CHILE: Scandal over Fugitive Former Insurgents

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Jun 25 2002 (IPS) - The Chilean government wants the courts to take action against a reporter who alleged that agents of the state had helped protect fugitive former insurgents implicated in the 1991 murder of a right-wing senator.

Deputy Minister of the Interior Jorge Correa asked special investigating Judge Hugo Dolmestch Monday to summon journalist Beatriz Undurraga, who wrote a controversial story that was published Saturday by the newspaper El Mercurio, to testify.

Dolmestch is handling the case involving the April 1991 assassination of Senator Jaime Guzmán, founder of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI), the party that took the most votes in the December 2001 legislative elections.

Guzmán was killed in his car by a commando of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), a Marxist insurgent group that emerged in 1982, during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-90).

Raúl Escobar, who is accused of firing the six shots that killed Guzmán, was never captured.

A week ago, Brazilian justice officials informed Santiago that Escobar had been sighted in the town of Santana do Livramento, on the border with Uruguay.

The initial media reports indicated that Escobar was virtually hemmed in. But a procedural delay that arose when the Chilean justice system requested Escobar’s arrest, through diplomatic channels, apparently allowed him to slip away.

The newspaper article written by Undurraga hinted that Escobar had been warned of his supposedly imminent capture by a “protection network” operating in Chile, with links to officials in the Office of Public Security and Information (DISPI), which answers to the Interior Ministry.

According to unnamed “police intelligence officials” cited by Undurraga, “representatives” of the central-left coalition government of Ricardo Lagos “negotiated” with insurgents through informants in the DISPI, “with the aim of preventing them from coming to Chile to carry out violent acts.”

Escobar, known in the FPMR as “Commander Emilio”, was reportedly accompanied by Pablo Muñoz Hoffman, who is also implicated in Guzmán’s murder, and who staged a spectacular escape by helicopter from a maximum security prison in December 1996.

Sources with the judicial system said it was Escobar who engineered the escape of Muñoz Hoffman and two other FPMR members, Mauricio Hernández and Patricio Ortiz.

Hernández was captured on Feb 2 by the Brazilian police in Sao Paulo after security forces rescued Brazilian advertising mogul Washington Olivetto, who was kidnapped and held for 53 days by a group of Chileans and Colombians.

Escobar was also allegedly one of the organisers of Olivetto’s kidnapping. But he and Muñoz Hoffman purportedly escaped the police operation in which the advertising executive was rescued and the other members of the supposed insurgent commando were arrested.

Reports from Brazil indicate that the two fugitives are still in the border region, supposedly moving between Santana do Livramento and the Uruguayan city of Rivera, which are only separated by a street.

Parliamentary Deputy Pablo Longueira, president of the UDI, asked the Lagos administration last week to protest the apparent bungling of the arrest by Brazilian police, which supposedly made it possible for Escobar and Muñoz Hoffman to escape while authorities were awaiting the arrest warrant from Chile.

After El Mercurio published the report alleging that the former members of the FPMR had received protection from a network with ties to DISPI, right-wing lawmakers demanded that the government launch an investigation.

Interior Minister José Miguel Insulza, however, denied the allegations published by El Mercurio.

“The government is convinced that this is nothing but slander, but that can only be determined by the courts,” Deputy Minister Correa said Monday.

“We are not asking the newspaper El Mercurio to reveal its sources, but we are asking it to disclose the evidence it possesses that state agents committed such grave crimes” (protecting the insurgents), said Correa.

A Chilean “press law”, enacted in June 2001, guarantees the right of reporters to protect the confidentiality of their sources.

Undurraga, who writes in the police pages of El Mercurio, has been accused by human rights groups of cooperating with the repressive security agencies during the Pinochet dictatorship.

The journalist was targetted three years ago by the Funa Commission, an organisation of young people that holds street demonstrations to reveal the identity of the dictatorship’s torturers and human rights violators, who continue to enjoy impunity.

According to a 1991 truth commission report, the dictatorship assassinated or “disappeared” more than 3,000 supposed subversives.

The FPMR, which ambushed Pinochet in 1986, killing six of his bodyguards, split up after democracy was restored in 1990, between those who wanted to insert themselves into legal political life and a faction that wanted to continue staging armed actions.

Escobar, Hernández and Muñoz Hoffman belonged to the second group, known as the “autonomous” faction.

The FPMR is not currently active in Chile, and the actions staged in other countries by its one-time “commanders” are described either as common criminal activity or politically- motivated acts.