It took nearly four decades for a conviction. On Friday, January 5, Chile's Supreme Court handed down a 20-year prison sentence to four now-retired soldiers for the killing of two people in the so-called “Quemados” case.
This dark episode of dictatorship occurred on July 2, 1986, against the backdrop of a nationwide strike against the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. That day, a military patrol arrested two young Chileans, beat them, doused them with fuel and burned them. 18-year-old Carmen Gloria Quintana, a university student at the time of the incident, survived her severe burns, unlike Rodrigo Rojas de Negri, a 19-year-old photographer who died four days later.
On Friday, Chile's Supreme Court sentenced Pinochet regime officials Pedro Fernandez Dittus, Julio Castañer Gonzalez, Ivan Figueroa Canobra and Nelson Medina Galvez to 20 years in prison for the murder of Rojas de Negri and the attempted murder of Carmen Gloria Quintana.
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“A long process, very tiring”
This verdict ends “a long, very difficult trial in which the aim was to question an official thesis of the dictator that the young people burned themselves because they were carrying incendiary bombs under their clothes,” commented Carmen Gloria Quintana's lawyer , Nelson Caucoto, is quoted by a local radio.
The Quemados affair is one of the most symbolic of the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), in which more than 3,200 people died or went missing.
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