On August 28th, shortly before Chile celebrates the 50th anniversary of the coup to overthrow socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) on September 11th, a ruling by the Supreme Court caused an international stir: seven soldiers will be retired of the army were convicted as perpetrators of the kidnapping and murder of the singer-songwriter and leader of Latin American music Víctor Jara, who was killed with blows and bullets five days after the bombing of the La Moneda Palace at the Chile Stadium in Santiago at the age of Led to dictatorship by Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) for 17 years. More than 1,000 people are still missing.
It is a sentence handed down by the Chilean courts 50 years after the murder of Víctor Jara and the former warden of the Allende-Littré-Quiroga prison, and against the perpetrators – who had not yet been convicted – between the ages of 73 and 86 years old was imposed. One of them, the eldest, retired Brigadier General Hernán Chacón, committed suicide the next day when police ordered him to go to prison. “It seems terrible to me, very unfortunate for the family. It’s dramatic. It hit me very much when I found out,” Nelson Caucoto, lawyer for the family of the author of compositions such as “I remember you, Amanda” and “The right to live in peace,” tells EL PAÍS since 1999 . At that point, the case was reopened after being closed for more than two decades, a judicial process that was repeated in all cases of human rights violations in post-coup Chile.
Víctor Jara, in a picture of the foundation that bears his name.
Nelson Caucoto (Iquique, Chile, 1951) has dedicated 47 years to representing victims of human rights violations during the Pinochet dictatorship: his entire professional career. For this reason, he is both a witness and a protagonist in the judicial history of this type of cases since 1976, when he took on his first case, recently completed at the University of Concepción, for the arrest of the missing Nicomedes Toro Bravo until today. Virtually every week in 2023, he has heard dozens of cases before the Supreme Court that are still open and in their final stages. In addition to Víctor Jara’s crime, he was a plaintiff in hundreds of cases, including the beheading of three communist militants in 1985, the Operation Colombo disappearances and the assassination of Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria.
But to reach this moment, when the higher courts have begun to ratify a large part of the verdicts of Pinochet’s former agents, Caucoto, like many lawyers in his area, had to lose all his legal resources for three decades. This is because in the 1970s, 1980s and much of the 1990s, when democracy had already taken hold, a different generation of judges than the current generation either granted amnesty to cases or the military justice system applied for them and dismissed them. This explains why there are still many ongoing trials that were reopened after 1998, when hundreds of complaints were filed against Pinochet for crimes against humanity following his arrest in London on the orders of the Spanish judiciary.
Caucoto has vivid memories of these difficult times when he left the Vicariate of Solidarity (1973-1990) at the age of 26. It was an emblematic organization that advised the families of victims during the bloodiest years of the dictatorship and whose lawyers in the Chilean appeal courts “lost more than 10,000 low-level protection applications they had filed.” Arrests and disappearances of Allende supporters. “I have learned to read ministers’ lips [que integraban entonces las cortes de apelaciones]: ‘Now this guy is saying pure nonsense,'” he says.
Portrait of the human rights lawyer in an interview with EL PAÍS. ALEX DIAZ (EL PAIS)
In the face of defeat, remember that the climate in the Vicariate was key to overcoming these defeats. “There was an atmosphere of friendship, solidarity and welcome,” he emphasizes. “I lost everything. But when it comes to human rights, you have to have a different conviction and in the end you can achieve something.” “You have to have the patience of a saint,” says the lawyer.
But once Caucoto lost the “patience of the saint.” Namely in the case of Víctor Jara, in which he represents the singer’s widow, Joan Jara, and his daughters Amanda and Manuela. “The first thing I looked for was the information that the State of Chile had provided to the Inter-American Commission [en 1974]: reported that Víctor Jara was killed by snipers. And it was not a murmur: it came from the State of Chile to the Inter-American Commission!”
Exhausted from working in the armed forces to find out who was responsible for the Chile Stadium, which held more than 5,000 detainees along with the singer-songwriter, in 2004 he made a public call for information and dared to announce that he would request that the military junta be subpoenaed to testify when Pinochet was still alive (he died in 2006).
Although he seems to be suffering from a nervous breakdown, Nelson Caucoto raises his voice, recalling, with a passion that recalls the helplessness of those years, how much it took to advance Víctor Jara’s crimes. “It was so difficult,” he says. “Neither the carabineros, nor the army, nor the navy, nor aviation. Nobody was responsible for the Chile Stadium… And what did the Army General Staff report? That it was impossible to determine who was in command because supposedly there was a rotating command every day and therefore we didn’t know who it was. We insisted so much and they never gave us the information.”
Víctor Jara at a political rally in Santiago, Chile, in September 1973. Marcelo Montecino (Flickr Vision)
He remembers being overwhelmed and asking himself: “If there were 5,000 prisoners here, how can we not have witnesses?” In the end, he remembers, after that call, little by little there was data from former political prisoners and then from former conscripts appeared who were in this facility. “Witnesses came in droves. A lot of people called. “I sent the judge a list and that’s where the story started.”
Regarding human rights cases in Chile, Caucoto says: “I believe that history must be written in such a way that there were 30 years in which nothing was investigated.” [entre 1973 y 1997 aproximadamente]. With the exception of very exceptional cases such as the conviction in the Beheaded case in 1995 and the murder of the transporter Mario Fernández in 1997.
Questions: Numerous verdicts have been handed down recently, which also coincided with the 50th anniversary of the coup. Can we talk about impunity in Chile?
Answer. There is no impunity in Chile. But it existed for 30 years, without a doubt. Over the last 20 years, the judiciary has intensified its work. And it has fulfilled the function on which it is based: the protection of human rights. If the courts do not protect human rights, they are useless.
Caucoto says that it was the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the coup that brought these cases back to the agenda, but that they have continued to be processed and made progress for several years. And he points out that just last July, the Supreme Court convicted 33 former public officials for five people who disappeared in 1987, a case in which he is also a plaintiff.
But the road was long. Very long. And 2004, the lawyer recalls, was a key year because there was a case in which he was also one of the plaintiffs that tested the Chilean justice system on human rights issues: the disappearance of the tailor and activist of the Revolutionary Left movement (MIR), Miguel Ángel Sandoval Rodríguez, was arrested on public streets by state agents on January 7, 1975. He was 26 years old.
The investigation into the Sandoval case was conducted by Judge Alejandro Solís, who found that the leadership of Pinochet’s secret police, the DINA, led by its director, retired General Manuel Contreras (who died in 2015), was responsible for his disappearance. It was a ruling that was upheld by the Santiago Court of Appeal but went to the Supreme Court for review at the end of 2004. For human rights lawyers, it was a key case because it would be a verdict that would set the tone for what was to come: for the first time, the highest court would decide whether the amnesty law that so encouraged the dictatorship constituted crimes The crimes committed between 1973 and 1978 were not investigated, but there was a conviction.
Caucoto remembers this moment of tension before the verdict: “I thought: It’s an enormous responsibility that I’m taking on.” If I don’t get out of here, all causes will end. Because if the Supreme Court had said dismissal through amnesty or statute of limitations, everything else would be over. We were in danger whether international law would apply or not.”
Ultimately, the ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in a unanimous vote in 2005 and became a precedent that continues to this day.
It was a pivotal time, says Caucoto, because that same year retired General Hugo Salas Wenzel, the director of the CNI, Pinochet’s organization that replaced the DINA, was accused of the murders of twelve former members of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front in 1987 ( FPMR). “I don’t know in which other country one can imagine the imprisonment of the two heads of the secret service apparatus,” says Caucoto, who was also a plaintiff in this case.