Minister Mario Carroza indicted seven former CNI agents for the disappearance of five members of the Front, kidnapped in retaliation for the abduction of Colonel Carlos Carreño. Visiting Minister Mario Carroza indicted seven former agents of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) for the qualified kidnapping of five young militants of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) in September 1987.

The magistrate indicted them for varying degrees of participation in the kidnappings of José Julián Peña Maltés, Alejandro Pinochet Arenas, Manuel Sepúlveda Sánchez, Gonzalo Fuenzalida Navarrete, and Julio Muñoz Otárola, which occurred beginning on September 1, 1987.

The resolution affects Juan Carlos Orellana Morales, Hernán Antonio Vásquez Villegas, Raúl del Carmen Durán Martínez, José Guillermo Salas Fuentes, Marco Antonio Pincheira Ubilla, and Jorge Raimundo Ahumada Molina.

The list also includes Iván Quiroz Ruiz, who had remained a fugitive in the Operation Albania case and was arrested on Wednesday night. According to the ruling, the first six former agents face charges as perpetrators of the qualified kidnapping of Peña Maltés, while Quiroz was indicted for the same case, as well as for those of Pinochet Arenas, Sepúlveda Sánchez, Fuenzalida Navarrete, and Muñoz Otárola.

The investigation considers it proven that the five Front members were kidnapped in retaliation for the kidnapping of Colonel Carlos Carreño Barrera, then an official of the Army Factories and Workshops (Famae), perpetrated on September 1, 1987.

According to the investigation, the bodies of the five victims were thrown into the sea, for which Army helicopters were used. Other indicted individuals Before leaving the case and ascending to the Supreme Court in May 2007, Judge Haroldo Brito had indicted General (Ret.) Julio Cerda Carrasco, former head of the Army Intelligence Battalion (BIE), and retired officer Fernando Rafael Rojas Tapia, also a member of the aforementioned military unit.

Meanwhile, he indicted Aquiles Navarrete Izarnotegui, Víctor Campos Valladares, and Hugo Barría Rogers as accessories to the disappearances. And in September 2006, Brito indicted twelve former CNI agents, among whom are General (Ret.) Hugo Salas Wenzel and his subordinates, Brigadier (Ret.) Álvaro Corbalán Castilla and Krantz Bauer Donoso, as co-perpetrators of the kidnapping of Sepúlveda Sánchez, Fuenzalida Navarrete, and Muñoz Otárola.

On that occasion, the judge also indicted former agents Manuel Ángel Morales Acevedo, César Acuña Luengo, and René Valdovinos Morales as co-perpetrators of the kidnappings of Peña Maltés, Sepúlveda Sánchez, Fuenzalida Navarrete, and Muñoz Otárola.

They were joined by former CNI members Víctor Ruiz Godoy, Manuel Ramírez Montoya, Luis Sanhueza Ross, and Luis Santibáñez Aguilera, who were indicted as co-perpetrators of the kidnappings of Pinochet Arenas, Sepúlveda Sánchez, Fuenzalida Navarrete, and Muñoz Otárola.

Source: elmostrador.cl, January 24, 2008

Human Rights: 23 former CNI agents convicted for fake shootout during dictatorship

In the ruling by visiting Minister Miguel Vázquez Plaza, one of those convicted is Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, former head of operations of the dictatorship's National Intelligence Center, who adds another 20 years of imprisonment.

The extraordinary visiting minister for human rights violation cases of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Miguel Vázquez Plaza, convicted 23 former agents of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) for their responsibility in the crimes of homicide of Alejandro Salgado Troquián and Hugo Ratier Noguera, illicit acts perpetrated in 1983 in a fake shootout on Janequeo Street in the commune of Quinta Normal.

In the ruling, the visiting minister sentenced Roberto Schmied Zanzi, Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, and Aquiles González Cortés to 20 years in prison; meanwhile, former agents José Aravena Ruiz, José Salas Fuentes, Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross, Egon Barra Barra, Jorge Vargas Bories, Norman Jeldes Aguilar, Fernando Rojas Tapia, Manuel Morales Acevedo, Sergio Canals Baldwin, and José Vidal Veloso must serve 15 years and one day in prison as perpetrators of the crimes.

