Sergio Raúl Pardo Pedemonte, married, father of two, a Marine Biology graduate from the Universidad Austral de Valdivia and a militant of the MIR, was detained on June 16, 1976, at approximately 18:00 hours by DINA agents traveling in a white FIAT 125.

The events occurred after the victim had been released by DINA agents, who had held him along with 25 to 30 other people with whom he had attempted a mass asylum at the Bulgarian Embassy (at that time under the charge of the Austrian Embassy) the previous day, June 15, 1976.

Once inside the Embassy, a Bulgarian official on duty ordered them to leave. When they refused, he called security forces to clear the diplomatic premises.

Shortly after, a contingent of Carabineros and civilians arrived and transported all the detainees to the Las Tranqueras police station. That night, they were transferred to the "4 Alamos" detention camp, where they were taken into custody by DINA agents.

They spent the entire night there. The following day, June 16, 1976, they were told they would be released. While they were receiving their belongings to leave the facility, an agent known as "el Kung Fu"—due to the Chinese-style mustache he wore—arrived; he was "an interrogator from Villa Grimaldi." The agent approached Sergio Pardo and said, "You’re the one who organized the mess at the Embassy, kid," to which Pardo did not respond.

The agent immediately insisted, "We’ll see each other again." Luis Kurt Fonseca, who was also detained at the site, witnessed these events.

Around 17:30 hours, the detainees arrived at Parque O'Higgins, guarded by the agents. There, they observed a large number of journalists. This was because the Military Junta wanted to show the Foreign Ministers "their magnanimity toward the detainees," as a regime spokesperson put it; furthermore, only one detainee remained at "4 Alamos," as OAS visitors were scheduled to inspect the facility.

The detainees were made to exit the vehicles, and they noticed agents hiding among the bushes. They were lined up, and one agent, who appeared half-drunk, began to berate them for their "unpatriotic" attitude; at the end, he threatened them to be careful because they would be recaptured and hunted from that moment on.

Finally, he forced them to leave in the midst of journalists who were photographing and filming the "release" of the detainees. Once on the street, they began to organize into groups to head to their homes; different groups departed, some by bus, others by taxi.

Sergio Pardo Pedemonte took a bus, along with other companions, at the intersection of Avda. Matta and Viel, heading east. From the bus, they could see agents following other groups in cars and on foot.

Upon reaching Avda. Matta and San Diego, Sergio got off and walked to the central median of Matta. He wanted to take another bus to go to his mother's house, when his companions who were on the bus and others traveling in a taxi saw a Fiat 125 stop beside him.

Agents got out and forcibly pulled him into the vehicle. They did the same to Guillermo Cornejo Campos. That same afternoon, they notified the victim's mother of what had happened. Both detainees remain forcibly disappeared to this day.

An eyewitness to all these circumstances was Mr. Malaquías Delgadillo Navarro, who had been detained weeks earlier by the Comando Conjunto and released, only to be subsequently hunted intensely by security agents.

According to witness accounts, the violence of the DINA operation to recapture the detainees was such that it prevented many from helping their companions; they could only manage to capture as many details as possible to denounce the events.

It should be noted that on August 8 of that same year, 1976, another person who participated in the aforementioned frustrated asylum, Mario Maureira Vásquez, was detained by the DINA; like Cornejo Campos and Pardo Pedemonte, he is currently classified as a forcibly disappeared person.

Sergio Pardo Pedemonte was married and, as his spouse notes, he had been a student leader for the MIR at the Universidad Austral, which led to him being intensely sought after since the 1973 Military Coup.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On June 18, 1976, a writ of amparo (habeas corpus) was filed before the Santiago Court of Appeals on behalf of the victim, case file No. 542-76. It was rejected on July 20, 1976, based on information provided by the Ministry of the Interior, stating that the victim was detained on July 15, 1976, and released on the 16th of the same month in the vicinity of Parque O'Higgins.

His family then filed a complaint for kidnapping before the 5th Criminal Court of Santiago on June 28, 1976, under case file No. 102.417, attaching press information from the newspaper La Tercera de la Hora dated June 17, 1976, which features a photograph of a group of people, including the victim, identified as "The frustrated asylum seekers, after being released for lack of evidence."

On July 15, 1976, the Court was informed that the victim was not being held at "3 Alamos." The Director of the DINA informed the Judge on July 19, 1976, that henceforth, official correspondence should be sent to the Ministry of the Interior and not to his agency.

That same day, the Minister of the Interior reported that the victim had been detained between July 15 and 16, 1976, at "Cuatro Alamos" and was subsequently released by virtue of Exempt Decree No. 2115.

The Intelligence Services of the FACH (Air Force) and Carabineros communicated that they had no records of the victim. Similar information was provided by the Military and Aviation Prosecutor's Offices of the Santiago jurisdiction.

