More Errors in Chilean Army Report on Slain Political Prisoners

EFE News Service
February 3, 2002

Santiago, Feb 2 (EFE) — The recent discovery of the skeletal remains of 300 people buried on a military base reveals new errors in the information on abuses during the Pinochet regime that the Chilean armed forces supplied to the government, judicial spokesmen disclosed Saturday. In a preliminary identification by Judge Amanda Valdovinos and family members of the disappeared, the remains were identified as those of Palace chief Enrique Huerta, sociologist Claudio Jimeno and presidential bodyguard Domingo Blanco.

The three were arrested in the national palace on Sept. 11, 1973, the day of the military coup that overthrew socialist President Salvador Allende.

In a report containing the supposed whereabouts of 200 people's remains, which the army submitted to President Ricardo Lagos in January 2001, Huerta, Jimeno and Blanco were said to have been thrown into the ocean near the port of San Antonio, 110 kilometers from Santiago. This tactic was used by the regimes in Chile and later in Argentina.

Valdovinos, picked by the Supreme Court to investigate the disappearance and homicide of 20 people on a military base, confirmed that the discovered remains belong to, for the most part, those who were detained in the palace on the day of the 1973 coup.

The remains were found in a pit in the northern part of the army's Fort Arteaga, located in Colina, 35 kilometers north of Santiago.

According to the Rettig Report, which documented the human rights violations committed during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Pinochet, prisoners arrested in the palace were moved to the Tacna de Santiago regiment, where they were shot after being tortured.