In the case of Raúl Méndez Santos, Rodolfo Olguín González, Ema Ceballos Núñez, Miguel Gajardo Quijada, Rosa Humilde Ramos Hernández, Francisco Orellana Seguel, Juan Carlos Vergara Gutiérrez, Raúl Escobar Díaz, Rafael Ortega Gutiérrez, and Luis Gálvez Navarro, they were sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison as accomplices.

In the case, Minister Vázquez Plaza decreed the acquittal of agents Zinaida Vicencio González, Jorge Ahumada Molina, and Eduardo Chávez Baeza, as their participation in the events was not proven. According to the investigation, on September 7, 1983, a number of agents from the CNI, the Chilean Investigative Police, and other repressive agencies went to the residence located at Janequeo Street No. 5707, Quinta Normal commune, which had been under surveillance for several weeks, “proceeding to surround and cordon off the place, and then, through the use of a base of fire and other weaponry, to fire without any provocation and with great firepower against the property, as a result of which Hugo Ratier Noguera (José) died from various gunshot wounds in the backyard of the house.” Furthermore, the process established that “upon arriving at the same residence where he lived, Alejandro Salgado Troquián was gunned down by multiple gunshot wounds on the public thoroughfare, that is, on Janequeo Street in front of number 5946.”

Source: elmostrador.cl, July 22, 2019

Santiago Court convicts 23 former CNI agents for murders in 1983 fake shootout

The Santiago Court of Appeals confirmed the first-instance sentence issued by Minister Miguel Vásquez Plaza on July 19, 2019, which convicted 23 former agents of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) for their responsibility in the crimes of qualified homicide of Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) militants Hugo Ratier Noguera and Alejandro Salgado Troquián.

The crimes were perpetrated on September 7, 1983, in a fake shootout on Janequeo Street in the commune of Quinta Normal. In the ruling (case file 4741-2019), the Third Chamber of the appellate court—composed of ministers Verónica Sabaj Escudero, Alejandro Aguilar Brevis, and Rodrigo Carvajal Schnettler—resolved to reject the appeals and cassation motions filed by some of the convicted individuals and to confirm the first-instance sentence with the declaration of reducing from 20 to 17 years the prison sentences applied to former Army officers and former CNI leaders Roberto Urbano Schmied Zanzi, Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla, and Aquiles Mauricio González Cortés, in their capacity as co-perpetrators of the crime. The first of the convicted, Schmied Zanzi, served as head of the CNI's Metropolitan Division; Corbalán Castilla was head of the Anti-Subversive Division, and Aquiles González acted as head of the Blue Brigade, specialized in the repression of the MIR. Meanwhile, former Army officers Sergio María Canals Baldwin, Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ros, Fernando Rafael Mauricio Rojas Tapia, Norman Antonio Jeldes Aguilar, and former agents José Abel Aravena Ruiz, José Guillermo Salas Fuentes, Egon Antonio Barra Barra, Jorge Octavio Vargas Bories, Manuel Ángel Morales Acevedo, and José Isaías Vidal Veloso must serve 15 years and one day in prison as perpetrators of the crimes. For their part, former agents Rodolfo Enrique Olguín González, Ema Verónica Ceballos Núñez, Luis Hernán Gálvez Navarro, Rosa Humilde Ramos Hernández, Francisco Javier Orellana Seguel, Miguel Fernando Gajardo Quijada, Juan Carlos Vergara Gutiérrez, Raúl Boris Méndez Santos, Raúl Hernán Escobar Díaz, and Rafael Ricardo Ortega Gutiérrez were sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison as accomplices to the crimes. In the case, the acquittal of agents Zinaida Lena Vicencio González, Jorge Raimundo Ahumada Molina, and Eduardo Martín Chávez Baeza was decreed, as their participation in this event was not proven. Another individual indicted in this case, former PDI agent Jorge Arnaldo Barraza Riveros, passed away during the course of the process; meanwhile, the indicted former Carabineros officer Miguel Ángel Patricio Soto Duarte remains a fugitive. This "fake shootout" was carried out by the CNI on the same day and immediately following the execution of three other MIR militants on Fuenteovejuna Street, in a criminal act also orchestrated as a fake shootout. Judicially, both events are processed as separate episodes, in circumstances where it was a single repressive operation. In the investigation of the repressive act, it was demonstrated that the dictatorship's repressive agency developed a tracking and surveillance operation during the months prior on a group of MIR members who were acting in clandestinity in the resistance struggle against the tyrant regime. With the data obtained from that prior observation, the CNI orchestrated the extermination operation that meant the detention of a dozen people, the attack and murder of the three residents of the house on Fuenteovejuna Street, in the Las Condes commune, and then the attack and murder of two other militants in the house on Janequeo Street in the Quinta Normal commune. On September 7, 1983, dozens of agents from the CNI, the SIFA, the Investigative Police, and other repressive agencies went to the residence located at Janequeo Street No. 5707, Quinta Normal commune, which had been under surveillance for several weeks, proceeding to surround and cordon off the place, and then, through the use of a base of fire and other weaponry, to fire without any provocation and with great firepower against the property, as a result of which Hugo Ratier Noguera, 39 years old, died from various gunshot wounds in the backyard of the house. Additionally, upon arriving at the same residence where he lived, Alejandro Salgado Troquián, 30 years old, was gunned down by multiple gunshot wounds and executed on the public thoroughfare, that is, on Janequeo Street in front of number 5946. A minor, an adopted son of Salgado and a resident of the house along with Salgado and Ratier, was a victim and witness to the events but managed to flee to neighboring houses in the middle of the shooting, thus saving his life and later denouncing the criminal attack.

