The judge of the Curanilahue Court, Mauricio Leyton, issued indictments against Guillermo Arturo Cofré Silva, Luis Hernán Zúñiga Guzmán, José Arnoldo Bustos Vivanco, and René Orlando Rodríguez Salgado as material authors of the aggravated kidnapping of Marta Edith Vásquez Fredes, a merchant and member of the Communist Party who was detained on October 23, 1973.

The magistrate of the Eighth Region determined that the four defendants, retired officers and non-commissioned officers of the Carabineros, had direct participation in the events that occurred shortly after the military coup.

According to the expert reports and investigations of the case, the judge established that the woman was detained on October 23, 1973, when she voluntarily presented herself at the Curanilahue police station, as she was being sought, just like her siblings.

At the moment she presented herself to the police unit, Marta Edith Vásquez, then 25 years old, disappeared, and her whereabouts remain unknown to this day. This led the magistrate to invoke Article 141 of the Penal Code to charge them as defendants and order their immediate imprisonment, without the right to provisional release.

The victim is remembered in the area as a person who always worked to help her siblings. Over time, she set up a fruit and vegetable stand at the market, which helped to somewhat increase the family income.

Source: La Nación, May 19, 2005

Supreme Court ratifies final sentence for aggravated kidnapping of Curanilahue merchant

By three votes to two, the Second Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court rejected the appeal for annulment that sought to overturn the sentence of the Concepción Court of Appeals, which acquitted three defendants of the aggravated kidnapping of Edith Vásquez Fredes, which occurred in October 1973, and sentenced only one to five years and one day in prison.

Thus, the sentence against Guillermo Cofré Silva was confirmed as the author of the crime of aggravated kidnapping of María Vásquez, which occurred starting on October 23, 1973, in Curanilahue, Bío Bío Region.

In a split decision (docket 6308-2008), the ministers of the Second Chamber of the highest court, Nibaldo Segura, Jaime Rodríguez, Rubén Ballesteros, Hugo Dolmestch, and the participating lawyer Luis Bates, adopted their decision, which also ratified that the convicted person must pay compensation of $50,000,000 (fifty million pesos) to each of the victim's six siblings for the moral damage caused.

The ruling was adopted with the dissenting opinion of ministers Segura and Ballesteros, who were in favor of accepting the statute of limitations for the criminal action. Part of the ruling indicates that Luis Hernán Zúñiga Guzmán, José Arnoldo Bustos Vivanco, and René Orlando Rodríguez Salgado were acquitted of the charges brought against them during the investigation of the case, while “the defendant Guillermo Arturo Cofré Silva was sentenced to suffer five years and one day of major imprisonment in its minimum degree, the pertinent legal accessories, and the payment of court costs, for his responsibility as the author of the aforementioned crime of aggravated kidnapping of María Edith Vásquez Fredes, provided for and sanctioned in Article 141 of the Penal Code, perpetrated on October 23, 1973, in the commune of Curanilahue.” On that date, María Edith Vásquez Fredes, a street vendor, was detained by Carabineros personnel at the Curanilahue Police Station, with no competent judicial order existing, and there has been no reliable knowledge of her whereabouts since that date. In the resolution adopted by the Concepción Court of Appeals on September 3, 2008, the decision to release Bustos, Rodríguez, and Zúñiga from charges is based on the fact that “they only participated in a subsequent raid on the Vásquez Fredes family home, and Cofré Silva is the only one who indicates that they might have also been present at the site where the victim was interrogated, which leads the court to conclude that there is insufficient evidence to prove that the three named individuals had material and direct participation in the illegal detention of the woman, nor in the subsequent interrogation, such that the standard of incriminating conviction was not reached to demonstrate their culpable participation.” Likewise, “it is asserted that no intellectual or material convergence was proven between the author (Cofré Silva) and the three acquitted individuals in the commission of the injustice that could lead to studying an eventual co-authorship, since the leader of the group and hierarchical superior was Cofré Silva, who, moreover, confessed to his intervention and acknowledged that it was two military personnel who submerged the detainee's head in water, and her whereabouts have been unknown since that date.” At the same time, it is stated that “the sole circumstance of accompanying Cofré Silva six years after the events occurred, for the search for the remains of the kidnapped woman, is not enough to consider participation by Zúñiga, as it was not established that she had effectively died on that occasion, nor did any of her bones appear.” For these and other considerations, “the appeals for annulment in form and substance attempted by lawyer Patricia Parra Poblete, representing the Program for the Continuation of Law No. 19.123, in the main and first filing of her presentation on pages 1,719 to 1,726, against the sentence of the Concepción Court of Appeals of September 3, 2008, which reads from pages 1,717 to 1,718, are rejected, and therefore, it is not void.” It is added that the criminal conviction was agreed upon against the vote of Ministers Segura and Ballesteros, who were in favor of acting ex officio to annul the lower court's sentence, proceeding to issue a replacement sentence by which it is resolved to revoke the first-degree sentence insofar as it rejected the exception of the statute of limitations for the criminal action opposed in favor of the sentenced person.

Source: Tribunal de BioBio, September 10, 2009