Sergio Eduardo José Cienfuegos Cavieres, single, university student, and member of the Communist Party, was detained on January 7, 1974, at approximately 11:45 a.m. by Carabineros officers in civilian clothing at his workplace, the Enrollment Division of the Office of Student Selection and Admission of the Universidad de Chile, located at 1330 Valentín Letelier Street.

Two of the agents entered the premises and went directly to the victim, stating that they were arresting him "by superior orders." They also interviewed the victim's supervisor, Hugo Sáez, to whom they showed their credentials before proceeding to search Sergio Cienfuegos's desk, demanding information regarding his work duties and the type of information he handled concerning students.

The police indicated that they would take him in transit to the 1st Carabineros Precinct, and that they did not know his final destination. At approximately 12:20 p.m., he was taken from the office and placed into a yellow double-cab pickup truck, where another civilian who had been waiting at the office entrance joined them, and they drove away from the scene.

Ten minutes later, Hugo Sáez called the 1st Precinct, where he was told that the detainee had been there for a brief moment and had already been transferred elsewhere. Before leaving, the agents had made a phone call, after which the vehicle arrived to pick them up.

At the time of his detention, other officials were also present, including the Head of the Technical Division, Fernando Aranda, and Nancy González Cavada, who was the victim's girlfriend.

Nancy González went immediately to the 1st Precinct, where she was only informed that the personnel who had detained the victim were on duty for the "military forces."

Days later, on January 12, an anonymous phone call was received stating that Sergio Cienfuegos was at Tejas Verdes, in the custody of the S.I.M., and that his captors belonged to the DINA.

On February 19, 1974, these facts were reported to the Military Judge of Santiago, General Sergio Arellano Stark, who noted in his own handwriting that the victim had been detained on January 7, 1974, that he had been investigated, and that no charges had been proven against him, for which reason he was released on January 11 of the same year. He signed and stamped the document.

Commander Correa of SENDET also verbally acknowledged his detention to his relatives, indicating that there was an arrest warrant, but he did not specify the place where he remained detained.

However, Sergio Cienfuegos Cavieres remains forcibly disappeared to this day.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On January 17, 1974, his sister, Patricia Cienfuegos, filed a writ of amparo with the Santiago Court of Appeals, case file 43 74.

The head of the Estadio Chile Prisoner Camp reported that he did not appear in their records. SENDET responded the same.

Investigaciones and the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) also responded negatively regarding his detention by their services.

The Ministry of the Interior replied to the Court two months later, stating that there was no order against him.

Following General Arellano's response to the family and the information given to his girlfriend by Commander Correa of SENDET—that the victim was detained by virtue of an arrest warrant issued against him—official letters were reiterated to the Ministry of the Interior.

This response took eight months, only to state that there were no records of the person for whom the amparo was filed. Colonel Correa, for his part, stated that he had not provided any information to the Cienfuegos family.

Meanwhile, the Army Intelligence Directorate also responded negatively regarding his detention.

On December 6, 1974, almost a year after it was filed, the appeal was rejected by the Court.

In January 1974, a complaint for kidnapping was filed with the 2nd Criminal Court of Santiago, which initiated case file 81691 3.

The victim's coworkers who witnessed his detention, as well as his girlfriend and sister, testified before the Tribunal.

Three months after an investigation order was issued, it was reported by Investigaciones that his arrest was not registered in the Intelligence Services of the Carabineros, the Army, or the FACH, nor in SENDET.

The Commander of Tejas Verdes also responded that no arrest warrant had been issued against him by that Military Prosecutor's Office. With this information, the summary was closed on August 5, 1974, and a temporary dismissal of the case was ordered, as the crime had not been proven.

However, the Court of Appeals revoked this resolution and ordered new proceedings, including verifying the note made by General Sergio Arellano on the document that had been submitted, which was then delivered to the Tribunal.

It was not until December 30 of that year that an official letter was sent to the officer, enclosing the document in question. The General took nine months to respond, saying that he could not provide information because the document had apparently been lost, as it had not reached him.

Given this, the Postal and Telegraph Service was ordered to report on the destination of this letter, but nothing could be resolved through this channel.

The family provided the Tribunal with a copy of this document, and in April 1976, General Arellano was summoned to recognize his handwriting and signature, which he did four months later on August 3, 1976, ratifying both the handwriting, the signature, and the stamp.