Source: resumen.cl, November 18, 2021

Supreme Court convicts seven CNI agents for qualified homicide in Recoleta

In a unanimous ruling, the Second Chamber sentenced Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, Jorge Jofré Rojas, Víctor Ruiz Godoy, José Salas Fuentes, and Carlos Palma López to 10 years and one day in prison as perpetrators of the crime.

The Supreme Court accepted a cassation motion on the form and, in a replacement sentence, convicted seven agents of the defunct National Intelligence Center (CNI) for their responsibility in the crime of qualified homicide of Juan Antonio Díaz Cliff.

The illicit act was perpetrated on April 18, 1986, in the Recoleta commune. In a unanimous ruling (case file 13.364-2019), the Second Chamber of the high court—composed of ministers Manuel Antonio Valderrama, Leopoldo Llanos, Roberto Contreras, and ad-hoc lawyers María Cristina Gajardo and Carolina Coppo—established an error of law in the appealed sentence, issued by the Santiago Court of Appeals, by accepting the mitigating circumstance of the irreproachable prior conduct of the convicted individuals.

The high court confirmed the appealed sentence, with the declaration that agents Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla, Jorge Enrique Jofré Rojas, Víctor Eulogio Ruiz Godoy, José Guillermo Salas Fuentes, and Carlos Palma López are sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison as perpetrators of the crime.

Meanwhile, Eduardo Avelino Fuenzalida Pérez and Ema Ceballos Núñez must serve 5 years and one day in prison for their responsibility as accomplices. “It has been understood that the ground for nullity under examination occurs when the vice consists of the lack of considerations of fact or law, a situation that occurs, in the same way, when those considerations are contradictory or destroy each other, a situation that is noted from the study of the background,” the ruling maintains.

