding to the year 1973 in the archives of the 21st Station of Estación Central, the unit upon which the Cabo Tomas Pereira Carabineros station depended at that time, as it was reportedly incinerated." On April 27, 2016, a request was made to the Court of Appeals to reopen the summary investigation into the case of the Sepúlveda Bravo brothers and Luis Lobos Cañas. The court's resolution is still pending.

Murdered for going to the corner: The crime of Sonia Norambuena in Santa Adriana

The state of internal war decreed by Pinochet on September 11, 1973, also meant a reorganization of the Armed Forces. Thus, the Internal Security Jurisdictional Area Command (CAJSI) was established, through which instructions and macro-guidelines were issued for the fulfillment of the tasks required to maintain the state of emergency.

In Santiago, the CAJSI was in charge of General Herman Brady Roche (who died in 2011 after being in a coma for two years, having been prosecuted for multiple human rights violations) and was divided into different "groups," among which was the Southern Group, based at the "El Bosque" Garrison, under the command of Chilean Air Force (FACh) General Mario Vivero Ávila, a member of the Joint Command.

One day after this military reorganization was implemented, parallel to the military hierarchical order, the inhabitants of the southern zone of Santiago felt its full weight. Reports of overflights firing bursts from the El Bosque base, massive raids like those in La Bandera and La Legua, and random executions were part of the deployment necessary to maintain the internal state of emergency that gave Pinochet the justification, which persists to this day, of a war between two equivalent forces.

The Santa Adriana neighborhood was no exception.

Various witnesses have testified to the justice system regarding the presence of a patrol of officers dressed in blue combat uniforms—which they attribute to the Chilean Air Force (FACh), well-known in the area due to the presence of the El Bosque Air Garrison—at the bridge located at Ochagavía and Callejón Lo Ovalle on September 12, 1973.

From there, shots and bursts of machine-gun fire were fired from a weapon mounted on a tripod. Concerned by the sound of the gunfire, Sonia Isaura Norambuena Cruz (34) went out to look for one of her daughters who was playing in the street.

Sonia was expecting another child, who would join the six she already had with her husband. The economic situation had become especially difficult since, a couple of years earlier, he had suffered a work accident that prevented him from continuing to work.

Accompanied by his father, Francisco Cartes Cartes, Eugenio was playing soccer at the corner of Callejón Ochagavía and Pasaje 25. There, they took shelter with Sonia and his father, waiting for his sister to arrive. "My sister Edith arrived at the place where we were with my mother, at which moment she suddenly fell to the ground.

We approached her with my father, noticing a small scratch on the right side of her abdomen and on her back," Eugenio declared. Sonia Norambuena was carried to her house by her children, as Francisco could not lift heavy weights. "My mother could not be taken to the hospital to be treated, because due to the number of gunshots heard in the surroundings, it was impossible to leave the houses," one of her daughters, Cecilia, stated to the justice system.

Due to the state of commotion in the neighborhood, Sonia Norambuena could not be waked. Her husband and children built a coffin in the patio and held the wake in her own bed for approximately five days.

Only then could she be taken to the General Cemetery, where the military stationed at the entrance only allowed her husband to pass. That same month of September, soldiers raided the family home as a form of intimidation.

Today, the execution of Sonia Norambuena Cruz is being investigated by the justice system, after both the Undersecretariat of the Interior and its Human Rights program, as well as the AFEP, filed complaints.

The main difficulty has been identifying the FACh personnel who were stationed at the Ochagavía bridge, as the military officers summoned to testify have denied any non-routine patrolling, gunfire, bursts, or participation in any crime.

Like a carbon-copy script, they have all stated that it is the first time they have heard of the case. As for General Mario Vivero Ávila, he has even dismissed in his statements the existence of the Internal Security Jurisdictional Area Command (CAJSI) and the parallel "Anti-Insurgency Company" created by the FACh military in El Bosque, despite the fact that personnel under his command have confirmed its existence.

This company, parallel to the army's hierarchical order, was reportedly composed of personnel from the School of Specialties, Maintenance Wing, Aeronautical Polytechnic Academy, Supply and Maintenance Wing, and the Academy of the Aviation School of El Bosque.

As former soldier Oscar Chylk declared in 2011, this group was commanded by the late Lieutenant Leonardo Antonucci and, for the plaintiff lawyers, is one of the main suspects in the execution of Sonia.

On September 6, 1990, the citizen Francisco Cartes went to tell his story for the first time before the Rettig Commission. There he stated that "as a result of these events, my family has been left in a very bad state; they have not been able to study, and we had serious economic difficulties: hunger, frustrations, lack of health.

