An exhaustive and lengthy investigation by Judge Juan Guzmán and his team of detectives from Department V succeeded in uncovering the best-kept secret of the DINA: the fate of its forcibly disappeared in the Metropolitan Region. The systematic operation was carried out by the pilots and mechanics of the Puma helicopters of the Army Aviation Command between the years 1974 and 1978.

Calves and feet protruded from the potato sacks. In the case of women, high or low-heeled shoes were visible. Sometimes the hem of a skirt could be seen. In the case of men, shoes and the ends of trousers were visible.

Each sack contained a body tied with wire to a piece of rail. Some bodies still showed fresh blood. Others gave off the odor of initial decomposition. Other sacks were impregnated with human oil, a sign that the corpses had remained buried for some time. Some of the bundles, though fewer, did not have the shape of a body but were smaller in size, containing only partial remains.

There were at least 40 trips. On each one, eight to fifteen bundles were loaded onto the Puma helicopters. Of the 12 Army mechanics who eventually ended up acknowledging the operations, each one made at least one trip.

In some cases, there were two, three, or even more. There are other mechanics who also participated in these operations but who still deny it. For almost thirty years, the secret was kept among pilots and mechanics at the Army Aviation Command (CAE), the unit responsible for the operation.

At first, everyone denied it, several times. The pilots deny it to this day. But the mechanics broke the oath sealed with the blood of others. Judge Guzmán and the detectives assisting him took this thread and investigated it silently and patiently for more than a year, within the framework of the proceedings regarding the disappeared communist leadership of Calle Conferencia.

Learning the details of the death flights is harrowing. There, at last, is the detailed answer, and this time recounted from the inside, regarding the fate of the DINA prisoners in Santiago.

Between 400 and 500 bodies were thrown into the sea in these operations, which were carried out mainly between 1974 and 1978, although they may have also occurred in the final weeks of 1973.

The report from the Armed Forces that emerged from the Dialogue Table on Human Rights in January 2001, with information on the fate of 200 forcibly disappeared persons (49 on land and 151 at sea), barely recorded 29 cases attributed to the DINA.

Of those, only 23 appeared as having been thrown into the sea. At the dialogue table, the Army, under then-General Ricardo Izurieta, stated that it did not have further information. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, the Army failed to break the secret of those who had taken the oath at that time. Nor have they done so to this day.

The official figures from the Rettig Report and successor entities indicate that there were 590 DINA-disappeared in the Metropolitan Region between 1973 and 1978.

The reason of the "Mamo"

In the end, the truth was confirmed. It was confirmed by the executors themselves, or part of them. As has been happening with other chilling cases, such as the executions of La Moneda staff in Peldehue, those who spoke were those at the bottom, not the high-ranking officers. The mechanics are all non-commissioned officers who are now retired.

It must be admitted that the former head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, was right for once. “There are no DINA forcibly disappeared, they are all dead,” he recently told a documentarian from the French TV channel Canal+.

What Contreras has never acknowledged is that the macabre and systematic operation of throwing bodies into the sea existed. And that it could never have been planned solely by the man who was the head of the Army Aviation Command between January 1974 and December 1977, Colonel Carlos Mardones Díaz.

He, along with four other former CAE pilots, was indicted on Friday, November 14, 2003, by Judge Guzmán as an accomplice and accessory after the fact in the summary proceedings for the death of Marta Ugarte.

The body of this communist leader was the only one of the victims thrown into the sea that surfaced from the depths of the ocean and washed up in September 1976 on La Ballena beach, near the Los Molles cove in the V Region.

It was the only failure of the extermination system, the clue that will now allow the guilty to be convicted. No other body thrown into the sea appeared. The person “guilty” of the defective tying of the weight that allowed Ugarte’s corpse to rise to the surface and become fundamental evidence is identified and has confessed to his criminal error.

But Guzmán also indicted Contreras for this case as a perpetrator of kidnapping and homicide, as well as his own cousin, Brigadier (R) Carlos López Tapia, who in 1976 was the head of the DINA’s Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade and simultaneously the head of Villa Grimaldi.