The resolution adds: “Indeed, the first-instance sentence, in its 31st motive, after recognizing the mitigating circumstance of irreproachable prior conduct for all the accused, states ‘without qualification for lack of merit,’ while the appellate ruling, which reproduces that of the a quo without eliminating or modifying said statement, in its 13th basis expresses the following: ‘Having said the above, it is not possible to ignore that the accused Jofré Rojas, Ruiz Godoy, Salas Fuentes, and Palma López were Army non-commissioned officers, while Ema Ceballos Núñez was an administrative officer of the Navy with the rank of 2nd seaman, who were assigned to perform duties—when none of them were over 30 years old—at the National Intelligence Center, an organization in which their hierarchy was that of subordinates whose capacity for resistance or disobedience was reduced. Dealing with a repressive organ that systematically engaged in the perpetration of crimes, where the individuals identified above had few possibilities to reject their commission or to abstain from acting wrongly, there are reasons to suppose that the execution of this illicit act was favored by extraordinary circumstances that altered the capacity for self-determination and, therefore, it is feasible to weigh the mitigating circumstance of irreproachable conduct that favors them as highly qualified.’” For the Supreme Court: “(…) by reproducing in the analysis the 31st motive of the first-instance ruling, it becomes part of it, which means that the same resolution affirms on one hand that there is no merit to accept the qualification of the minor mitigating circumstance of irreproachable prior conduct and, on the other, that there is, providing reasons to support it, an antinomy that ultimately deprives this part of the ruling of foundation, preventing any citizen, and especially the relatives of the victim in question, from understanding the reason why the sentencers accept the requested qualification and apply the consequent punitive reduction.” “It is manifest, then, that the questioned sentence contains antagonistic motivations that cannot coexist, which leads to the annulment of those reasonings, leaving the ruling, regarding the qualification of the minor mitigating circumstance of Article 11 No. 6 of the Penal Code and the reduction of one degree of the penalty for the accused, devoid of the foundation required in Article 500 No. 4 and 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, with which the formal cassation vice provided for in No. 9 of Article 541 of the aforementioned legal body is configured, a vice that, furthermore, has had a substantial influence on the dispositive part of the ruling, since had it not been committed, the penalty could not have been reduced by one degree as only one mitigating circumstance concurred in favor of all the accused, which is why the appeal will be accepted,” it concludes. Therefore, it is resolved in the replacement sentence that: “the appealed sentence of March 21, 2018, is confirmed, with the following declarations: I.- That Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, Jorge Jofré Rojas, Víctor Ruiz Godoy, José Salas Fuentes, and Carlos Palma López are sentenced to the penalty of ten years and one day of major imprisonment in its medium degree and to the accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification for public offices and political rights and absolute disqualification for professional titles while the sentence lasts, and to the payment of the costs of the case, as perpetrators of the crime of qualified homicide of Juan Antonio Díaz Cliff, committed on April 18, 1986, provided for and sanctioned in Article 391 No. 1, first and fifth circumstances of the Penal Code. II.- That Eduardo Fuenzalida Pérez and Ema Ceballos Núñez are sentenced to the penalty of five years and one day of major imprisonment in its minimum degree and to the accessory penalties of absolute perpetual disqualification for public offices and political rights and absolute disqualification for professional titles while the sentence lasts, and to the payment of the costs of the case, as accomplices to the aforementioned crime. III.- That given the quantum of the corporal penalties imposed, all the convicted individuals must serve them effectively, with the times they remained deprived of liberty and which have been recognized in the first-instance ruling serving as credit.” In the first-instance resolution, visiting Minister Mario Carroza established that: “On April 18, 1986, two teams of the Blue Brigade of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), then under the command of agent Krantz Bauer, one of them led by Jorge Jofré Rojas and the other by José Salas Fuentes, after tracking and surveillance in the Recoleta sector, decided to intercept a passerby who was walking along Gabriel Palma Street in that commune—Juan Antonio Díaz Cliff, a MIR militant—who at that moment was walking toward his home. In the operation, two of the agents from one of these teams, with the cover of two agents from the other team, got out of the vehicles that were transporting them and upon seeing Díaz Cliff, drew firearms and fired at his body, hitting him five times; one of the projectiles perforated his right lung, causing severe anemia that finally caused his death.”

