Former brigadier general and DINA officer Pedro Espinoza Bravo was given 40 years for his part in the planning of the political assassinations. Espinoza has been charged several times for his roles in “Operation Condor” and the “Caravan of Death,” in which former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s political opponents were kidnapped and murdered.

In addition to sentencing Contreras and Espinoza, Judge Alejandro Solís announced that José Zara, Juan Morales Salgado and Christoph Willeke will each spend 20 years and two days behind bars for their involvement in the Prats case. Raúl Iturriaga and Mariana Callejas received sentences of 30 years and 10 years and one day, respectively. Judge Solís also handed down two 541 day sentences to DINA sub-official Reginaldo Valdés.

According to Contreras’ testimony, the DINA planned and executed the Prats family assassination on direct orders from Pinochet.

Prats served a Commander and Chief of the Chilean Army during the presidency of socialist Salvador Allende. Following civil unrest, Prats stepped down on August 22, 1973. His resignation allowed plans for a military coup to continue in full force. His replacement was Gen. Augusto Pinochet, at that time believed to be a staunch Allende loyalist.

After the September 11, 1973 coup, Prats went into exile with his wife to the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. Pinochet viewed Prats, a constitutionalist who remained popular among the military ranks following his resignation, as the primary barrier to achieving military unity behind the governing Junta.

Human rights advocates see the convictions, which come 34 years after the car bombing that killed Prats and Cuthbert on September 30, 1974, as a key milestone in Chile’s struggle to mend its troubled human rights past. Before Monday’s decision, the only conviction in the Prats case had been handed down by an Argentine court on July 15, 2007.

Angélica Prats, the victims’ daughter, was filled with emotion following the court’s decision. “These 34 years have been spent searching for truth and justice,” she said. “There were some very difficult moments when we feared the killers would never be punished. Judge Solís handed down a clear judgment for the perpetrators of the crime. Although Augusto Pinochet is unable to be punished for his numerous crimes against Chile, this ruling brings a sense of justice for the murder of my parents and for all the victims of the military government.”

In a Monday press release, Socialist Party President Camilo Escalona welcomed the court’s decision. “This ruling is an act of justice against the military regime’s terror against Chile and its people,” he said. “The judgment today is a message that cannot be ignored by civilians and future military personnel. … Judgments such as these allow our society, particularly the victims and their families, to regain its moral consciousness.”

Escalona also repeated his disgust for what he called Senate President Adolfo Zaldívar’s “thesis that trials against the military should end.” “To entertain Zaldívar’s recommendation is to ignore the countless cries for closure by the victims’ families,” said Escalona. “Judge Solís’ successful convictions show that indictments are still a legitimate means of delivering justice in Chile.”

Amnesty International Chile also praised the court’s decision, but said much work remains to be done to achieve justice for victims of Pinochet-era human rights violations. “We welcome the conviction of Manuel Contreras and others for the killing of Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife. We view the judgment as a significant step towards ending impunity for human rights violations during the military regime. Ongoing cases concerning human rights violations should continue to be investigated, as well as the actions of other military officers – both retired and active – who may have been involved,” Amnesty told The Santiago Times.

Contreras and Espinoza have been in the spotlight for decades concerning their alleged roles in countless human rights violations following the 1973 coup against Allende. In 1993, Contreras and Espinoza were convicted for their role in the Washington, D.C. car bomb plot that claimed the lives of Marcos Orlando Letelier — who served as Chile’s Ambassador to the United States under Allende —and his assistant Ronnie Moffet on September 21, 1976.

While the involvement of the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency in destabilizing Allende’s government prior to the coup continues to be debated, declassified documents reveal a deeper relationship between the CIA and the DINA concerning the political operations designed to eliminate the political opponents of Pinochet.

According to a series of documents declassified on September 19, 2000, the CIA “maintained contact with Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda” between 1974 and 1977. The report added that Contreras was “necessary to accomplish the CIA’s mission, in spite of concerns that this relationship might lay the CIA open to charges of aiding internal political repression.”

”This is, in fact, the unraveling of a cover-up of U.S. ties to repression during the Pinochet dictatorship,” said Peter Kornbluh, a Senior Analyst for the National Security Archive.

“As a result of lessons learned in Chile, Central America and elsewhere, the CIA now carefully reviews all contacts for potential involvement in human rights abuses and makes a deliberate decision balancing the nature and severity of the human rights abuse against the potential intelligence value of continuing the relationship,” a 2000 Senate report stated. “These standards, established in the mid 1990′s, would likely have altered the amount of contact we had with perpetrators of human rights violators in Chile.”