On January 28, 1977, International Police notified the Court that there was no record of Sergio Pardo leaving the country.

In May 1977, following a request from the Judge of the 5th Criminal Court, the presiding judge of the 6th Criminal Court, also in Santiago, reported that case file No. 94.517 had been processed in that court, initiated on August 17, 1976, for the alleged disappearance of Sergio Pardo P. as ordered by the Court of Appeals; said case was temporarily dismissed on January 7, 1977.

This resolution was approved by the Court on March 9, 1977.

The Civil Registry Service communicated on May 13, 1977, that the victim's death was not registered.

On June 30, 1977, the summary proceedings were declared closed, and since in the judge's opinion the commission of a crime was not fully justified, the temporary dismissal of the case was decreed. The Court of Appeals approved the resolution on August 4, 1977.

Furthermore, on August 1, 1978, relatives of 70 disappeared persons, including those of Sergio Pardo Pedemonte, filed a criminal complaint before the 10th Criminal Court of Santiago for the crime of aggravated kidnapping against General (Ret.) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Army Colonel Marcelo Luis Moren Brito, and Army Lieutenant Colonel Rolf Gonzalo Wenderoth Pozo.

The identities of other agents of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), information on the agency's secret detention centers, and other data regarding its structure and resources were also provided to the Court.

Without conducting any investigative steps, on August 10 of that year, the Judge of the 10th Court declared herself incompetent and referred the records to the Military Justice system; after several appeals, in May 1979, the case was lodged with the 2nd Military Prosecutor's Office of Santiago, under case file No. 553-78.

In 1983, the Court reviewed the four volumes of the Extraordinary Visitation for cases of forcibly disappeared persons in the Metropolitan Region, conducted by Minister Servando Jordán, which contained significant information regarding the actions of the DINA and that security agency's responsibility for hundreds of forcibly disappeared persons.

Without any investigative steps being taken for four years, on November 20, 1989, Army Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Ibarra Chamorro, Military Prosecutor General, requested the application of the Amnesty Decree Law (D.L. 2.191) for this case, because the process had the exclusive purpose of investigating alleged crimes that occurred between September 11, 1973, and March 10, 1978, and because, during the 10 years of proceedings, it had not been possible to "determine the responsibility of any person." On November 30, 1989, the request was accepted by the 2nd Military Court, which dismissed the case totally and definitively—even though it was still in the summary stage—due to "the criminal responsibility of the persons allegedly accused in the reported events having been extinguished." The plaintiffs appealed this resolution to the Court Martial, which confirmed the ruling in January 1992. A complaint was then filed before the Supreme Court of Justice, which, as of December 1992, had not yet issued its resolution.

(Complete records of the complaint against Manuel Contreras can be found in the case of Eduardo Alarcón Jara, July 30, 1974).

Source: Corporation report

On the granite slab located in the Patio de las Banderas, the names of the nine UACh students were inscribed—martyrs of an era marked by political intolerance that left its mark on the country's history.

-The ceremony reached its peak of emotion when the voices of the relatives present were heard, who—with displays of deep love and remembrance for their loved ones—thanked the University for the gesture and the institutional recognition.

The deep sound of a saxophone that, amidst the trees, flooded the environment with the well-known melody "Luchín" (by Víctor Jara), was the prelude to the significant ceremony inaugurating the monolith that the Universidad Austral de Chile erected in the Plaza de las Banderas (Isla Teja Campus, Valdivia), in memory of the students who lost their lives after the 1973 Coup d'État.

Inscribed forever on the stone are the names of: José René Barrientos W. (Philosophy), Víctor Fernando Krauss I. (Philosophy), José Gregorio Liendo V. (Forestry Engineering), Mario Alejandro Mellado M. (Agronomy), Sergio Raúl Pardo P. (Biology and Chemistry), Héctor Darío Valenzuela S. (Philosophy), Hugo Ribol Vásquez M. (Forestry), and the married couple José Luis Appel de la C. and Carmen Angélica Delard C., both of Medicine.

In an atmosphere of deep reflection, the event took place on the afternoon of Friday, May 26, 2006, an occasion on which the poet Omar Lara (a former academic of this higher education institution) gave an emotional reading of a poem in which he captured the deepest feeling of pain and hope for the young lives that were violently cut short after the Military Coup.

Part of that poem (attached at the end of the note) is what, as of today, is engraved on the monolith sculpted with special dedication by the Valdivian artist Guillermo Franco.

Words from the Rector

Following this reading, the Rector of the Universidad Austral de Chile (see speech at the end of the note), Prof. Carlos Amtmann Moyano, took the floor. Visibly moved by the significance of this tribute, he said that it is frequent that, when faced with events that cause pain and disturb the conscience, one opts for silence and concealment, including, in part, the Universidad Austral de Chile itself. "Breaking that silence," he said, "in 1994, the decision was made to engrave on the hard stone installed in this Patio de las Banderas expressions of apology for the University's grave omissions regarding human rights violations."

