US documents published on Friday indicate former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet covered up the military’s role in the burning death of a 19-year-old US citizen during a 1986 protest, a case that drew worldwide condemnation and strained the regime’s relationship with Washington.
Declassified US Department of State cables from July 1986 cited a source within Chile’s national police force as saying a police report identifying those responsible for the attack on Rodrigo Rojas and another teen, Carmen Quintana, was presented to Pinochet, who refused to take it and rejected ordering an investigation. The cables were posted on Friday by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit organization based in Washington.
The attack on Rojas, a photographer from Washington whose mother was exiled from Chile, and the 18-year-old Quintana occurred during a street protest on July 2, 1986. Witnesses said soldiers doused the two with gasoline and set them ablaze, before abandoning them in a ditch on the outskirts of Santiago. Rojas died four days later and Quintana, a university student, suffered severe burns.
Photo: Reuters
Pinochet accused Rojas and Quintana of being terrorists who were burned by firebombs they planned to use against barricades. Chile’s army denied any involvement.
At the time, the burning attack drew broad condemnation from governments and rights groups. The administration of then-US president Ronald Reagan demanded a full investigation and judicial action.
Cables published by the National Security Archive cited “a reliable source within the Carabineros,” referring to Chile’s national police, as saying its investigation indicated “members of a Chilean army street patrol unit were involved in the burning of the two Chilean youths and the dumping of their bodies.”
The documents said that witnesses reported soldiers deliberately set Rojas and Quintana on fire and that the director of the central hospital blocked Rojas from being transferred to a clinic better equipped to treat him.
Quintana, whose disfigured face became a symbol of the atrocities committed by Pinochet’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, said the documents vindicated her account of the attack.
“The confidential files from the United States ratify what I have been saying, along with my parents and lawyers, for 29 years: that all of this was orchestrated from Pinochet on down,” Quintana told reporters on Friday. “The cables reveal the existence of an institutionalized system of lies in crimes against humanity and the systematic policy of the army to cover them up until now.”
The attackers long enjoyed impunity. However, a local judge recently charged 12 former soldiers in the crime, after another former soldier testified about the case, breaking a nearly three-decade pact of silence.
“Carmen Quintana and Rodrigo Rojas, who I watched grow up in Washington, deserve legal and historical justice,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
Chilean Minister of Foreign Affairs Heraldo Munoz on Friday said that the declassified documents would be translated into Spanish and handed over to authorities as part of the current investigation.
“For several weeks, we have been talking with the US State Department about lifting the redactions on blacked-out paragraphs in the declassified cables, including these, and, in addition, about completely declassifying the rest of the documents still classified by the United States related to this period,” Munoz said.
In all, 40,018 people were killed, tortured or imprisoned for political reasons during Pinochet’s dictatorship, according to official figures. Chile’s government estimates 3,095 were killed.
Pinochet died in 2006 under house arrest without ever being tried on charges of illegal enrichment and human rights violations.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of