The Santiago Court of Appeals on Monday raised the prison sentences against ten retired soldiers for burning two young men alive in 1986, in one of the most atrocious episodes of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, known as the “Caso Quemados.”
The court rectified the sentence passed, in the first instance in 2019, rejecting “the res judicata exception regarding one of the convicted” and increasing the sentences for the “qualified homicide” of photographer Rodrigo Rojas de Negri and the “homicide qualified frustrated” of the student Carmen Gloria Quintana, explained the Judiciary.
Unanimously, the court sentenced soldiers Julio Castañer González, Iván Figueroa Canobra, Nelson Medina Gálvez and Pedro Fernández Dittus to 20 years in prison for being the perpetrators of the crimes.
Meanwhile, Leonardo Riquelme Alarcón, Walter Lara Gutiérrez, Juan Ramón González Carrasco and Pedro Franco Rivas were sentenced to 10 years in prison for their responsibility as accomplices, while Francisco Vásquez Vergara and René Muñoz Bruce must serve three years as accessories.
The victims were detained by a military patrol on July 2, 1986 during a day of protest against the dictatorship and later beaten, doused with gasoline and burned alive.
The convicts threw the victims into a ditch next to a rural road, on the outskirts of Santiago, in the Quilicura commune, where Rojas de Negri died hours after the attack, but Quintana, only 17 years old, managed to save himself. despite the serious burns and injuries.
The “Caso Quemados”, one of the most emblematic of the time, led to protests against the military regime at the national level and abroad, mainly in the United States, where the murdered photographer lived.
It should be remembered that according to official figures, during the Pinochet dictatorship, around 3,200 Chileans died at the hands of state agents, of which 1,192 are still listed as disappeared detainees, while another 33,000 were tortured and imprisoned for political reasons.
