Until now, it was believed that the first forcibly disappeared persons found had been riddled with bullets by Carabineros from the Isla de Maipo station before being thrown into the Lonquén kilns. But international experts confirmed to the families that the cause of death—according to the traces on the remains of the 15 peasants—was due to blunt force trauma.

There has not been an event in Isla de Maipo as horrendous as the murder of the 15 peasants at the hands of Carabineros from the station that existed in the commune in 1973. Today, the pain that has remained with the victims' families for nearly 35 years has become more intense after learning another major detail of the story: they were not murdered by gunfire, but were simply beaten to death, only to be thrown later into the lime kilns in Lonquén.

Only 517 bone fragments of the 15 victims were saved from disappearing forever and were identified following anthropological and dental analyses by a group of international experts convened by the Government.

It was the Spanish expert Francisco Echeverría who conducted the detailed follow-up of the entire forensic examination of these remains, as part of an Executive program to correct the identification errors of the remains found in the early nineties in Patio 29 of the General Cemetery of Santiago.

Echeverría met with the families of the 15 victims and, through tears, told them of the discovery that made the Lonquén episode even more dramatic. "I can state with absolute certainty today that the remains we have separated and examined correspond to those of the 15 victims who were found in 1978, and it was established that the cause of death corresponds to a violent, homicidal death.

There are no bullet impact injuries; these are blunt force traumatic injuries. Death was caused by beatings." According to the expert, the old report from the Legal Medical Service did not establish this fundamental fact.

Until now, the families were convinced that their loved ones, although they had suffered beatings at the Isla de Maipo station, were ultimately riddled with bullets before being thrown into the Lonquén lime kilns.

In these lime kilns were found the bodies of Sergio Maureira Lillo and his four sons, Rodolfo Antonio, Sergio Miguel, Segundo Armando, and José Manuel; Óscar Hernández Flores and his brothers Carlo and Nelson; Enrique Astudillo Álvarez and his two sons, Omar and Ramón; and the young men Miguel Brant, Iván Ordóñez, José Herrera, and Manuel Navarro, aged between 17 and 51.

The discovery was made through the confession of a peasant to a priest. The kilns were two old nine-meter-high chimneys once used for the preparation of lime, located inside the El Triunfador agricultural cooperative, about 14 kilometers from the city of Talagante.

The official version to justify the Lonquén crime was that once detained at the Isla de Maipo station, one of the peasants confessed that there were hidden weapons in some kilns at the abandoned Lonquén mine.

That alone was enough for them to transport the prisoners, who, according to the same explanation, attacked the police, resulting in everyone being killed in an armed confrontation. Curiously, no Carabinero was injured.

At the beginning of April 1979, the visiting judge Adolfo Bañados declared himself incompetent, and the case was transferred to military justice. On July 2, the military prosecutor issued an indictment against Captain Lautaro Castro Mendoza and Carabineros Juan Villegas Navarro, Félix Sagredo Aravena, David Coliqueo Fuentealba, José Belmar Sepúlveda, Jacinto Torres González, Manuel Muñoz Rencoret, and Justo Romo Peralta as authors of the death of the 15 Lonquén victims.

