24 retired police convicted of human rights violations in Chile

[Judi Lynn]

Source: International Herald Tribune/Associated Press

24 retired police convicted of human rights violations in Chile
The Associated Press
Thursday, March 20, 2008

SANTIAGO, Chile: Two dozen retired police officers were convicted Wednesday of human rights violations linked to the 1973 massacre of 30 political prisoners — the biggest group of defendants ever sentenced in such a trial in Chile.

Judge Emma Diaz convicted the former officers on charges involving the detention, torture and shooting of 31 leftists whose bodies were dumped in a fast-flowing river days after Chile's military coup. One woman survived to testify about the incident.

Retired police Col. Adrian Fernandez, 66, was given a maximum sentence of life in prison, while the others received lesser sentences ranging between four and 20 years, a statement from Chile's Judicial Authority said.

Most of the victims, reportedly active in the country's Socialist and Communist parties, were detained by security agents near the southern city of Osorno days after Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power in September 1973.

One of them — Blanca Valderas Garrido, an elected socialist mayor at the time — told a panel that she had been with the other prisoners when they were executed, but survived when a gun jammed and she was beaten but tossed alive from a bridge.



Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/20/america/LA-GEN-Chile-Human-Rights.php

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Chile and the United States:
Declassified Documents relating to
the Military Coup, 1970-1976

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. CNN: Decades after coup, 24 sentenced for rights violations in Chile

updated 2 hours, 58 minutes ago
Decades after coup, 24 sentenced for rights violations in Chile

CNN) -- A court in Chile has sentenced 24 former police officers in cases of kidnapping, torture and murder that happened just after a U.S.-backed coup toppled the country's democratically elected president in 1973, the country's Judicial Authority said Wednesday.

The former officers were sentenced for their roles in a national wave of kidnapping, torture and murder that killed thousands of Chileans after a coup overthrew President Salvador Allende, a Socialist, on Sept. 11, 1973.

The case involved the most defendants sentenced at one time on charges related to widespread repression committed during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who took power after the coup, according to a report in The Nation, a Chilean newspaper.

Pinochet was widely blamed for encouraging subordinates to kidnap, torture and kill people with suspected leftist ties, such as journalists and union members. Years after he left power in 1990, courts indicted him in two human rights cases, but judges threw out the charges on the grounds that Pinochet was too ill to stand trial.

More:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/03/20/chile.convictions/index.html



Henry Kissinger & Chile's butcher dictator,
Augusto Pinochet, in the uniform.



American journalist, Charles Horman,
tortured and killed at Chile stadium
in Santiago, Chile by Pinochet's government.