This was the main clandestine center for political imprisonment and torture in the country, and the largest number of corpses sent to the sea were taken from there. The judge was backed on Friday, November 21, 2003, by the Fifth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals, which confirmed the indictments.

Although it revoked that of pilot Emilio de la Mahotiere “for being in France” when Marta Ugarte disappeared.

Tobalaba-Peldehue

Operation “Puerto Montt” (the code used in DINA clandestine centers to mark in the prisoner registry those who would be executed and thrown into the sea) had an operating protocol that was repeated. Before each flight, the mechanics received the order to remove the Puma’s seats (18 to 20) and the auxiliary fuel tank.

The flight range of this helicopter without the second tank is two and a half hours. Each trip was ordered by the head of the CAE to the head of the Aeromobile Company of that helicopter command. All flights were recorded.

The machines departed each time from the Tobalaba airfield in the La Reina commune, where the Army Aviation Command operated during those years. The crew consisted of a pilot, a co-pilot, and a mechanic.

The flight began with a destination of Peldehue, in Colina. There, on military grounds, they would land and were usually awaited by two or three Chevrolet C-10 pickup trucks, almost always white, whose rear section was covered by a tarp.

In charge of these vehicles were two or three plainclothes agents. The civilians would pull back the tarps that hid the piled-up corpses and unload them to put them inside the helicopter. The Puma would then take off again with the civilian agents on board.

It would normally head toward the coast of the Fifth Region, and at the height of Quintero, the machine would head out to sea. Less frequently, the flights went out to sea at the height of San Antonio or Santo Domingo.

Once an adequate distance was reached, the pilot would give the order to begin unloading the bodies. The launch was carried out through the hatch of approximately one square meter located in the middle of the helicopter, where the cargo hook is found, which lowers inside at the height of the main rotor.

But the unloading was also sometimes done from a stern hatch, 1.80 meters high by almost a meter wide. The launch was carried out by the civilian agents, who were responsible not only for taking the bodies to Peldehue and putting them inside the craft, but for supervising that the bundles reached the bottom of the sea.

The identities of the bodies thrown into the ocean in this operation are not established, since the witnesses say they never knew them, except for that of Marta Ugarte. Those who do know them, such as former DINA head Manuel Contreras, deny that this operation existed.

“They shone”

The rails, “freshly cut, so they shone on the cut sides,” as the Investigations commissioner and DINA agent Nibaldo Jiménez Santibáñez saw them prepared, provided, in principle, the security that the proof of the crime would go with the piece of metal to the bottom of the ocean.

Jiménez says in one of his procedural statements that when he asked one day what those rails cut into pieces were for, he received the answer, “those are for the packages.” When he asked, “What packages?”, he maintains they replied, “the ones that leave cut up every day from here, a large batch to the sea; they wrap them in a sack, tied well with wire, throw in the body and the rail, and with the weight of the rail, they go to the bottom.”

These were no longer former prisoners talking about the rails, nor just the underwater fishing champion Raúl Choque, who once in the 1980s declared to the press that he saw bones on the seabed off Pisagua, attached to pieces of rails. Now the fragments of track were a reality seen by one of the agents themselves who was telling it to a judge.

Nor had retired Colonel Olagier Benavente Bustos gone mad when, on June 24, 1999, he declared in an interview with La Nación that “Pinochet’s pilot, his favorite, Antonio Palomo,” told him one summer day a couple of years after 1973 in Pelluhue, where both had vacation homes, that he had been tasked with making trips piloting a Puma to throw bodies into the sea. “They departed from Tobalaba,” said Colonel (R) Benavente, that Palomo had told him.

It was the first time a high-ranking retired officer had revealed part of the secret. But that time, everything stayed there, only in the statements. All the evidence discovered now did not exist. Of course, Palomo denied Benavente’s statements when Judge Guzmán interrogated him.