However, on August 16, the Amnesty Law was applied to them; they were released, and the case was dismissed. This resolution was confirmed by the Court Martial on October 22, 1979. Forensic examinations of the bone remains continue, so the inauguration of a memorial on October 4 at the Isla de Maipo Parish Cemetery to remember the 15 peasants will only be a symbolic act. "Television Set Removal" The discovery of the bodies of the 15 peasants at the end of 1978 was an alert for Pinochet, who determined, with an encrypted message decrypted by each regiment, the so-called "Operation Television Set Removal" (Operación Retiro de Televisores), as the Army itself internally called it. The order was clear: exhume the bodies of murdered prisoners and throw them into the sea. The means? Helicopters from the Army Aviation Command and the Chilean Air Force, which collaborated, for example, in the case of the 26 bodies in Calama, victims of the Caravan of Death. In various legal proceedings, there are statements from now-retired non-commissioned officers who acknowledge having held in their hands the cryptogram sent from the Army General Command ordering the reporting of clandestine graves in order to "clean them." The discovery of the Lonquén victims put an end to the concealment of the truth about the forcibly disappeared, which had been a permanent policy of the dictatorship. "This has been etched into us. The families do not sleep thinking about what they suffered at the hands of their executioners. For me, it has been very hard to know this recently. We talked about it at home, and it has been even more painful. It reopens our wounds and adds more suffering to what we have already carried for 35 years. At least now we will be able to give them a dignified burial, but this will be etched into us for the rest of our lives," Corina Maureira told LND through tears. For Isla de Maipo councilman Emilio Astudillo, what was revealed "bitterly surprised us after learning how people wearing the Carabinero uniform could be so cruel to our relatives and brutally beat them to death. That is more shocking. It hurts the soul and the heart more to know how they were really murdered." Councilman Astudillo was 16 years old in '73. He had to assume the responsibility of becoming the head of the household and caring for his mother and younger siblings after being left without his father and his other older brothers, Ramón and Omar. Furthermore, he had to endure the burden of searching for them for five years in concentration camps with the hope of finding them alive. "Only those who live it can realize the psychological damage it causes to a person and their family. Only with the discovery of the victims in the Lonquén kilns in '78 did we have some peace and closure, because we knew it was them." The memorial The families of the Lonquén victims say they wanted to build a memorial to deposit the remains of their loved ones that have already been identified in the country; but so that what happened with the remains from Patio 29—where the bodies were wrongly delivered to their families—does not happen to them, both they and the Government opted to have samples of the victims' bodies sent to a laboratory in Texas, where, within a year, the results will certify if they are indeed their relatives, who were murdered and thrown into the Lonquén kilns, subsequently exhumed from the mass grave in Isla de Maipo, and transferred to the Legal Medical Service in Santiago. In 2006, the families achieved the exhumation and hoped that after two years they would be able to have their relatives' remains to bury them. But reality has placed them in another scenario, and they will have to wait one more year. For this reason, they decided to inaugurate the memorial on October 4 regardless, an act that will be attended by Government authorities and human rights organizations. "We must not forget that the Lonquén victims were the first discovery of forcibly disappeared persons in the country, when the dictatorship denied that they existed. Even at the United Nations, the legal existence of our relatives was unknown. The former ambassador to the UN in those years, Sergio Diez, said that our companions had no legal existence or had gone abroad of their own volition. So, the Lonquén discovery marked a before and after regarding the forcibly disappeared in Chile," maintains Emilio Astudillo. The memorial will, however, contain 17 graves, because the families chose to include the names of Juan de Dios Salinas and Guillermo Bustamante Sotelo, killed in September '73 at the Naltagua bridge by the same police officers from the Isla de Maipo station. Nelson Caucoto, plaintiff lawyer: "We will ask for state reparations" Margarita Herreros was the first judge in charge of the case after its reopening upon the filing of the complaint by Isla de Maipo councilman Emilio Astudillo. However, she was there for a short time, as she was appointed as a member of the Supreme Court. Since then, the case has passed through the hands of several judges. Some did not even manage to read the entire file. Today, the proceedings are in the charge of Judge Marta Hantke at the San Miguel Court of Appeals, and without major developments, awaiting the conclusion of the identification stage with the results of the samples sent to Texas. For the lawyer for the victims' families, Nelson Caucoto, "the most important thing of all is that the definitive dismissal that existed in the case was reversed, which has allowed us to advance in the stage of accurate identification of the remains. Once that concludes and they are delivered to their families, we will give an impetus to the criminal process and take the corresponding actions to summon the implicated parties to testify regarding the homicides. In due course, we will also ask for reparations from the Chilean State." Lautaro Castro Mendoza, the lieutenant in charge of the Isla de Maipo Carabinero station in October '73, was notified three weeks ago of a first-instance sentence in another case for the murder of Juan de Dios Salinas and Guillermo Bustamante Sotelo, two social leaders from Isla de Maipo detained in September '73. Castro was sentenced to 20 years in prison, 10 for each victim.