SOURCES: LA TERCERA, EL MERCURIO, THE NEW YORK TIMES, US NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVES
By Jason Snyder

Julio Salazar Monroe, a retired army general and former head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), was sentenced to 35 years in prison as an accessory before the fact, for instigating the crimes.

The court also sentenced three former members of the Colina Group, ex-army intelligence service (SIE) agents Fernando Lecca Sequen, José Alarcón Gonzales, and Orlando Vera Navarrete, to 15-year prison terms, for having participated in the kidnapping, torture and murder of the professor and students and the incineration of their bodies.

The Colina Group is also connected to the Nov. 3, 1991, attack in Lima’s Barrios Altos district, in which hooded Colina group members stormed into a squalid tenement building and opened fire on party goers with submachine guns fitted with silencers, killing 15 people. One of the victims was an 8-year-old boy, who was struck by 11 bullets.
In line with a 2006 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the First Anti-Corruption Court ordered those convicted to pay reparations equivalent to 50,000 dollars to each parent, spouse and child of the victims, and 20,000 dollars to each sibling.

Former presidential adviser Montesinos, and former army commander Nicolás Hermoza (1991-1998), are awaiting sentencing.

The alleged leader of the Colina group, ex-army Maj. Santiago Martin Rivas,(a decorated graduate of the U.S. School of the Americas), and Carlos Pichilingüe, as well as some other members of the organization, were not on trial because they are serving 20-year sentences handed down by a military tribunal in 1994. See Abducted Below

The three-judge panel aquited another member of the squad and three officers accused of providing support for it. Acquitted were, retired officers Aquilino Portella, Carlos Miranda and Julio Rodríguez, as well as Manuel Hinojosa and Ángel Pino, for lack of evidence. The verdict made no reference to a ninth man charged
The killings became a landmark human rights case in Peru, where security forces fought a bloody war against Shining Path Rebels in the 1980s and early 1990s. The insurgency began to fade after Abimael Guzman and other key rebel commanders were captured in 1992.
The death squad operated out of the Army Intelligence Service Headquarters as part of a “low intensity” war allegedly sanctioned by former President Alberto Fujimori against Shining Path guerrillas and suspected sympathizers of their Maoist-inspired insurgency.
According to the newspaper La Primera, the military officers who organized Peru’s commandos and the counterinsurgency “dirty war” were trained at SOA, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). (Prensa Latina, Feb.

Fujimori, whose decade-long authoritarian regime crumbled in 2000 amid mounting corruption scandals, is currently facing a separate trial for Colina group massacres. Fujimori has denied any knowledge of the death squad’s existence and says he never approved a dirty war against leftist rebels.
A truth commission determined in 2003 that the insurgency took nearly 70,000 lives between 1980 and 2000, including non-combatants, members of the security forces and rebels.
In 2000 Fujimori fled to Japan, his parents’ homeland, as his 10-year autocratic regime collapsed in a corruption scandal involving Vladimiro Montesinos, his closest adviser.
In 2005, he flew unexpectedly to Chile, from where he was extradited in September 2007 to face trial on human rights and corruption charges.

Abducted

In the pre-dawn hours of July 18, 1992, nine students and one professor “disappeared” from La Cantuta University in the Peruvian capital, Lima. Witnesses saw them being beaten and forcibly dragged away.

In April, 1993, a group of Peruvian military officers calling themselves “Sleeping Lion”, anonymously released a document detailing the La Cantuta massacre. They stated, an official government death squad had kidnapped the ten victims, tortured and murdered them, and then hurriedly buried, exhumed, burned, and reburied the bodies. The document named the death squad members, including its chief of operations, Major Santiago Martín Rivas, and revealed that it operated under orders from the de facto head of the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, a close ally of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori.

In response to these charges, the Fujimori government suggested that perhaps the ten people at La Cantuta had “kidnapped” themselves and were, in fact, hiding from the authorities.

But on July 8, 1993, Mariella Lucy Barreto Riofano, an agent of the Peruvian Army Intelligence Service, leaked a marked map to a Peruvian magazine. Reporters found the brutalized remains of the “La Cantuta 10″ in Cieneguilla, a holiday resort near Lima. Investigation suggested strongly that the Peruvian intelligence services and the Peruvian army were responsible for the torture and murder, and that the actions were approved by the highest levels of the Peruvian government.