I ask for justice for my children and not for me. I swore that day before my family that I would never marry any woman until I killed the dog that murdered my wife, and I am here now fulfilling that." He died a year later without knowing who had murdered his wife.

The friends from the Matadero slaughterhouse

On October 30, 1973, Jeremías Jara Valenzuela (21), Pedro Otárola Sepúlveda, and Manuel Gutiérrez Montano, refrigeration workers at the La Granja Slaughterhouse, went to play a soccer match before their work shift, which started at 3 in the afternoon.

At 2:30 p.m., they were having a drink at the "Don Ale" soda fountain in the Villa Nueva Paraguay neighborhood when a group of carabineros burst into the establishment and took them into custody. Their families were alerted to the detention by various witnesses.

That was how Digna Valenzuela, Jeremías's mother, arrived at the San Gregorio neighborhood police station. They told her they would be released at night.

Two days later, they returned to ask about the young men. "They surely went to entertain themselves somewhere else," the carabineros from the station in charge of Captain Héctor Osses Yáñez and Sergeant Armando Sáez Pérez said, showing them the registry book where the young men had supposedly signed.

But, according to Manuel Gutiérrez Montano, what happened was something else. In the early hours of the day of their detention, they were taken from the cells and brought to the El Mariscal ravine, at the 46th stop of Avenida Santa Rosa, where they executed Jeremías Jara and Pedro Otárola and threw their bodies into the current.

Manuel, meanwhile, jumped into the river before they could shoot him and managed to survive. He thus alerted the Jara Valenzuela and Otárola Sepúlveda families, only to then disappear from the neighborhood. They never heard from him again. Jeremías Jara's remains appeared a month later in San Bernardo, where they had been dragged by the current.

According to the Rettig Commission, between October 8 and 30, 1973, in that same place, 16 people appeared dead in similar conditions. Of this group, the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation only managed to identify Jaime Antonio Rivera Aguilar and Eduardo Santos Quinteros Miranda, whom it declared victims of human rights violations.

This does not mean that all of them are attributable to the La Granja Sub-station, located in San Gregorio: the southern zone was also patrolled by the FACh and the Army, in addition to the Carabineros.

However, the carabineros of the La Granja Sub-station themselves gave themselves away when they arrived five days after the bodies appeared at the homes of the Jara Valenzuela and Otárola Sepúlveda families.

According to Rosa Sepúlveda's statement to the Rettig Commission, "apparently it was known that one of the detainees had remained alive." Rosa was summoned to the Military Prosecutor's Office, where an officer commented to her that her son's body was at the Legal Medical Service and that he had been executed "for being a politician." In 1974, she went to the SML, where they informed her that her son Pedro had been buried in a mass grave at the General Cemetery.

The testimonies of the relatives of Jeremías Jara and Pedro Otárola point to the fact that, at the very least, Sergeant Arnaldo Sáez knew the victims. This is because it was common for officials from that station to arrive at the La Granja Slaughterhouse and demand that the workers steal meat from the warehouses to give to them.

Sáez, moreover, was very recognizable for suffering from vitiligo, for which reason he was known as "El Manchado" (The Spotted One).

Several versions of the case circulate: first, that "El Manchado" had taken advantage of his status as an agent of the State and the general climate of repression and executions to "get back at" the young men for their constant teasing about his skin.

Other information provided by carabineros from the La Granja sub-station to the justice system suggests that Manuel Gutiérrez Montano managed to leave the neighborhood because a relative of his was a domestic worker for the General Director of Carabineros, César Mendoza. None of these have been proven.

Accused of various cases, including the execution of Dante Valentín Olivares Jiménez (36), who was detained in September '73 in La Bandera, Captain Osses has blamed Sergeant Sáez for these acts, who died in 1985 from a stroke.

In addition, Captain Osses and officers Aquiles Bustamante Oliva, Fernando Félix Rojas Véliz, Luis Alberto Baeza Sanhueza, and Segundo Baldomero Llanos Amarilis were also prosecuted for the executions of Héctor Queglas Maturana and Luis Morales Muñoz, also in La Granja, also in October 1973.

During those days, Jorge Hernán Espinoza Farías (19) was also murdered, a crime for which Osses Yáñez and Bustamante Oliva are also accused.

According to Captain Osses Yáñez's statement, he learned of the execution of Jeremías and Pedro from officer Aquiles Bustamante, who had allegedly accompanied Sergeant Arnaldo Sáez in the murders. Today, the case has finished its investigation stage, and the plaintiffs are awaiting indictments.

Doña Rosa Sepúlveda was not part of it. In the 80s, she was informed by the General Cemetery that her son Pedro's remains had been removed. She was never able to see the body or say goodbye to him.

Source: eldesconcierto.cl, September 11, 2016