The cleanup

Once each flight mission was completed, the helicopters returned to the place in Peldehue where the C-10 trucks had been parked. There, the civilian agents would get off, get into the trucks, and leave.

The helicopter would take off again and head to its CAE base in Tobalaba. Once the machine was cleared of its crew, the mechanics would perform the operation of cleaning the floor, which most of the time remained impregnated with blood and a penetrating smell of decomposing flesh.

They would hose down the floor and the interior and let the machine ventilate. When the smell and the blood disappeared, the mechanics would reinstall the seats and the auxiliary fuel tank, unless it was already known that the same helicopter had to perform a similar task the next day.

Normally, this cleaning was not performed by the same mechanics who had participated in the flight. Among the cleaners was, more than once, E.A.O., the very personal mechanic of Puma No. 256 of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Augusto Pinochet.

Although he maintains in the proceedings that he “never” had to perform any of these high-seas flights. His boss for many years was the now-Brigadier (R) Antonio Palomo.

Most of the disappeared who left Villa Grimaldi with the “Puerto Montt” mark departed from the Tobalaba airfield.

“When we talked among the mechanics, I could see that several of them had made these types of trips,” declared in the proceedings another mechanic who participated in the flights and whom we will name “Rotor 1.”

The identities of the mechanics who finally told the judge the dark stories that allowed these facts to be known are kept confidential by LND. The son of one of them was kidnapped for a few hours the Friday before last, the same day that Judge Guzmán issued the first indictments for the Marta Ugarte case against five former Puma pilots, in addition to Contreras and López Tapia.

Two individuals forced him into a car, tied him up, put a hood over his head, beat him, and told him to tell his father to “shut his trap.” Then they dumped him on a street in Santiago.

Another of the mechanics, “Rotor 2,” recounted in the investigation that as soon as these flights began, the CAE commander Carlos Mardones gathered the pilots and mechanics and ordered them that “these are secret missions that you must not comment on with anyone who does not participate in them. You must not even talk about it with your families.”

The tribunal

Commissioner (R) Nibaldo Jiménez, a former DINA agent with duties at Villa Grimaldi and at the José Domingo Cañas facility, maintains that “those who sent the individuals to the sea were a meeting that was held with the group leaders of that time, the captains Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, and others, because there were several barracks.

They met in something like a tribunal, where they decided which prisoner was saved and who went to the sea with the code noted as Puerto Montt.” Those “others” to whom Jiménez refers were the usual ones, Marcelo Moren Brito and Pedro Espinoza Bravo, both rotating heads of several of the DINA’s clandestine centers.

The result of each of those meetings, Jiménez continues, “was sent to General Contreras, the supreme head of the DINA (...) General Contreras was the one who reviewed the lists and was ultimately the one who decided the fate of the prisoners.”

Another of the DINA’s victims was the journalist Máximo Gedda Ortiz, brother of the Geddas who produce the television program “Al sur del mundo.” Detained in July 1974, he disappeared at the Londres 38 facility. Jiménez recounts the state in which he saw his body before, presumably, it joined the list of those thrown into the sea.

“An individual with the surname Gedda was detained. They had cut the flesh from his leg with a knife and the bone was visible. He was hanging, they had him hanging. They had flogged him.”

Jiménez describes another figure of horror and brutality against another of the DINA’s disappeared. This is the photographer Teobaldo Tello Garrido, who had been an official of the Investigations police during the government of Salvador Allende.

He was detained in August 1974 and remains disappeared. “I went to see him in a room crowded with prisoners; upon opening his mouth, I saw that it was bloodied. His teeth had been removed with pliers by Mr. Marcelo Moren (...) Colonel Moren was quite brutal.”

Pilots of the caravan

Among the five former Puma helicopter pilots whom Judge Juan Guzmán indicted for the kidnapping and homicide of Marta Ugarte are those who were the pilots of the Caravan of Death.