However, even though this recognition confirmed the official information regarding the victim's detention, the General added that he could not specify where the information he had recorded there had come from, as at that time he made periodic inquiries to all intelligence services, the Carabineros, and Investigaciones.

Despite this evidence, the Military Judge reported that there was no record of any case against Cienfuegos Cavieres. The directors of the intelligence services of the FACH, the Army, and the Carabineros reiterated the same.

On March 19, 1977, the summary was closed again and a temporary dismissal was ordered, as the crime had not been proven. This time, the resolution was approved by the Santiago Court of Appeals on August 23, 1977, even though the Court's Prosecutor was of the opinion that the Judge should declare himself incompetent and remit the records to the Military Justice system to resolve the dismissal.

On May 30, 1974, the aide to General Pinochet, Army Major Luis Patricio Serré Ochsenius, sent a letter to the victim's mother, Mrs. Rosa Cavieres, widow of Cienfuegos, informing her that the Inspector in charge of the proceedings at the Ministry of Defense had established that her son had been detained on January 7, 1974, and released on the 11th of the same month, as no charges were proven against him, but that he was not registered in the lists of detainees that existed there, nor in those of SENDET.

Major Serré added that in the 5th Judicial Precinct (of Investigaciones), there was an arrest warrant against him that did not indicate a crime in case 9?74 of the 1st Military Prosecutor's Office. However, when consulted, the Technical Advisory and the Information Department of Investigaciones stated that the victim had no police or political records.

This long response from Major Serré to Sergio Cienfuegos's mother regarding her son's background provided much more information than what had been granted in three years by the same authorities to the Tribunal investigating his kidnapping.

Furthermore, all responses sent were negative regarding the existence of any order affecting Cavieres, including that of the 2nd Military Court, the Tribunal upon which the 1st Prosecutor's Office depends, which, according to Major Serré, had issued an arrest warrant against him.

Source: Corporation report

Posthumous and symbolic degrees at the U. de Chile: a process that is just beginning

An interdisciplinary committee led by the Vice-Rectorate of Extension and Communications has developed an investigation process that, this April 11, will allow for the posthumous and symbolic recognition of U. de Chile students who were victims of political executions or who became forcibly disappeared, in what will be the first recognition ceremony.

On September 11 of this year, new names resulting from the investigation will be honored, and the process will continue until all students who were victims of political violence during the civil-military dictatorship are recognized.

In 1974, Luis Alberto Guendelman Wisniak was conducting his thesis research together with his classmate Valeria Vásquez Valdivia. At the beginning of 1976, only Valeria Vásquez appeared to take the exam.

Her thesis advisor, Miguel Villa, had to explain to the Examining Committee that two people were supposed to appear for that instance; however, the student Luis Alberto Guendelman had been missing for more than a year.

Guendelman's case was one of many that returned to the memory of the U. de Chile on September 11, 2017, with the announcement of the decree that, for the first time in the history of the University, allows for the awarding of posthumous and symbolic degrees and posthumous and symbolic academic titles to students who were victims of political executions and those who became forcibly disappeared during the civil-military dictatorship.

This April 11, the first presentation of these distinctions will take place, a ceremony that will materialize an exhaustive and rigorous effort developed by the interdisciplinary committee led by the Vice-Rectorate of Extension and Communications (Vexcom).

This team, composed of the Andrés Bello Central Archive and the Human Rights Chair of Vexcom, the Legal Directorate, and the Undergraduate Department of the Vice-Rectorate of Academic Affairs, has spent months dedicated to a crucial and delicate process, for which an ad hoc methodology was designed.

“This starts with the realization that the University did not have a formal record of who these students were. In that sense, it has been a very careful and methodical job, since it is a delicate subject and one for which we did not know we lacked the data,” noted the director of the Andrés Bello Central Archive, Alejandra Araya.

The committee's first step was the tracking and construction of this registry. “Legally official documents of the forcibly disappeared and political executions, such as the Rettig Report, were reviewed, and all those students of our University who appear with ‘conviction’ in the archives were identified,” Araya explained.

With that registry and for legal compliance, the Committee had to methodically establish what the steps would be to validate the student status of the individuals identified in the Truth and Reconciliation Report. “We had to find the documentation from the U. de Chile, validated by the University, that would accredit that status.

Fortunately, the Undergraduate Directorate had these archives,” Araya detailed.

