The World Today
MADRID, 22 (EUROPA PRESS)
Chilean justice on Thursday sentenced two retired army officers to ten years in prison for the kidnapping and subsequent disappearance of a social leader in October 1973, less than a month after the coup d'état that ousted democratic president Salvador Allende and gave rise to the military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet until 1990.
Special Judge for Human Rights Violations Marianel Cifuentes has sentenced "Francisco Ricardo Alfonso Varela Gantes, a second lieutenant in the Army at the time of the events, and Moisés Retamal Bustos, a former member of the Intelligence Section of the Puente Alto Railway Engineers Regiment," to a decade in prison and a lifelong ban from public and political office.
Likewise, according to the statement issued by the Judiciary, it has ordered the Public Administration to pay 130 million Chilean pesos (almost 115,300 euros) as compensation for moral damages to the family of the victim, Jorge Enrique Carrión Castro, a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) who disappeared at the age of 22, married and father of two children, in Puente Alto, a town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile, the country's capital.
The judge ruled that the soldiers in charge of the convicted men "unlawfully detained" Carrión and subsequently "took him" to the "Luis Emilio Recabarren" military camp in Puente Alto, where he was interrogated and "subjected to physical abuse." Afterward, in an attempt to escape, he was "captured, punished, and locked in a railroad car," although he was later removed from the car and his whereabouts have remained unknown.