Antonio Palomo was the pilot during the southern leg of this operation, with Emilio de la Mahotiere González acting as his co-pilot. For the northern leg of the caravan, the pilot was De la Mahotiere himself and the co-pilot was Luis Felipe Polanco Gallardo. The fifth pilot declared a defendant is Colonel (R) Oscar Vicuña Hesse.

A second phase of this method of disappearing prisoners by throwing their bodies into the sea began after 1978 and lasted at least until 1981-82, once the corpses of 15 peasants were discovered in a kiln in Lonquén at the end of 1978, and the Army and Pinochet became alarmed.

This second phase, known as the clandestine “removals,” was admitted even by the former director of the National Intelligence Center, General Odlanier Mena, and some former agents who participated in the operation have also provided statements about it.

To this operation belong, among others, the prisoners of Chihuío in the X Region; the executed of La Moneda exhumed from Peldehue; and the 26 victims of the Caravan of Death buried clandestinely in the Calama desert. These were not DINA victims.

Probably, given the experience acquired, this second phase was carried out by the same pilots and mechanics of the Army Aviation Command. This episode is not totally clarified judicially. In any case, the CAE commanders after Carlos Mardones were: Colonel Hernán Podestá Gómez, between January and December 1978; Colonel Fernando Darrigrandi Márquez, between January 1979 and July 1981; and Colonel Raúl Dinator Moreno, between August 1981 and February 1982.

Source: lanacion.cl, November 23, 2003

The Fifth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals, in a split decision, revoked one of the seven indictments issued last week by the special judge Juan Guzmán Tapia against uniformed officers who threw the bodies of detainees into the sea after the 1973 coup d'état.

The appellate court annulled the charges against pilot Emilio de la Mahotiere because it verified that at the time of the events, he was in France.

De la Mahotiere had been charged as an accessory after the fact to kidnapping with homicide in the case of PC militant Marta Ugarte, whose body appeared after having been thrown from a helicopter onto the beach of Los Molles, in the Fifth Region.

The Court, however, ratified the ruling by Guzmán against former DINA director Manuel Contreras and his cousin and head of the DINA’s Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade, Carlos López Tapia, who were indicted for kidnapping with homicide as co-perpetrators.

Likewise, it ratified the indictments against Carlos Mardones (pilot) as an accomplice, and pilots Antonio Palomo, Oscar Vicuña, and Luis Felipe Polanco as accessories after the fact.

According to the Rettig Report, Ugarte Román, a seamstress, was 42 years old at the time of her detention. She was a militant in the Communist Party, which in 1976 was operating with a clandestine leadership. Another of her roles was as secretary to former deputy Mireya Baltra.

Her detention was carried out by DINA agents on a public street, while her death was recorded on September 9, 1976, as a result of the torture applied to her at Villa Grimaldi, where the head of the facility was, precisely, López Tapia.

Source: elmostrador.cl, November 21, 2003

Conferencia Case: Court releases three indicted pilots

The Fifth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals, unanimously, granted bail to the three individuals indicted as accessories after the fact to the kidnapping with homicide of communist militant Marta Ugarte Román in the so-called Calle Conferencia case.

The three pilots of the Army Aviation Command—between 1973 and 1978—Major (R) Luis Felipe Polanco, Captain (R) Antonio Palomo, and Second Lieutenant (R) Oscar Vicuña, had been charged by Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia as accessories after the fact for that crime.

As determined today by the capital’s appellate court, the uniformed officers, who were being held at the Telecommunications Command, will be released after paying a bail of 500,000 pesos each, reported Radio Cooperativa.

Marta Ugarte was 42 years old at the time of her detention and was first detained by agents of the dissolved DINA and then transferred to Villa Grimaldi, where she reportedly died as a result of a series of illegal duress.

As stated in the proceedings, her body was thrown into the sea from a Puma helicopter and her remains later appeared on Los Molles beach in the Fifth Region.

Source: emol.cl, December 1, 2003

The Puma List: Round of interrogations of former pilots for Paine crimes

Judge Héctor Solís now has the list of officers of the Army Aviation Command (CAE) that the institution initially denied him. And he is looking for those who, in 1978, piloted helicopters from which bodies were thrown into the sea.