Source: lanacion.cl, September 28, 2008

"Lonquén Kilns" Case: Supreme Court confirms conviction of Carabineros

The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence that convicted six retired Carabineros for their responsibility in the crimes of qualified kidnapping and simple kidnapping committed against fifteen people in the town of Isla de Maipo during the civil-military dictatorship in 1973, whose remains were found in 1978 inside the Lonquén Kilns. "Pieces of yellowish skulls, with traces of scalp; loose black hair; torn clothing in which a pair of blue jeans and a man's sweater can be recognized." This was the description by the deputy director of Revista Hoy, Abraham Santibáñez, after the discovery of the bodies of fifteen peasants detained, tortured, and murdered by Carabineros during the civil-military dictatorship in 1978. In 1973, a Carabinero patrol detained 15 men between 17 and 51 years old who were taken to the Isla de Maipo station, the place where they were last seen alive. After this, the police took them with their hands tied and they were thrown into the lime mine kilns in Lonquén. The statements made by an elderly man who claimed to have found human remains in the abandoned mines gave rise to a commission tasked with going to Lonquén that same day to verify those claims. Its members were Enrique Alvear, auxiliary bishop of Santiago; Vicar Cristián Precht; Javier Egaña, executive secretary of the Vicariate of Solidarity; Alejandro González, chief lawyer of the same institution; Máximo Pacheco, lawyer; the director of Qué Pasa magazine, Jaime Martínez; and the deputy director of Revista Hoy, Abraham Santibáñez. The highest officials of the Vicariate of Solidarity, together with Máximo Pacheco and Bishop Alvear, went to the Supreme Court to file the complaint and request an investigation. On December 6, 1978, the Plenary of the Supreme Court appointed the Minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Adolfo Bañados Cuadra, as Extraordinary Visiting Judge in charge of pursuing the Lonquén investigation. Information from the dictatorship's agencies indicated that those detainees had been taken to the National Stadium. This was also affirmed by Captain Lautaro Castro, who at the time of the detention was the head of the Isla de Maipo station, and his subordinates. In April 1979, the visiting judge declared himself incompetent and the process passed to military justice; however, the investigation had determined that the victims did not die during a confrontation and that Captain Lautaro's version was "intrinsically implausible." "In none of the 15 skeletal remains studied by the Legal Medical Institute were signs of perforations, fractures, or other types of traces found that could be related to firearm projectiles impacting a living organism, so the death of the fifteen people must be attributed to other causes," stated Judge Bañados' resolution. The military prosecutor issued an indictment against Captain Lautaro Castro Mendoza and Carabineros Juan Villegas Navarro, Félix Sagredo Aravena, David Coliqueo Fuentealba, José Belmar Sepúlveda, Jacinto Torres González, Manuel Muñoz Rencoret, and Justo Romo Peralta as authors of the death of the 15 Lonquén victims. However, the following month—on August 16—the Amnesty Law was applied to them, so they were released and the case was dismissed. This resolution was confirmed by the Court Martial on October 22 of the same year. According to information from the Museum of Memory, once the investigation was finished, the families asked for the victims' bodies to be handed over to them for burial, but although Military Prosecutor Gonzalo Salazar ordered the remains to be handed over, they were removed from the Legal Medical Institute that night in secret and buried in a mass grave in the so-called "Operation Television Set Removal." On February 18, 2010, the acting judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, Héctor Solís, announced the identification of 13 of the 15 bodies whose remains were found in 1978, finally allowing the burial to take place, with the removal of the remains from the Legal Medical Service occurring on March 26. On March 27, a public wake was held in the Civic Patio of the Isla de Maipo Municipality, and on Sunday the 28th, the solemn burial of the victims took place at the Isla de Maipo Parish Cemetery. Convicted Carabineros This afternoon, the Supreme Court convicted six retired Carabineros for their responsibility in the crimes of qualified kidnapping and simple kidnapping committed against fifteen people from the town of Isla de Maipo. In a split decision, the Second Chamber of the highest court rejected an appeal for cassation and confirmed the sentence of Judge Marianela Cifuentes, which sentenced David Coliqueo Fuentealba, Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta, Félix Héctor Sagredo Aravena, Jacinto Torres González, and Juan José Villegas Navarro to 15 years and one day in prison as authors of qualified kidnapping. Pablo Ñancupil Raguileo was sentenced to 11 terms of 60 days in prison as the author of simple kidnapping. Lorena Pizarro, president of the Association of Relatives of Forcibly Disappeared Detainees, said that "it is so brutal that, for multiple murders, entire families destroyed, after so many years of impunity, they receive a sentence of this type, especially when today they are elderly and lived their whole lives with impunity. We have to face the fact that the sentences are not exemplary of the magnitude of the crime. It is good that it was confirmed, but it should have been more than that, without a doubt." "In general, the judiciary has been quite benevolent with the criminals responsible for crimes against humanity; most of the sentences never involve civilians, since the dictatorship was civil-military. Here there were clear responsibilities of those who held positions in ministries and public services. The judiciary has settled for sentences that are sometimes even laughable, which allow criminals to go free. So the delay in investigations, the low sentences, and the fact that the truth is not a subject we know is a reality in the immense cases being investigated in Chilean courts. One feels that this justice, 'to the extent possible,' dictated and decreed in the first government of the transition until today, is a reality in the judiciary," Lorena Pizarro elaborated. For his part, lawyer Nelson Caucoto said that "with the resolution of the justice system, we are satisfied, because we have finished a case that dates back to 1973, which had an interval until 2005 and was dismissed by military justice. We managed to extract it from military justice and take it to the ordinary courts. I don't know if anyone thought that in the Lonquén case the subjects would be convicted, when they had been definitively dismissed by the application of the amnesty. From that point of view, it is an important achievement; the main achievement was recognizing the victims and delivering them to their families, because the remains were thrown into a mass grave and it was necessary to start the identification process, which was finally achieved for the peace of the families." "The sentences in other circumstances could have been several life imprisonments, but a 15-year sentence for these people is significant nonetheless. With this, a long investigative process is culminated, and that must be valued," the lawyer concluded. Regarding civil matters, the sentence ordering the State to pay a total indemnity of $2,050,000,000 to the victims' families was confirmed.