The documents where the University accredits the enrollment of those who studied at the University between September 11, 1973, and March 10, 1990, were safeguarded by officials of the time. Thanks to that action, the other stage of the Committee's work has been to corroborate the student registry with this list of enrollments from the Undergraduate Department of the Vice-Rectorate of Academic Affairs (VAA).

"The process that fulfills the reparatory commitment of granting posthumous titles and degrees to our students who were victims of the dictatorship has been addressed as a community and is backed by the values and academic rigor that distinguish the Universidad de Chile.

It has been a noble task that also commits us to the future to train people who build a country incapable of the violence that we are trying to repair today through this symbolic act," affirmed the Vice-Rector of Academic Affairs, Rosa Devés.

“We made everything we have here available, of course, as it is institutional, but also out of a need to collaborate in an instance as relevant as this one. The Department has safeguarded and stored an enormous amount of historical documentation regarding the students the University has had, including the regional branches from when it had a national character.

We have rosters of students and study plans from that era. Information that is super valuable because it allows us to reconstruct history along with sufficient evidence to grant the corresponding recognition in a safe and reliable way for the people who were students and today are forcibly disappeared,” noted the director of the Undergraduate Department, Leonor Armanet.

A key part of this process has been the different validations that legally and administratively allow for the materialization of the distinctions. One of them is the one carried out by the Legal Directorate, which took on the task of elaborating and proposing the legally viable mechanism to establish and allow for the granting of these distinctions to former students—University Decree No. 0030766, of 2017, signed by the Rector—and has also had to work on the first resolution that allows for the granting of "Posthumous and Symbolic Titles" and "Posthumous and Symbolic Academic Degrees."

“It was of utmost relevance to understand that the University is a public body, and as such, it must adjust its actions strictly to the administrative legal framework that governs it, an element that allowed us to find the appropriate way to grant this recognition, which in previous eras was not granted to the relatives of those who were victims of political executions or who were forcibly disappeared,” noted Juan Carlos Gimeno, a lawyer for the Legal Directorate of the U. de Chile.

The committee is currently working to address cases of greater complexity for which there is no complete information. “Other cases are appearing due to information provided by organizations and relatives.

For example, regarding people who were students of the U. de Chile but for whom the Rettig Report only says ‘student’,” he noted, adding that “when we cannot corroborate that data with either the Report or the University's archives, it is the families who can help make that identification by providing documents that are legally recognized.” The commitment, in these cases, is to make an effort to validate different elements, such as an ID card, a transcript, an administrative summary, or any document that accredits the status of these students, so that all those who were part of the University community receive the diploma that corresponds to them.

In order to help the committee's task, during this time they have also worked with the support of an advisory commission, formed by the Association of Relatives of Political Executed Persons (AFEP), the Association of Relatives of the Forcibly Disappeared, and the Human Rights Program of the Undersecretariat of Human Rights.

“What I want to insist on is that this has a methodology, where legal, administrative, and historical criteria are being crossed. And that is allowing us to have an archive or rather a documentation fund about victims of political violence at the University. We are starting, and now we are addressing what refers to the students,” Araya warned.

“This measure has been a necessary recognition that advances justice for victims of human rights violations and honors those who, having been part of our university community, lost their lives at the hands of agents of the civil-military dictatorship that governed our country, whatever the circumstances may have been,” affirmed Gimeno.

For this reason, this ceremony is only the first delivery of a process that remains open and will function permanently for the U. de Chile. From April 11, the interdisciplinary Committee will continue its work with those more complicated cases, and the next date for the delivery of distinctions is already set for September 11 of the current year.

The Enrollment Division and the reconstruction of memory

Sergio Eduardo José CIENFUEGOS CAVIERES was studying to become a Statistics Technician at the U. de Chile and worked in the Enrollment Division of the Office of Student Selection and Admission of the University. On January 7, 1974, at approximately 11:45 a.m., he was detained in his office by Carabineros officers who cited “superior orders.”

According to coworkers from that time, Cienfuegos was a key part of those who worked on the construction of the centralized enrollment lists of the University, which at that time had a national character.

Those documents and that work, initiated at the beginning of the ‘70s, have been key to the current process that investigates the names of the students who will receive posthumous and symbolic titles.

These archives, which continued to be built and safeguarded over the years, are the only preserved documents that accredit the enrollment of those who studied at the University between September 11, 1973, and March 10, 1990.