Two still well-kept secrets continue to haunt the dramatic events of Paine.

Until now, they resemble the pact of silence that for 34 years kept the numerous Lautaro Brigade and its Delfín Group—exterminators of clandestine communists starting in 1976—hidden from justice.

That pact was finally broken in January 2007 by Jorgelino Vergara, a former agent and former waiter for former DINA head Manuel Contreras.

In Paine, however, there is still no one to provide that type of collaboration to Judge Héctor Solís, and the silence has become a shield to hide two young officers with the rank of second lieutenant who, according to several witnesses accused or indicted in the trial, took part in the massacre of 22 peasants in October 1973.

The other great mystery in this case continues to be who exhumed the bodies in 1978 to throw them into the sea.

This coming week, and without abandoning the inquiries to learn the identity of the two second lieutenants who accompanied Second Lieutenant Andrés Magaña Bau on that occasion, Judge Solís begins a marathon task to try to identify the perpetrators of the Paine version of “Operation Television Removal.”

Although the Army initially denied the magistrate the information he requested to learn the identity of the officers and flight logs of the Army Aviation Command (CAE) of that time, citing “national security secrecy,” the information finally reached the magistrate’s hands.

THE “STARS”

At the beginning of 1978, the CAE commander operating at the fateful Tobalaba airfield was Colonel Carlos Mardones Díaz. According to Andrés Magaña, that year was the year of the exhumation that he himself guided because he knew the location of the clandestine grave where they hid the bodies.

Around that same time, Colonel Hernán Podestá Gómez was his commander. Mardones and Podestá were the ones who gave the order for any flight to take off from that runway, in this case, the Puma helicopters.

Mardones has pending judicial accounts, as he is indicted for the case of communist leader Marta Ugarte, thrown into the sea from a Puma on the coast of the V Region and the only one who floated because the piece of rail tied to her corpse came loose.

Among the list of officers who were part of that Aviation Command and were pilots of the CAE’s Pumas are those who piloted the Caravan of Death helicopter through cities in the south and north of the country: Captain (rank in the 1970s) Antonio Palomo Contreras, personal pilot of Augusto Pinochet, and Majors Luis Felipe Polanco and Emilio de la Mahotiere González.

All indicted in cases of forcibly disappeared persons, except for De la Mahotiere, whose indictment, issued at the time by Judge Juan Guzmán, was revoked by the Court of Appeals in the investigation of the Marta Ugarte case.

Palomo was later, with the rank of colonel, commander of the CAE between February 1982 and December 1986.

THE PELDEHUE TRAIL

Another who is on the list of officer-pilots of the CAE helicopters is Lieutenant Colonel José Darrigrandi Márquez, indicted for the exhumation of the bodies of the forcibly disappeared from La Moneda in Peldehue and their being thrown into the sea on December 23, 1978.

The date of this episode would be close to the Paine exhumation, so Darrigrandi could know the perpetrators that Judge Solís is looking for. Darrigrandi was also commander of the CAE from late 1978 until July 1981.

In January 2007, he was acquitted by Judge Patricio Villarroel, benefiting from the statute of limitations after the magistrate rejected that it was a crime against humanity.

The identity of the perpetrators of the different episodes of “Operation Television Removal” is the least public part of these cases and, at the same time, one of the most complex facts to investigate for the judges, since all the officers involved persist in denying their participation. Although they have been identified several times by the mechanics who traveled with them on these flights.

The work of the Human Rights Brigade of the Investigative Police has been a fundamental contribution to learning about these operations.

List of CAE pilots

Colonel: Óscar Mardones Díaz (PP = Puma Pilot). Lieutenant Colonel: José Jaime Darrigrandi Márquez (PP). Major: Luis Isaac Contreras Prieto. Major: Emilio de la Mahotiere González (PP). Major: Luis Felipe Polanco Gallardo (PP).