Source: pjud.cl, October 25, 2021

Supreme Court confirms convictions of 22 CNI agents for crimes in fake shootout in Quinta Normal in September 1983

The Supreme Court confirmed the convictions against 22 agents of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) for their responsibility in the crimes of qualified homicide of Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) militants Hugo Ratier Noguera and Alejandro Salgado Troquián.

The crimes were perpetrated on September 7, 1983, in a fake shootout on Janequeo Street in the commune of Quinta Normal, in Santiago. In a unanimous ruling, the Second Chamber of the high court (case file 10.047-2022)—composed of ministers Manuel Antonio Valderrama, Leopoldo Llanos Sagristá, Jean Pierre Matus, and ad-hoc lawyers Gonzalo Ruz L. and Leonor Etcheberry C.—ruled out an error of law in the sentence and rejected the cassation motions on the form and on the merits filed by almost all of the convicted individuals against the ruling of the Santiago Court of Appeals, issued in November 2021, which in turn confirmed with some changes the first-instance ruling issued in July 2019 by Minister Miguel Vásquez Plaza. In the resolution, the Second Chamber confirms the convictions applied to former Army officers and former CNI leaders Roberto Urbano Schmied Zanzi, Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla, and Aquiles Mauricio González Cortés, who are sentenced to 17 years in prison as co-perpetrators of the crime. The first of the convicted, Schmied Zanzi, served as head of the CNI's Metropolitan Division; Corbalán Castilla was head of the Anti-Subversive Division, and Aquiles González acted as head of the Blue Brigade, specialized in the repression of the MIR. Meanwhile, former Army officers and CNI operatives Sergio María Canals Baldwin, Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ros, Fernando Rafael Mauricio Rojas Tapia, Norman Antonio Jeldes Aguilar, and former agents José Abel Aravena Ruiz, José Guillermo Salas Fuentes, Egon Antonio Barra Barra, Jorge Octavio Vargas Bories, and José Isaías Vidal Veloso must serve 15 years and one day in prison as perpetrators of the crimes. For their part, former agents Rodolfo Enrique Olguín González, Ema Verónica Ceballos Núñez, Luis Hernán Gálvez Navarro, Rosa Humilde Ramos Hernández, Francisco Javier Orellana Seguel, Miguel Fernando Gajardo Quijada, Juan Carlos Vergara Gutiérrez, Raúl Boris Méndez Santos, Raúl Hernán Escobar Díaz, and Rafael Ricardo Ortega Gutiérrez were sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison as accomplices to the crimes. Agent Manuel Ángel Morales Acevedo, also convicted in previous instances, passed away during the course of the process. Fake shootout On September 7, 1983, dozens of agents from the CNI, the SIFA, the Investigative Police, and other repressive agencies went to the residence located at Janequeo Street No. 5707, Quinta Normal commune, which had been under surveillance for several weeks, proceeding to surround and cordon off the place, and then, through the use of a base of fire and other weaponry, to fire without any provocation and with great firepower against the property, as a result of which Hugo Ratier Noguera died from various gunshot wounds in the backyard of the house. Simultaneously, upon arriving at the neighborhood and the same residence where he lived, militant Alejandro Salgado Troquián was gunned down by multiple gunshot wounds and executed on the public thoroughfare, that is, on Janequeo Street in front of number 5946, two blocks from the attacked house. Hugo Norberto Ratier Noguera, 39 years old, was of Argentine nationality, originally from Misiones, and had resided in Chile since 1970. He was a leader of the MIR and remained active in clandestinity. He was married and a father of three children; shortly before these events, his wife and children had left the country for security reasons. Alejandro Salgado Troquián, 30 years old, a veterinarian by profession, also a MIR militant, was married and a substitute father to his partner's children. A minor, an adopted son of Salgado and a resident of the house along with Salgado and Ratier, was a victim and witness to the events but managed to flee to neighboring houses in the middle of the shooting, thus saving his life and later denouncing the criminal attack. This fake shootout was carried out by the CNI on the same day and immediately following the execution of three other MIR militants on Fuenteovejuna Street, in the Las Condes commune, in a criminal act also orchestrated as a fake shootout where Arturo Vilavella Araujo, Lucía Orfilia Vergara Valenzuela, and Sergio Peña Díaz were murdered. The three had returned clandestinely to Chile to join the struggle against the dictatorship. Judicially, both events are processed as separate episodes, in circumstances where it was a single repressive operation. In the investigation of the repressive act, it was demonstrated that the dictatorship's repressive agency developed a tracking and surveillance operation during the months prior on a group of MIR members who were acting in clandestinity in the resistance struggle against the tyrant regime. With the data obtained from that prior observation, the CNI orchestrated the extermination operation that meant the detention of a dozen people, the attack and murder of the three residents of the house on Fuente Ovejuna, and then the attack and murder of two other militants in the house on Janequeo Street in the Quinta Normal commune. by Darío Núñez

