2023-08-23 03:54:00
On the afternoon of July 14, 1976, the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria he left his office in Providencia, one of the most charming neighborhoods of a militarized Santiago. Agents of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), the fearsome secret police led by Colonel Manuel Contreras who, with the endorsement of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, they intercepted him in his car while he was driving home. Soria, at that time a member of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and, furthermore, a communist militant, he was taken to “Quetropillán”, a conspiracy center of the military regime where, in addition to torture, the sarin gas and explosives. There he was assassinated two days after his capture. Then they threw their car down a ravine in the north of the capital to simulate an accident as a result of the driver’s drunken state. When there are few days left to commemorate Half a century since the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende and opened the doors of horror, the Supreme Court of Chile announced the final judgment against the perpetrators of that crime. It involves six ex-DINA members and two ex-military personnel.
The Soria case had to wait 47 years to be closed. The plaintiffs had to overcome different walls of impunity and other judicial labyrinths. On the heated eve of the 50th anniversary of that tragic September 11, the former Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravonumber two of the DINA and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, who was in charge of terrorist acts abroad, received a new sentence of 15 years in prison. Espinoza Bravo is in the Punta Peuco prison, where, throughout the democratic transition, uniformed men deprived of liberty for committing crimes against humanity were sent. Almost three decades ago he was accused along with Contreras of having planned the assassination in Washington of the former foreign minister of Allende, Orlando Letelier.
Former secret agent Juan Morales Salgado was sentenced to 10 years and one day in prison as the author of the murder. The three repressors had already been sent to a penitentiary unit for another of the atrocious episodes perpetrated by Pinochetism: the double murder, in 1974 in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, of the former commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, Carlos Prats and his wife Sofia Cuthbert. Another of the faces of the repression also received a new sentence, the ex-general Eugenio Covarrubias Valenzuela, who was director of Army Intelligence and later one of the representatives of the CNI, the body that replaced the DINA. Covarrubias Valenzuela received a four-year sentence for making a false statement under oath.
The weight of the sentence
The ruling did nothing more than give a new public and legal status to what was always known: Soria had been deprived of his liberty “by armed DINA agents” who transferred him “to a hidden place” where he was “blindfolded and tied up“. The interrogation “under physical pressure” led to his death.
The steep and at times dangerous path that led to the definitive closure of the Soria case had been initiated, on behalf of the victim’s family, by the lawyer Alfonso Insunza, who decades later would be known throughout the world for his intervention in the scandal of the ex-dictator’s secret accounts abroad. For many years, even when the dictatorship withdrew and Pinochet maintained control of the Army, the participants in the crime benefited from the validity of the Amnesty Law, with which the military shielded itself long before handing over power.
singular context
The actions of the Supreme Court did nothing more than reactivate memories of that past at a time when the extreme right, which is managed by the Constituent Council, trivializes what happened after September 11, 1973 or openly defends Pinochet.
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