The Second Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court unanimously sentenced Army Brigadier General (R) Orlando Carter Cuadra to 10 years and one day in prison for the qualified homicides of the MIR militants, Bautista Van schouwen Vasey and Patricio Munita Castillo, an event that occurred on December 14, 1973, on Avenida Américo Vespucio at 600 in the city of Santiago.
This, after the ministers Haroldo Brito, Manuel Antonio Valderrama, Jorge Dahm, Leopoldo Llanos and María Teresa Letelier, rejected individual appeals in form and substance presented by the military’s defense.
The plaintiff lawyer and representative of the relatives of both victims, Nelson Caucoto Pereira, expressed his satisfaction with this ruling, noting that “this is one of those cases destined to never be clarified again. However, the performance of justice is remarkable because they have not allowed these serious crimes to remain in impunity, and have allowed the unraveling of a complex and sophisticated intelligence action. As long as there is a will to prosecute these crimes against humanity, as in this case, there should be no crimes that remain unpunished and all the crimes of the dictatorship can be clarified for the good of Chile.”
In the same way, Caucoto valued the activity carried out by the lawyer Ilan Sandberg, from the Human Rights Program “is highly commendable, since he discovered the file that gave an account of what Mr. Carter Cuadra did with his patrol on December 14, 1973 “.
The convicted Orlando Carter, some time after these crimes, married the eldest daughter of Manuel Contreras. Both coincided in 1973 in the Tejas Verde Regiment, a military unit to which the Patrol that killed the victims belonged.
The victims
Bautista Van Schouwen, a 31-year-old doctor, founder of the MIR and one of its most charismatic leaders, was arrested along with Patricio Munita Castillo, 22, a law student at the University of Chile, who was serving as Van’s guard. Schouwen, on December 13, 1973, in the Parish of the Congregation of the Capuchins, located at Calle Catedral 2345, by members of the DINA, headed by Marcelo Morén Brito.
On the occasion, the priest Enrique White, who would have been the person who welcomed them in that parish, was also arrested, being taken to a secret DINA compound.
In the early morning of December 14, 1973, a Military Patrol made up of an officer, a non-commissioned officer and two conscripts, killed two people who, violating the curfew, with multiple shots in the back. The patrol verified that they did not carry identification documents or weapons, leaving the bodies abandoned on public roads. The victims turned out to be Van Schouwen and Munita, which was later confirmed through their fingerprints.
A sophisticated criminal plan
The criminal investigation to clarify the death of Van Schouwen and Munita Castillo, was plagued by irregular situations, which accounted for a sophisticated intelligence action, in order to confuse, hinder or prevent the discovery of the criminal action.
In this way, the autopsy protocols were lost in the SML, the corpses of the two victims were buried clandestinely by DINA personnel, outside working hours and with the consent of the authorities of the General Cemetery. They were buried in Patio 29 as “NN”, but when the family of Patricio Munita managed to find out where they had been buried, and were able to obtain the exhumation of their relative and transfer him to the Catholic Cemetery, the following day DINA personnel arrived and exhumed Bautista Van Schouwen, proceeding to cremate him, but not before arresting the General Cemetery worker who had buried the victims and taking him under arrest to the London 38 compound, where he remained for about three months.
The mother of Patricio Munita, Lucía Castillo, relative of a former Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and cousin of General Ernesto Baeza, at that time Director of Investigations of Chile, who had been the authority that initiated the exhumation and transfer of the remains of Patricio Munita to another enclosure.
This participation of General Baeza brought him problems with Pinochet, who had been alerted by DINA for his actions in this case, which earned him a reprimand from the dictator and a veiled threat.
