Aldo Anfossi
Correspondent
La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, October 5, 2024, p. 19
Santiago. Twenty-five years after the crimes occurred, the Supreme Court of Justice of Chile yesterday declared five former agents of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) guilty of murdering two militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in 1989.
The Second Chamber of the highest Chilean court handed down sentences after finding them responsible for the crime of qualified homicide: Hugo César Acevedo, Raúl Farías, Víctor Rolando Caro and Jorge Enrique Rivas must serve 15 years and one day in prison, while Luis Arturo Sanhueza will be imprisoned for 10 years and a day.
On April 18, 1989, agents of the National Information Center (CNI) shot down the militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement, Iván Gustavo Palacios and Éric Enrique Rodríguez on a street in Santiago, in the municipality of Quinta Normal.
The court considered it proven that, after the double murder, the CNI agents altered the scene of the event to simulate a confrontation with the victims, whom they accused of preparing to plant explosive devices.
The CNI operated between 1977 and 1990 as a body for the persecution, kidnapping, murder and disappearance of political opponents and was the successor to the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), Pinochet’s secret police under the command of General Manuel The Mamo Contreras, a lieutenant of the dictator to whom he reported directly from the 1973 coup and until its dissolution.
Since the end of the dictatorship, hundreds of state agents who operated in the CNI and the DINA and who came from the army, navy, aviation and the Carabineros and Investigations police, have been brought to trial and convicted for their participation in crimes that left more than 3,200 dead or missing, as well as tens of thousands of people tortured.
Currently, the fate of more than 1,100 people remains unknown.
Towards the end of 2023, the Caucoto Abogados law firm, specialized in human rights, updated a list of eight former uniformed officers who are fugitives from justice convicted of various crimes against humanity, some involved in the crime of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara and lawyer Litré Quiroga; in the execution of 38 peasants in the Paine Case, the murder of the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria, Operation Condor, the Caravan of Death and the Quemados Case, among other investigations.
Former soldiers, police officers and civilian members of the DINA and the CNI were accused as perpetrators and co-authors of qualified kidnapping, qualified homicide, illicit association and application of torture, among other crimes.
In the mid-1970s, military dictatorships in the Southern Cone united to pursue and eliminate leftist dissidents across national borders, as part of a secret plan known as Operation Condor.
Hundreds of people were murdered under this program of state terror, supported by the United States, in which Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay participated.
