Officers Arrested in 1986 Burning Death of U.S. Student in Chile
|
Version 0 of 1. SANTIAGO, Chile — A judge on Tuesday ordered the arrest of two former army officers and five former noncommissioned officers accused in the 1986 killing of Rodrigo Rojas, a United States resident, and the serious injury of a young woman. The two were set on fire by members of three military patrols during a protest in Santiago. The warrants are part of a continuing investigation by Judge Mario Carroza into the burning, one of the heinous crimes committed during the 17-year dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The case was reopened in 2013 when a human rights organization filed a criminal complaint in Chile on behalf of Mr. Rojas’s family. By Tuesday evening, all seven of the accused had been taken into custody. Last year, a former soldier testified and identified an official who he said had set the two on fire. The former officers were the commanders of two military patrols involved: Lt. Julio Castañer and Iván Figueroa. The commander of the third patrol, Lt. Pedro Fernández, was exempted because he had already been sentenced by a military court in 1991. The judge did not issue arrest warrants for the 17 soldiers said to have obeyed their orders. Mr. Rojas, a 19-year-old photographer and student at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, had returned to Chile in May 1986 to rediscover his birth country and take photographs along the way. He grew up in the Chilean exile community in Washington, the son of Verónica De Negri, a political exile and supporter of Salvador Allende, the socialist president. After a military coup toppled the Allende government in 1973, Ms. De Negri was imprisoned, tortured and expelled from the country. She settled in Washington with her two sons, Rodrigo and Pablo, in 1977. On the morning of July 2, 1986, Mr. Rojas accompanied a group of people to photograph a two-day national strike against the dictatorship in a working-class neighborhood in Santiago, the capital. Military patrols intercepted the group, and nearly everyone fled. Mr. Rojas and an engineering student, Carmen Gloria Quintana, 18, were captured. According to Ms. Quintana and multiple witnesses, members of the patrols beat them severely, doused them with gasoline and set them on fire. Fernando Guzmán, an 18-year-old soldier at the time, was a member of one of the three military patrols. He testified in court that the commander of one of those patrols, Lieutenant Castañer, had ordered a soldier to pour gasoline on the two. “Lieutenant Castañer was taunting them with a lighter,” and insulting them, Mr. Guzmán said. “It was Lieutenant Castañer who set them on fire with a lighter,” Mr. Guzmán said. “Both burst into flames immediately.” Mr. Guzmán said that he heard Lieutenant Castañer tell the commander of a third military patrol, Lieutenant Fernández, that it was better to kill them off. “But Fernández said no, because he was a Catholic,” Mr. Guzmán said. Lieutenant Castañer confiscated Mr. Rojas’s camera, he said. Lieutenant Castañer is an adviser to the chief of staff of the army division in Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of the country, and until 2010 was a professor of political science at the University of Magallanes. In statements to the police last year, he denied seeing the victims being sprayed with gasoline or the moment when they caught fire, and he said he did not recall Mr. Rojas’s having a camera with him. Lieutenant Fernández’s patrol took the two victims to the outskirts of Santiago and dumped them in a ditch, leaving them to die. They were found by local workers, taken to a police station and later to a hospital. Both had burns over 60 percent of their bodies, but government officials refused to authorize their transfer to a hospital with a better burn unit. Ms. De Negri, who worked as a youth counselor in Maryland and was a board member of Amnesty International at the time, was banned from entering the country. Chilean human rights organizations and Harry G. Barnes Jr., the United States ambassador to Chile at the time, persuaded the military regime to authorize her entry. Ms. De Negri was able to spend her son’s last days with him. Mr. Rojas died on July 6, 1986. The killing strained relations with the Reagan administration at a time when it was beginning to press the regime for democratization. Ms. Quintana, who was severely disfigured by the burns, spent the next two years in Canada receiving medical treatment and undergoing about 40 operations, and several more years in therapy. Later, she pursued a psychology degree and married. Last year, she was appointed by President Michelle Bachelet as scientific attaché of the Chilean Embassy in Ottawa. After the killing, the army denied any involvement. General Pinochet suggested that the two had accidentally set themselves on fire with inflammable material they were carrying to build barricades. More than two weeks later, the army admitted the presence of two dozen members of the military at the scene but maintained that the victims were responsible for their burns. A civilian judge echoed the official version and charged Lieutenant Fernández with involuntary manslaughter, but then turned over the investigation to the Martial Court, which reduced the charges to negligence and in 1991 sentenced him to 600 days in prison, which he did not serve. Two weeks after the crime, said Mr. Guzmán, the former soldier, the 17 conscripts who were part of the military patrols were taken to a regiment, threatened and instructed by Lieutenants Castañer and Fernández about what to say in the investigation. “We had to memorize statements that had already been drafted,” he said. “They had even made a mock-up of the place so that we could learn our version better.” They gathered several times to agree on their stories, Mr. Guzmán said. At one point, he said, they had a meeting with the vice commander in chief of the army at the time, Santiago Sinclair, now 87, who said that nothing would ever happen to them and that they should think about their families. “I am still afraid and think that maybe they will act on their threats,” Mr. Guzmán told the judge. In 2013, two museums exhibited Mr. Rojas’s photographs for the first time: high school cheerleaders in Washington; the streets of Lima, Peru; and children playing in a slum in Santiago, his last stop. |