Captain: Enrique Fernando Aguilera Acevedo. Captain: José Javier Carmona Bennet. Captain: Raúl Adolfo Moyano Vatel (PP, CAE commander, April 1991-December 1992). Captain: Aquiles Navarrete Izanortegui (CAE commander, December 1986-April 1991).

Captain: Richter Aliro Nuche Sepúlveda (PP). Captain: Antonio Alberto Palomo Contreras (PP, CAE commander, February 1982-December 1986). Captain: Juan Miguel Reveco Bravo. Captain: Rodolfo Enrique Sánchez Rubio (PP and flight course commander).

Lieutenant: Gastón Rodolfo García Miranda (PP). Lieutenant: José María Marinello Kairath. Lieutenant: Juan Carlos Stolzenbach Fahrner (PP). Lieutenant: Luis Walterio Riedel Martínez. Second Lieutenant: Juan Pablo Bascur Gaete.

Second Lieutenant: Óscar Carlos Medel Olavaria. Second Lieutenant: Luis Ramón Menare Rowe. Second Lieutenant: Dantón Iván Venegas Quiñones (PP). Second Lieutenant: Óscar Alfonso Vicuña Hesse (indicted for the Marta Ugarte case).

Source: lanacion.cl, March 10, 2008

Chile: Pilots who murdered communist leader Marta Ugarte, murdered in 1976, indicted

Judge Juan Guzmán indicted seven former Armed Forces officers for the crime against the leader of the Communist Party (PC) of Chile, Marta Ugarte, which occurred on September 9, 1976.

Guzmán’s investigations are framed within the Calle Conferencia case, referring to the disappearance of 10 members of the PC leadership, among whom is the husband of former presidential candidate Gladys Marín.

According to the inquiry, Ugarte’s body was thrown into the sea inside a sack from a military helicopter and was found on Los Molles beach, about 260 kilometers north of this capital.

Judicial sources indicated that among the seven former uniformed officers indicted is Brigadier (R) Carlos Mardones Díaz, head of the Army Aviation Command in 1976, indicted as an accomplice, and as accessories after the fact, the military helicopter pilots Emilio de la Mahotiere González, Brigadier (R) Antonio Palomo Contreras, Oscar Vicuña Hesse, and Luis Felipe Polanco Gallardo.

Palomo, De la Mahotiere, and Polanco were pilots of the so-called “Caravan of Death,” the delegation led by General (R) Sergio Arellano Stark, which carried out 18 kidnappings and 57 homicides in October 1973.

General (R) Manuel Contreras, former head of the military regime’s political police, the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), and former Army Brigadier and head of the DINA’s Metropolitan Brigade in 1976, Carlos López, who was also responsible for the Villa Grimaldi torture center, were indicted as co-perpetrators of the communist leader’s murder.

According to the Rettig Report, the PC leader was detained on a public street on August 9, 1976, and taken to the Villa Grimaldi repression center, east of this capital, where she died as a result of torture at the age of 42.

Her body was thrown into the sea, but despite the precautions her captors took to make her disappear, her corpse was found semi-naked and inside a sack tied to her neck with wire on September 9 of that year.

The autopsy determined that Ugarte suffered while alive a luxation-fracture of the spine, thoracic-abdominal trauma with multiple rib fractures, rupture and bursting of the liver and spleen, dislocation of both shoulders and hip, and a double fracture in the right forearm. She died on September 9, 1976.

Plaintiff lawyer Adil Brekovic told the press “that Judge Guzmán’s ruling confirms the suspicions that Army pilots participated in the disappearance and crime of Marta Ugarte.”

Guzmán is investigating more than 300 complaints against General (R) Augusto Pinochet for human rights violations.

For the Caravan case, Guzmán indicted the former Chilean dictator, first as a perpetrator and later as an accessory after the fact to 57 homicides and 18 qualified kidnappings, perpetrated days after the coup d'état of September 11, 1973.

Source: lafogata.org, November 16, 2003