SANTIAGO, CHILE.- After 37 years of impunity, the Supreme Court of Chile sentenced four former U.S. officers to 20 years in prison Armed forces who burned two young people alive in a protest against the dictator Augusto Pinochetin July 1986. Only one survived.
The sentence, against which there is no appeal, also sentenced a retired colonel who had been acquitted in a previous ruling, and a corporal, to three years and one day in prison, for both covering up the events in which the young student was killed. university student Carmen Gloria Quintana and the photographer Rodrigo Rojas de Negri.
The ruling reduced the sentence from 10 years in prison to 3 years for four soldiers of the Armed Forces patrol involved in the attack, while two other soldiers were acquitted.
The process was promoted by Quintana and Rojas de Negri’s mother, who demanded justice from the first moment, in what was called the Quemados Case, which the Chilean Court has put an end to.
Supreme Court and Quemados case in Chile
On July 2, 1986, in Santiago de Chile, Rodrigo Rojas de Negri and Carmen Gloria Quintana were preparing to participate in a two-day protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pincohet, on a street near the concentration, but they were stopped by a patrol military. They were beaten and doused with gasoline, and after an officer in charge threatened them several times with a lighter, he burned them alive.
They were days of growing demonstrations against the regime and fierce repression during that year, considered decisive for the fall of Pinochet who left in March 1990. The event was considered one of the most horrible crimes of the dictatorship.
The photographer Rojas died and Quintana survived the serious burns that lacerated his face and body.
Pinochet soldiers condemned
The ruling of the Supreme Court includes the qualified, consummated homicide of Rojas, and the frustrated homicide of Quintana, according to the Chilean radio station Radio Biobio, agencies cited. Furthermore, he rejected the application of mitigating circumstances, such as half-prescription and due obedience requested by the defense of the accused.
The main convicts are: the commanding officer, Pedro Fernández Dittus, who received a 20-year prison sentence even though he had been acquitted in lower courts. Also, the same sentence to officers Iván Figueroa Canobra, Julio Castañer González and Nelson Medina.
Retired Colonel René Muñoz Bruce, then active and who had been acquitted, was sentenced to three years and one day in prison, as was Corporal Francisco Vásquez Vergara.
End of the torturous search for justice
Nelson Caucoto Pereira declared that the sentence “means putting an end to a long process, very tortuous in its development, where it was necessary to contest an official thesis established by the dictator himself, in that the young people burned themselves because they carried in their clothing the incendiary bombs,” as quoted by Europa Press.
Caucoto highlighted that “all of this was prepared and put together from the highest military spheres, with the help of a functional military justice that lent itself to this judicial fraud, today the Supreme Court exposes it, as the Court of Appeals had done before. “.
Quintana, speaking to TVN Chile, said that it is still difficult for him to overcome the injuries he received, especially “how a human being can do this to another human being.”
Source: With information from EuropaPress, TVN of Chile, Diario Las Américas editorial staff