Source: radio.uchile.cl, June 19, 2018

Lonquén: The Carabinero massacre of 15 peasants

On October 7, 1973, at 9:45 PM, a group of eleven peasants from the town of Isla de Maipo was detained by Carabinero officials. The police did not carry arrest or search warrants for the homes of these people.

Numerous witnesses saw how they were beaten and loaded into a white pickup truck owned by the owner of the Fundo Naguayán—where the houses of the three families were located—and how they were tied up and laid face down on the floor of the vehicle.

They were the agricultural workers: Enrique Astudillo Álvarez (51 years old), Omar Astudillo Rojas (20), Ramón Astudillo Rojas (27), Carlos Hernández Flores (39), Nelson Hernández Flores (32), Oscar Hernández Flores (30), Sergio Maureira Lillo (46), José Maureira Muñoz (26), Rodolfo Maureira Muñoz (22), Segundo Maureira Muñoz (24), and Sergio Maureira Muñoz (27).

The Carabinero officials stood on their backs. They paraded through the streets of the town to intimidate the entire population. Finally, they were taken to the station. The same fate befell four young men who had been detained that same day in the town square: Miguel Brant Bustamante (22 years old), Manuel Navarro Salinas (20), Iván Ordóñez Lama (17), and José Herrera Villegas (17).

The families were deceived by government authorities. They were informed that the detainees had been taken to the National Stadium in the capital. The relatives filed a recurso de amparo (habeas corpus) in 1974.