Source: resumen.cl, January 27, 2024

Supreme Court convicts CNI agents for murder of professor executed in fake operation

In a unanimous ruling, the Second Chamber of the high court confirmed the sentence that convicted nine agents of the dissolved National Intelligence Center (CNI) for their responsibility in the consummated crime of qualified homicide of professor Alan Williams Rodríguez Pacheco.

The illicit act was committed in the Maipú commune in January 1985. The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence that convicted nine agents of the dissolved National Intelligence Center (CNI) for their responsibility in the consummated crime of qualified homicide of professor Alan Williams Rodríguez Pacheco.

The illicit act was committed in the Maipú commune in January 1985. In a unanimous ruling (case file 10.237-2022), the Second Chamber of the high court—composed of ministers Manuel Antonio Valderrama, Leopoldo Llanos, Jean Pierre Matus, minister María Cristina Gajardo, and ad-hoc lawyer Eduardo Gandulfo—rejected the cassation motions on the merits filed against the sentence that convicted Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla and Aquiles Mauricio González Cortés to 15 years of effective imprisonment as perpetrators of the crime.

Meanwhile, former repressive agents Rodolfo Enrique Olguín González, Víctor Eulogio Ruiz Godoy, José Guillermo Sala Fuentes, Juan Alejandro Jorquera Abarzúa, Sylvia Teresa Oyarce Pinto, and Claudio Segundo Sanhueza Sanhueza must serve 10 years and one day in prison as co-perpetrators.