Sergio Cienfuegos Cavieres remains forcibly disappeared to this day. According to the information reconstructed in Memoria Viva, the student was taken from his office at 12:20 p.m. on that January 7.

Thanks to Cienfuegos's work, the memory of the U. de Chile is being reconstructed. Today, his effort is part of the investigation and validation carried out by the Committee in the process of posthumous and symbolic titles, where his name also appears as deserving of this distinction.

Source: medicina.uchile.cl 4/4/2018

Date: 04-04-2018

U. de Chile inaugurated a memorial that remembers the disappeared and executed of the North Campus

A sculpture and a plaque located at the Central SEMDA are the testimony of the students, academics, and staff of the health programs who were executed or made to disappear for political reasons during the civil-military dictatorship, led by Augusto Pinochet starting in 1973.

With the presence of relatives, friends, representatives of professional associations, authorities, and members of the university community, this Thursday, December 21, the memorial that remembers all the people linked to the North Campus of the University who are currently disappeared or were murdered by the dictatorship was inaugurated.

In total, there are twenty-eight people, including students, academics, and staff of the health units who lost their lives due to the actions of State agencies between 1973 and 1990, starting with Salvador Allende himself, who died at the La Moneda Palace during the coup d'état of September 11.

The memorial site consists of a sculpture made by the artist Miguel Lecaros, as well as a plaque with the names of the victims, which was made possible thanks to a joint effort between the School of Public Health of the Faculty of Medicine, the Vice-Rectorate of Student and Community Affairs, the Human Rights and Public Health Days collective, the Center for Mental Health and Human Rights, and the Projects, Memorials, and Institutional Management Area of the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of Justice.

The ceremony, which was conducted by the actress Malucha Pinto and featured a performance by the singer-songwriter Elizabeth Morris, began with the words that President Michelle Bachelet sent for the occasion. In them, she highlighted the tribute to the victims of our institution:

“I am honored to know that the Universidad de Chile, their House of Studies, their refuge, their home, today honors their memory with this work and, through it, also honors the persistence and courage of their relatives, their friends, and classmates, because it is thanks to all of them that our executed and disappeared have never died, because they live as an example in the memory of each one of us who recognize in their life stories, testimonies of convictions and tenacity.”

Then, on behalf of the Undersecretary of Human Rights, Lorena Fríes, María Soledad Silva, coordinator of the Projects and Memorials Area, read a greeting in which the memorial was highlighted within the framework of promoting a society in which dialogue and peace prevail: “Projects like these contribute to integrating civil society and new generations, creating awareness about the importance that human rights have for each person and society as a whole.”

Also present at the activity were the Vice-Rector of Student and Community Affairs, Juan Cortés; the Vice-Rector of Research and Development, Flavio Salazar; the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Manuel Kukuljan; the Director of the School of Public Health, Patricia Frenz; the academic coordinator of the Human Rights Chair of the Vice-Rectorate of Extension and Communications, Claudio Nash; and the former directors of the School of Public Health, Giorgio Solimano and Óscar Arteaga, among other authorities and former authorities of our institution.

Rescuing the values of the public, truth, and justice

Rector Ennio Vivaldi spoke at the event, pointing out the need for a cultural change that prevents society from falling back into the abuses committed during the military regime, and he also highlighted everything that was lost along with the people who were victims:

“Each of these people represents the best that Chile had to offer, the transcendent values that our country had, and that we were able to know,” he indicated.

Those values, he pointed out, can be brought to the present to analyze how, for example, the educational situation is faced:

“Today we can see how distorted a concept as essential as ‘the public’ is in its sense of common good, of something that belongs to all of us and makes us feel in solidarity. It is impressive how those concepts are lost at the same time that the people who were persecuted were lost.”

Finally, on behalf of the victims' relatives, Jaime Lorca, brother of the disappeared doctor Carlos Lorca Tobar, addressed the public, highlighting the strength of those close to the victims, as well as the institutions and organizations that welcomed them, so as not to forget what happened and to raise the cause of Human Rights.

“That is how we have managed not to turn the page, and also a little bit of justice, which is still quite insufficient,” he noted.

“We do not demand truth and justice only because it is important in personal or family terms, but we do it thinking about the future, about the next generations, and about the Chile that we are building day by day, so that these events can never happen again,” concluded Lorca.

Source: uchile.cl 21/12/2017

Date: 21-12-2017