Regarding the monolith, and recalling that human rights constitute the rock upon which professional and human training is built, he said, "We are here to ask for forgiveness from the memory of nine of our own, nine members of this university community.

Most especially, we are here to ask for forgiveness from the relatives and to express to them that the University accompanies them and will accompany them in the memory of their sons, their daughter, their parents, their spouses."

He further noted that today the University grieves with their memory and engraves their names into the university and civic conscience. "Of all human feelings, one of the noblest is remembrance, the nostalgia for the people who no longer accompany us.

Nostalgia is a form of personal memory, that untransferable way we have of being a part of historical memory. In it, all the people who have helped us become who we are today are gathered. Those for whom we keep tenderness even in the hardest times.

Reconstructing personal memory is a way of reconstructing the memory of institutions and, among them, the most beloved of all, the memory of the Universidad Austral de Chile."

Initiator of the Project

For his part, Juan Carlos García, the main promoter of this idea, explained that it was born within the framework of the Humanities Congress held in 2004 on the occasion of the UACh's fiftieth anniversary, an opportunity in which this concern was raised to Rector Carlos Amtmann, who received it—he said—with special generosity.

"We had been waiting for this for 33 years, and for us, it is impressive to see the people who accompany us and who remember the friends we are honoring today; it is something that exceeds my expectations, but I have realized the deep feeling of the citizenry regarding this situation," he noted.

He especially valued the presence of so many people gathered at the site, which even warranted a temporary cessation of the binational Journalism seminar that was taking place at that time in the UACh Aula Magna, whose attendees joined the tribute.

Let their names remain here

it does not matter if this stone dissolves in the wind it will not be this matter that ignites their voices.

Source: diario.uach.cl 5/26/2006 Date: 05-26-2006

The last of the good ones who managed to see him

Sergio Pardo Pedemonte

Aminta Traverso; I met Sergio when I arrived as a student at the British High School and I found this brilliant student, a little younger than me, who finished school at sixteen and went to study Marine Biology at the Universidad Austral.

We were boyfriend and girlfriend for four years and we married in '70; I felt very much in love. He often came from Valdivia to see me and always wrote to me until we discovered that it wasn't worth living apart because we were starting to have needs that made us tense, and we often ended up fighting.

My mother did not accept that we didn't marry in the church, although for me that had no importance. For him it did; when I met him, he was a fervent Christian and a constant reader of the Bible. Later, when he left for the University, he continued to think almost the same, until he joined the people who would shape him in the political arena.

He then joined the MIR, where he was a militant until his disappearance. Our son Rodrigo was born a year and a half later; it was a beautiful relationship, each of us assumed what corresponded to us. I stopped studying to support the child, in an agreement that he would dedicate himself entirely to the revolution and I would be responsible for educating and supporting the children, if he wished to have them.

I still have in my retina the image of Sergio as a protector; he was one meter eighty-six tall and was capable of turning an assembly around. I didn't go to those things because even the most conservative girls were after him, and they even voted for him, and I would get jealous.

The coup d'état caught us in Valdivia with him already graduated, and while I was waiting for our second daughter—I was seven months pregnant—he came to leave me in Santiago, and in the meantime, they executed all his companions.

This caused him a tremendous moral problem; the poor man felt guilty for not having been there when all that had happened. We could have traveled outside of Chile and we didn't, which meant that Sergio lived from one place to another and only appeared sometimes; besides, in the raids in Valdivia, they had found photos of him and were looking for him, which practically prevented his political work.

Things became even more difficult when they detained one of his companions after a contact, which meant they were tracking him. Sergio was very affected, and we chose to go live on the coast and survive by fishing for locos (abalone), which was only a chimera.

I understood it that way and knew that we had to leave: I would have to leave and he would have to seek asylum. The decision was made. One afternoon in June, he said goodbye to me and the children, happy to think that we would meet outside.

He told me, "If you have news of me through the newspapers, we will never see each other again; if not, the only thing I want is that with time you find a father for my children, because if they detain me, you will never see me again."

This work on Sergio Pardo Pedemonte was carried out by Traverso after a testimonial interview with Sergio's partner, Nora Luksic, in the context of "Elaboration and mourning in women of forcibly disappeared persons," research that was censored by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile during the times of the dictatorship.

If you know anything more about the companion whose story you read, share it with us by sending us an e-mail so that we can all get to know him. If you know anything about any other companion disappeared or murdered by the dictatorship, share it with us as well; that will help us never forget them.

Source: archivochile.com (undated)