The case was taken to court in 1994, and for the first time military personnel had to answer for their official acts. Charges were brought and eleven perpetrators were convicted, but the court officially cleared the military and the intelligence services of any complicity in the crime. In July, 1995 the government released even those individuals who had been convicted.

The US State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Peru 1996:

A 1995 law granted amnesty from prosecution to those who committed human rights abuses during the war on terrorism from May 1980 to June 1995. When lower court judge Antonia Sacquicuray declared the Amnesty Law unconstitutional, Congress immediately passed a second law blocking any judicial review of the law’s constitutionality. Subsequently, a split decision by a superior court overturned the Sacquicuray decision. These events created considerable concern over military and police impunity for past abuses. The Amnesty Law also cleared the records of security force personnel who had already been convicted of human rights abuses, including the eight military perpetrators of the 1992 La Cantuta massacre, who were sentenced in 1994 but released by military authorities a few days after the Amnesty Law’s passage.
In July the United Nations Human Rights Committee severely criticized the Amnesty Law and called for its repeal. Committee members considered the Amnesty Law a violation of the Constitution, reflecting the earlier Sacquicuray decision. The Amnesty Law demonstrates a lack of serious commitment to accountability and the protection of human rights.

Meanwhile, two months after the State Department released its annual report on Peru, 28-year-old army intelligence agent Mariella Barreto, (former girlfriend of Colina Group Chief, Army Major Santiago Martin Rivas), the Peruvian intelligence operative who had confessed to leaking the information about the La Cantuta massacre, was herself found murdered.

Her body had been decapitated and dismembered by her colleagues in the Army Intelligence Service. “It is believed that Barreto was tortured to death, as her body was bruised, her spine broken, and some of her joints had been cut with a scalpel” (El Diario-La Prensa, April 8, 1997).

To cover up this crime (as is usual for crimes of the regime) then Defense Minister Tomas Castillo Meza announced that the military courts would assert jurisdiction over the Barreto case. Thus, the murderers become prosecutors and judges.

A few days later, Leonor La Rosa, another female SIE agent and partner of Barreto was tortured in the basement of the office of the high military command. In an April 6, 1997 interview, by Peru’s Channel 2 (Frecuencia Latina) La Rosa had revealed in detail that her superiors and fellow SIE intelligence officers had tortured her. Speaking from a military hospital ward, she displayed burn marks from electric shocks to her body. According to La Rosa’s account she was first tortured in January 1997, following a SIN investigation of some press leaks and then in February she was tortured again after refusing to participate in an undercover task linked to a sting operation against Air Force General Waldo Richter.

On June 5, 1997, La Rosa was released from the military hospital, transferred to a private clinic, and then fled to Mexico to save her life.

For publishing this interview and other similar ones, the regime retaliated against the owner of the TV, the Israeli Born Baruch Ivcher Bronstein with the loss of ownership of his TV station, and his Peruvian citizenship.

Victims and their Families

Professor Hugo Muñoz Sánchez
Roberto Edgar Teodoro Espinoza
Luis Enrique Ortiz Perea
Armando Richard Amaro Cóndor
Marcelino Manuel Rosales Cárdenas
Heráclides Pablo Meza
Juan Gabriel Mariños Figueroa
Dora Oyague Fierro
Bertila Lozano Torres
Felipe Flores Chipana

“Justice comes late, but it has come,” said Raida Cóndor, mother of one of the students killed at La Cantuta, who waited with other relatives for nine hours outside the Callao Naval Base to hear the reading of the sentence. “The verdict confirms everything that Fujimori denies. It’s clear that he authorized the murders, and he should pay for them.”

Gisella Ortiz, the sister of another of the murdered students, stressed that the court had determined that the Colina Group was part of the structure of the army and the SIN.

“The order to kill came from above. It’s no longer only we who are saying this: the justice authorities are now saying it,” said Ortiz.

Also, two former Peruvian military officers who attended arms orientation classes at SOA in 1981-1982, Telmo Ricardo Hurtado and Juan Rivera Rondon, are currently being sued in federal court in Miami for leading the units responsible for the death of 69 unarmed civilians living in the Andean highlands of Peru on Aug. 13, 1985. The plaintiffs, survivors of the massacre who lost relatives, are suing under the Alien Torts Statute; they are represented by the San Franciso-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA).