Lautaro Vaché Vargas, assigned to the No. 3 Engineering and Telecommunications Regiment of Curicó, acted as Military Prosecutor (September - October 1973) and sentenced two Socialist militants and members of the President's security detail (GAP) to three years and one day in prison.

Francisco Lara Ruiz and Wagner Salinas Muñoz (29 and 22 years old, respectively) were detained on September 11, 1973, in the vicinity of Curicó. During their captivity, they were subjected to torture sessions that included food deprivation.

While Wagner Salinas and Francisco Lara were serving their sentences in the public prison, they were taken to the regiment during the first days of October, where prosecutor Lautaro Vaché notified them that they would be sent to Santiago to be executed by firing squad.

During the afternoon, they were removed from the prison, bound with wire, and thrown onto the floor of a military truck that took them to the Tacna Regiment in Santiago, where they were executed.

According to conscripts from Curicó, the execution was carried out by Tacna personnel. The remains were handed over to their families at the Santiago Morgue, with their deaths certified on October 5, 1973, listing gunshot wounds as the cause.

Thanks to the intervention of Wagner Salinas's brother, a member of the Homicide Brigade of the Investigative Police, it was possible to locate their bodies.

Colonel Lautaro Vaché Vargas was the commander of the No. 6 Telecommunications Regiment of Iquique from December 24, 1981, to January 8, 1987.

Information Sources: Revista Análisis No. 224; Rettig Report; HispanicLA.com; Memoriaviva Archive.

Source: Revista Análisis No. 224

"Go away!" said a voice from above. "They aren't here anymore; they were taken at six in the morning."

Sitting on the bench in the alameda that offered them a full view of the front of the Curicó Prison, neither Carmen, Arturo, nor María could distinguish the face of the uniformed man who had just spoken to them. Nor could they tell if he was a soldier, a policeman, a prison guard, or a spirit from the adjacent cemetery, taking pity on such a scene of helplessness.

Feeling that the lives of Wagner and Francisco were no longer a certainty filled them with chills. Carmen, wife of the former, would choose memory and commitment. She could not do otherwise, as the child growing inside her would be responsible for keeping alive the story of the man she affectionately called "Wally," no matter how painful his epilogue might be.

María, Francisco's wife, on the contrary, let herself be carried away by a furious oblivion. The long-awaited utopia that spoke of a paradise for the poor, a republic of workers, and a united people that would never be defeated, ended up snatching away her partner, the father of her child, leaving her only suffering in return.

Arturo, Francisco's father, protected his pain with a cloak of silence that he maintained unchanged for many long years.

Rats in their holes

Wagner Salinas was questioned on numerous occasions for trying to reconcile his militancy in the Socialist Party with his profession of the Evangelical faith. "You have two gods," a close associate reproached him. "God the Father and god Allende."

He never worried about hiding his closeness to "Chicho." He mourned in his soul his third consecutive defeat in the race for the Presidency of the Republic in 1964, at the hands of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva.

His good physical condition and his height of one meter ninety-two allowed him to be crowned Latin American boxing champion. At the same time, after obtaining his agricultural technician certificate, he worked as a night watchman for the Copper Corporation at the El Teniente mine, then in the Cachapoal Province.

There he met his girlfriend and later wife, Carmen Órdenes. Together with her, he returned to Talca to work in agriculture, though without putting down his gloves, now under the rigorous training of Lautaro Contreras.

Faced with the dilemma of aspiring to a world title or spending more time with his family, he opted for the latter. The arrival of two children made his forays into the ring increasingly sporadic, which did not seem to alter his spirit much.

One of the events that would mark his life—and also his death—would be his role as a leader in the occupation of land near the Panamericana Sur, baptized by the settlers themselves as the Pedro Lenin camp, in honor of a young leftist who died while trying to enter Cuba clandestinely.

While improvising a heated speech on the dusty ground, Wally uttered the phrase that earned him the eternal hatred of his political adversaries: "...those rats that hide in their holes..." It was an evident reference to a well-known Talca merchant and militant of the opposition National Party.

Next to him, a tall young man with an easy laugh cheered and applauded him wildly.

The President or me

The only means of subsistence the Salinas couple had was a magazine exchange kiosk in the Manso de Velasco neighborhood. With the arrival of Salvador Allende to the Presidency of the Republic in 1971, his brother Daniel, a Socialist deputy, offered Wally the possibility of working for the Government.

Contrary to what Carmen expected, these were days of even greater sacrifice. Besides the fact that their tight economic situation did not change one bit, despite Wally's new job "linked to the high spheres," he could only share weekends with his family, and to make matters worse, only every fifteen days.

Despite everything, his wife remembers him as always happy, sharing the little time he had with his loved ones and those friends who let themselves be carried away by petty-bourgeois discouragement.

"Things are going to change," he would repeat. "That's what we are working for with Comrade President."

Carmen was always struck by the bulky, James Bond-style briefcase that Wally carried with him. On one occasion, he pulled an infinity of maps from inside. Trying not to seem indiscreet, she decided to ask him what all that paperwork was for.

"The thing is, I have to know where the President is going, check that place, what conditions it's in..." her husband answered naturally.

Simple words to summarize his status as a member of the GAP—Grupo de Amigos Personales (Personal Friends Group), as the controversial security detail of Salvador Allende was baptized by the right-wing press—and thus justify his frequent trips to remote places like Algeria, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.

When his wife expressed concern about the risk of always being by the side of a figure who generated love and hatred in equal measure, Wally was clear: "Look, I want you to engrave one thing in your mind: if a bullet comes, if it's not me, it's the President," in allusion to the possible attacks of which Allende could be a victim by anti-Marxist commandos, especially Patria y Libertad.

The news of Carmen's new pregnancy was taken as a blessing. However, when she was about to reach four months of gestation, Wally went on the last trip from which neither he nor Allende would return. His only consolation was a farewell letter written on a coffee-stained napkin in a concentration camp.

Pioneer

The fifth of eleven siblings, Francisco Lara—"Pancho" to those close to him—learned to read before he learned to tie his shoes. Instead of wasting time in class, he preferred to sit under a grapevine in his backyard to devour literature, especially that which inflamed his chest with social commitment.

Welcome were the texts of Marx, Gramsci, but also Verne, Salgari, Dickens, Nicomedes Guzmán, and Manuel Rojas. By age 13, he joined the pioneers, cherubs who traded marbles, spinning tops, and kites to join the ranks of the Socialist Party.

Not content with this, taking advantage of his histrionics and engaging gift of gab, he dedicated himself to incubating revolutionary ideas in every boy he encountered.

When his parents or older siblings scolded him to worry more about his studies, he would answer with a smile, but firmly:

"Everything I needed to learn, I already know, and now it's my turn to put it into practice."

Along with this intellectual restlessness, he began to develop, as if by magic, a prodigious physique, even though he had never shown any interest in sports or anything that would distract him from his intentions of changing the world.

Already in his twenties, at one meter eighty-four tall, he occupied a prominent place in the occupation of the Pedro Lenin camp, in addition to cheering the fiery speeches against the "rats that hide in their holes" delivered by a certain Wagner Salinas.

Mutual admiration made them both close friends. Salinas, identified within the GAP as "Silvano," did not take long to realize that Pancho was the right man to join the team in charge of watching Salvador Allende's back. However, given that clandestinity was part of the spirit of the leftist brotherhood, to his family, he remained just another official of the Agricultural and Livestock Service.

The 11th

"We are going to fight here," Pancho said, convinced, as he felt his firearm. "If not, these bastards are going to kill us."

The day before, he had promised his sister María to buy her a pair of earrings for her saint's day. She had never worn them and was excited. But beneath his joviality and apparent enthusiasm, Pancho was worried.

He sensed that something bad was about to happen, if it wasn't already happening at that very moment. There were too many threats that the coup forces would end up overthrowing the Popular Unity government. On the night of September 10, he decided to be honest with his father.

"What do you advise me to do?"

"Whatever your heart tells you, my son," he replied.

"If I have to listen to it, I'm just going to the President," Pancho said. "Even if that means being prepared for anything."

That is why, at six o'clock sharp in the morning, he was knocking on Wally's door to set off, together with his partner and friend, toward the capital. But a police patrol cut them off, and his impulse to fight a duel was stopped by Wally's restraint.

"No! Lower your weapon!"

The red double-cab pickup truck remained parked on the side of the road at the Panguilemo junction, while dozens of police agents approached, pointing their carbines at them. They were forcibly removed from the interior and placed with their hands open on the bodywork to be searched and have their pistols confiscated.

"They don't have anything else, Captain!" shouted a corporal who searched the interior of the car.

"And what are you looking for, you idiot? Do you want fruit?"

Pancho's insolence was answered with a rifle butt to the face. Wally, for the first time, felt him vulnerable. He, just like his friend, had also arrived in Talca around six in the evening the day before.

He had tea with Carmen and invited her to Maule to visit his father and bring him some gifts, including blankets for the cold. Carmen was not feeling well due to the pregnancy and preferred to stay home. Wally returned at 10 at night, and for the first time, his wife noticed he was nervous.

"What's wrong with you?" Carmen asked him.

"Nothing... but at the Maule junction, they were burning some tires."

"Who?"

"I don't know. It seems they were soldiers. They like to do those things..."

Minutes later, there was a knock at the door. It was Pancho. After arguing for a few minutes, they agreed to return to Santiago at six the next morning. He would pick him up right there. Carmen left Wally's suitcase ready so he wouldn't waste time—the same suitcase that the corporal was now destroying with kicks and rifle butts.

Record

Wagner Salinas and Francisco Lara (29 and 22 years old, respectively) were detained on September 11, 1973, in the vicinity of Curicó. During their captivity, they were subjected to torture sessions that included food deprivation.

Subsequently, they were transferred to the Tacna Regiment, Metropolitan Region, where they were executed by firing squad on October 5, 1973, by decision of General Sergio Arellano Stark, who at that time commanded the repression group known as the "Caravan of Death."

Thanks to the intervention of Wagner Salinas's brother, a member of the Homicide Brigade of the Investigative Police, it was possible to locate their bodies.

Source: HispanicLA.com, January 1, 2011