When the local authorities were requested by the courts, they merely stated that "all had been transferred on October 8, 1973, to the National Stadium." This was completely false. The SENDET (National Service for Detainees) contradictorily indicated that it "did not have, and had never had, information about them." Sergio Diez—now a National Renewal senator, and at that time a delegate of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte's dictatorship to the OAS—lied in 1975 before the whole world, saying that: "these people had no legal existence," while other "Lonquén detainees had been admitted to the Legal Medical Institute in October 1973." On November 29, 1978, an informant gave the Catholic Church the exact location where the ill-fated remains of the peasants and young men were: some lime kilns in the town of Lonquén, 14 kilometers from the town of Talagante. The Vicar of Solidarity, Cristián Precht, and the Bishop of Santiago, Enrique Alvear, decided to verify the information by going to the place together with journalists—Jaime Martínez (Qué Pasa) and Abraham Santibáñez (Revista Hoy)—and lawyers Máximo Pacheco (PDC) and Alejandro González. The press reported: "In an old stone construction, about twelve meters high, attached to the slope of a hill, inside which there are two silos of two and a half meters, were the corpses (...) In the other, covered with stones from above and with an exit in its lower part, also walled up, were human remains, a skull, torn clothes (...)". It was a precise and painful blow to the conscience of thousands of Chileans. A wound open to this day, unspeakable. An image of pain and human misery, of horror without limit and brutality that the history of humanity will remember forever. Pinochet and his lackeys could do nothing to hide the horrendous crime. The bishop informed Israel Bórquez, president of the Supreme Court and collaborator of the regime, who sent the information to the Talagante Court. Judge Juana Godoy was appointed to begin the investigation. In December 1978, the remains were sent to the Legal Medical Institute. The Plenary of the Supreme Court appointed Judge Adolfo Bañados as Visiting Judge, who ordered autopsies and ballistic examinations and gathered the cases in which the disappearance of persons or alleged misfortune had been reported. He interrogated the families of the "disappeared" peasants. The police officers involved: Lautaro Castro Mendoza—head of the Isla de Maipo station—and Carabineros Juan Villegas Navarro, Félix Sagredo Aravena, Manuel Muñoz Rencoret, Jacinto Torres González, David Coliqueo Fuentealba, José Belmar Sepúlveda, and Justo Romo Peralta, gave the courts the version that they had "taken the detainees, who were highly dangerous, to the Lonquén kilns in order to unearth the weaponry they had hidden, and that later—at the place—they had suffered an armed attack by unknown persons, with the peasants being killed by the gunfire. Fearing reprisals, they had decided to hide the bodies in the abandoned kilns." In April 1979, Judge Bañados had to declare himself incompetent due to the prevailing legislation that grants immunity to uniformed personnel and hands over criminal cases in which they are involved to Military Justice. However, before leaving the case, he established the responsibility of these police officers in the events. His resolution says: "The version (...) to try to explain the death of their prisoners, not only contradicts the merits of the case in multiple aspects and details, in particular, of course, regarding the number of victims, but is intrinsically implausible (...) in none of the remains were signs of perforations, fractures, or other types of traces found that could be related to firearm projectiles impacting a living organism, so the death of the fifteen people must be attributed to other causes." The process then passed into the hands of the "Second Military Court," which indicted the Carabinero officials as "authors of the crime of unnecessary violence causing death." After a short procedure, the case was definitively dismissed through the Amnesty Law dictated by Pinochet, legislation to which the eight Carabineros had requested to be subject. Subsequently, the "Court Martial" confirmed that resolution. The murderer Lautaro Castro was promoted to the rank of Captain. One year after the bodies of the peasants and young men were found, the remains were handed over to their families. The bodies were transported by officials of the Legal Medical Institute to Isla de Maipo and buried immediately—except for Sergio Maureira Lillo—to avoid the presence of their families, depositing them in a mass grave. The families, aggrieved once again by the military authorities, filed a complaint with the Court Martial—which was forced to accept it—against military prosecutor Gonzalo Salazar Sweet for "fault and abuse committed by not complying with the order to hand over the bodies." He was given a written censure. In January 1980, the Supreme Court decided to set it aside, considering that the prosecutor "did not commit any fault. It was the judges themselves who imposed it on him who indicated the procedure he used." A complaint was filed again with the justice system for the death of the Isla de Maipo peasants. This case was handled by visiting judge Héctor Solís, who could not continue his investigation. The judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, Marianela Cifuentes, continued the investigation, finishing it on September 12, 2016, when she issued a first-instance sentence. The judge convicted the 7 Carabineros who detained the fifteen peasants; the former Carabineros were convicted of the crime of qualified kidnapping: Lautaro Castro Mendoza, head of the patrol, to a sentence of 20 years in prison for his responsibility as an author. David Coliqueo Fuentealba, Justo Ignacio Romo Peralta, Félix Héctor Sagredo Aravena, Jacinto Torres González, and Juan José Villegas Navarro were sentenced to 15 years in prison. Pablo Ñancupil Raguileo was sentenced to 900 days in prison. The case went to the second instance, the San Miguel Court of Appeals, which on May 16, 2017, confirmed the sentence. On June 16, 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence that convicted 6 former Carabineros, given that the head of the Carabineros, Lautaro Castro, passed away before the conviction. On February 18, 2010, the acting judge of the San Miguel Court of Appeals, Héctor Solís, announced the identification of 13 of the 15 bodies whose remains were found in 1978, finally allowing the burial to take place, with the removal of the remains from the Legal Medical Service occurring on March 26. On March 27, a public wake was held in the Civic Patio of the Isla de Maipo Municipality, and on Sunday the 28th, the solemn burial of the victims took place at the Isla de Maipo Parish Cemetery. The Lonquén Kilns were demolished to erase all traces and footprints of memory, to definitively impose oblivion. By Arnaldo Pérez Guerra

Source: prensaopal.cl, October 7, 2020