Likewise, the penalty imposed on the appellant Eduardo Avelino Fuenzalida Pérez of 5 years and one day of effective imprisonment is maintained. “In successive pronouncements, this Court has declared the reasons regarding the impropriety associated with the isolated interposition of the ground indicated in numeral 7 of Article 546 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, in which an infringement of the law regulating evidence is denounced,” the ruling states. “In this case, it has been maintained that if it is argued in isolation and is not linked to another of the grounds for invalidation provided for in Article 546 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, it must be dismissed,” it adds. “Indeed,” it continues, “if the intention is to alter the factual substrate of the challenged ruling, it is necessary that another of the grounds for nullity that said precept enshrines be raised jointly, since the mere mutation of the facts does not allow this court of cassation to make use of its invalidating powers and determine, ex officio, which of those other grounds—taxatively indicated in the procedural statute of the branch—that denote an erroneous application of the law corresponds to make concurrent, in such a way that the appeal contains a defect that entails its rejection.” The resolution adds: “Likewise, it is necessary to reaffirm the position that jurisprudence traditionally maintains in matters of criminal cassation, in particular regarding the ground invoked by the appellant. Indeed, the protest raised is that contained in numeral 7 of Article 546 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which refers to the violation of the laws regulating evidence, which must have a substantial influence on the dispositive part of the sentence.” “In particular, the appellant questions the assessment executed by the judges, pointing out that it violates the laws regulating evidence and would not allow reaching the convicting conclusion arrived at. However, beyond this statement and the reproduction of the observed aspects, nowhere in her plea does she adequately develop the way in which said assessment norms were affected. Moreover, the writer merely asserts the infringement, building her claim on statements as general as those she observes in the ruling and which, in reality, seek for this Court to perform an exercise forbidden in this venue, which is a new assessment of the evidentiary means that, moreover, were duly appraised by the instance sentencers,” the resolution affirms. “In this sense,” it delves, “it is not superfluous to mention that the instance judges are sovereign regarding the establishment of the facts and, therefore, the Supreme Court is denied their review and is obliged to accept them, provided there is no clear and flagrant violation of any law regulating evidence that, as the ground for cassation provides, substantially influences the dispositive part of the sentence. In that understanding, it was held at the time that ‘it is up to the instance judges to establish the facts and for this purpose they have the private and sovereign power to assess the intrinsic merit of the various legal means of evidence accumulated in the case, without the exercise of this power to weigh and compare those same elements of the process discretionally and subjectively being subject to the censure of the court of cassation, nor can it fall within the scope in which the ground of No. 7 of Article 546 of the Code of Criminal Procedure operates, since the laws regulating evidence, whose infringement gives basis to the appeal of cassation on the merits, are only those that establish prohibitions or limitations to the aforementioned power, as would be the admission in the grounds of the ruling of background information foreign to the means of evidence recognized as such by Article 457 of the Code of Criminal Procedure’ (Rev. D. y J. T. LI, Second Part, Fourth Section, P. 56, cited in the work Tratado de Derecho Procesal Penal. T. II, P. 393 and 394, by the author Rafael Fontecilla Riquelme). In the same sense, it was resolved that, ‘the appreciation of the laws regulating evidence to which No. 7 of Article 546 of the Code of Criminal Procedure alludes, implies the violation of a legal norm related to evidence, but not to the appreciation of the facts, which the law always places, sovereignly, in the instance judges’ (Rev. D. y J. T. LI, Second Part, Fourth Section, P. 89, cited by the aforementioned author).” For the high court: “As can be seen, there is already an established interpretation regarding the invariability of the facts pointed out by the instance sentencers, who have the power to assess the evidence to determine them, and that scope escapes the reviewing action of the Supreme Court, unless the judges violate in a serious manner the norms regulating evidence and this has an influence on the dispositive part of the ruling—which is not the case here—, which must be described with clarity, being entirely insufficient an enumeration of the legal norms that are denounced as violated or the partialized description of certain evidentiary elements that, moreover, were duly appraised regarding the analysis performed by the instance sentencers in the exercise of their own attributions, an idea that predominates since the Draft Code of Criminal Procedure for the Republic of Chile and which is revealed in the words of Mr. Manuel Egidio Ballesteros, who expressed: ‘we set general rules for the way of estimating evidence, and we record the cases in which it should be considered sufficient to prove the existence of a fact, but at the same time we leave the judge the freedom of criteria to make his inductions or deductions’.” “With what has been said, it is possible to conclude that the appeal seeks the execution of a task that has already been performed, providing legal reasons to adopt the decision that is now questioned, but which, in concrete terms, is based on an exercise private to the judges and in which the vices attributed to them are not observed, thus the appeal presented must be discarded,” it highlights. Likewise, the ruling records: “That on behalf of the representative of the convicted Sylvia Oyarce Pinto, an appeal for invalidation on the merits is presented, which is based on numerals 1 and 7 of Article 546 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, denouncing the infringement of Article 15 No. 3 of the Penal Code, in relation to No. 1 of Article 488 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a matter that would occur by changing the participation attributed to the accused, who went from being an accomplice to a perpetrator, without, in her concept, there being evidence that allows proving the requirements associated with prior concert, nor the facilitation of the means for its execution, nor the fact of witnessing it without taking immediate part in it, in such a way that she understands that she never executed actions proper to co-perpetration, estimating that, in passing, Article 488 No. 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure is infringed.” “Consequently, she requests to invalidate said ruling and issue a new sentence in accordance with the law and the merit of the process, which declares that there is no element in these files that allows maintaining that Sylvia Oyarce Pinto did something in such a way that criminal reproach can be formed against her, in the terms of Article 15 No. 3 of the Penal Code,” it concludes. Therefore, it is resolved that: “the cassation motions on the merits filed by the respective representatives of the convicted Aquiles Mauricio González Cortés, Eduardo Avelino Fuenzalida Pérez, José Guillermo Salas Fuentes, Rodolfo Enrique Olguín González, Víctor Eulogio Ruiz Godoy, Juan Alejandro Jorquera Abarzúa, Sylvia Teresa Oyarce Pinto, and Claudio Segundo Sanhueza Sanhueza, directed against the final sentence dated December 31, 2021, pronounced by the Ninth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals, are REJECTED, and it is not null.” Planned attack The first-instance sentence, issued by the visiting minister for human rights violation cases of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Mario Carroza Espinosa, established the following facts: “1.- That the National Intelligence Center, CNI, was created on August 13, 1977, through Decree Law No. 1878, whose norm established its structure, with powers and faculties similar to those of its predecessor, the DINA, imposing a dependence on the Ministry of the Interior, compliant with its function of gathering and processing all national information coming from diverse fields of action that the ‘... Supreme Government requires for the formulation of plans and programs, and the adoption of measures necessary for the safeguarding of national security, the development of national activities, and the maintenance of institutionality.’ The organization had a military nature and counted on both personnel from the armed forces and civilian personnel for the performance of its functions, being endowed with its own means, detention centers, etc., all under the charge of a general director, who exercised national command and to whom all its members were subordinate. In the Metropolitan Region, there was the Anti-Subversive Division based at the Borgoño Barracks, and within it, among others, was the Blue Brigade, which had as its objective, at the date of the occurrence of the events, the investigation and repression of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left. The Brigades were organized at the top around a commanding officer, who established the guidelines, objectives, and priorities of the work. At this middle level of structure, as in every hierarchical organization, contact and information channels were maintained with their superiors in the case reviewed, to whom work was reported and from whom guidelines were received. The operations of the brigades were developed by groups or work teams, composed of members of the Army, Carabineros, and the Chilean Investigative Police, who followed the orders issued by the heads of the Brigades; 2.- That such being the case, Alan Williams Rodríguez Pacheco, 28 years old, a militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, MIR, on January 3, 1985, lived together with his partner Emilia Rosa López Cifuentes, who was pregnant, in the house at Victoria Street No. 2304 in the Maipú commune. He performed private English classes and typing work at his home, while she performed administrative functions at the VECTOR Center for Social and Economic Studies. On the mentioned day and after having said goodbye to his wife at the door of the house, he returned and remained inside until about 10:30 hours, at which moment the property was attacked by security agents of the National Intelligence Center, CNI, who for several months had been tracking him, which allowed them to detect his location and detail his routines. The attack on the property lasted incessantly for about half an hour, and as a consequence of it, Rodríguez Pacheco died from cervicothoracic trauma due to a gunshot wound, and his body was charred as a consequence of the fire generated by the use of war weaponry; 3.- That the official information delivered on that occasion to the press media by the security agency and that recorded in the statements given by the agents in the investigation substantiated in the Military Prosecutor's Office, the operation would have been developed with the purpose of arresting a subject linked to subversive activities, but when they tried to fulfill the task, they were received with bursts from inside the property, and they had to repel the attack; 4.- That the proceedings carried out and the information accumulated during the development of this investigation allow maintaining that the official version was only a disguise of what really happened, since there was from the beginning a conscientious preparation of the operation, with permanent tracking and surveillance of Alan Rodríguez Pacheco, then his location and routine were established in advance, since they waited for the departure of his wife from the property, which allowed for the preparation of the place and the base of fire. This detailed gestation is not typical of an arrest, but of an action that sought his death as a result; for the same reason, the decision to operate on the property on Victoria Street in the Maipú commune had been taken previously by the operational heads and communicated through the respective channels to the institution's directorate, which approved it and issued the pertinent order.”

Source: pjud.cl, December 11, 2024