The minister on extraordinary visit for human rights cases of the Court of Appeals of San Miguel, Marianela Cifuentes, handed down a first instance ruling in the case investigating the qualified kidnapping, in a consummated degree, of Jenny Barra Rosales, a nursing student from the Catholic University and activist of the Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR, committed from October 17, 1977.
The judge sentenced the former soldiers and members of the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA, Pedro Espinoza Bravo (Army Brigadier), Rolf Wenderoth Pozo (Colonel), Juan Morales Salgado (colonel) and Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko (brigadier) as perpetrators of the crime of qualified kidnapping of the victim, to the penalty of 10 years of major prison in its minimum degree.
Those sentenced must serve the sentence imposed effectively, and must serve as payment for the days they have been deprived of liberty, since May 25, 2021.
For his part, Enrique Sandoval Arancibia was convicted as an accessory to the crime of qualified kidnapping of Barra Rosales, committed against the victim. The sentence imposed on the convicted person is deemed to have been served with the time that he was subject to preventive detention in this case since February 7, 2022.
Jenny Barra Rosales was 23 years old at the time of the events. Her arrest was near her home in the commune of San Bernardo and she was transferred to the Villa Grimaldi clandestine torture center and later to the Simón Bolivar, where she disappeared. Her remains were found in 2001 in an abandoned mine in Cuesta Barriga, where two bone fragments of the victim could be identified.
“There were years of very difficult research that often went nowhere, but that finally bore fruit. In that sense, we are very satisfied with the first instance ruling,” said plaintiff lawyer Andrea Gattini, from the Caucoto Abogados Law Firm.
He adds that “the investigative difficulties of the case were above all due to the time in which the events occurred, when the criminal repressive operation passed from the DINA to the CNI. A terrible crime of a young university student, testimony of the atrocity that was Villa Grimaldi and the Simón Bolívar Barracks, and that she was searched for decades, first especially by her mother and then also by her brothers. Only small fragments of bone could be recovered from the Cuesta Barriga, the place where her body was dumped, since the authorities of the time tried to cover up her crimes by also disappearing the remains of the victims.
Finally, Gattini noted that “we hope that the convictions will be confirmed by the Court of Appeals of San Miguel and, eventually, then by the Supreme Court.”
According to what was established in the ruling, “on Saturday, October 15, 1977, in the morning hours, José Miguel Tobar Quezada, a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), was detained by security agents who were traveling in a car. Peugeot brand, model 404, who deprived him of his sense of sight, putting adhesive tape over his eyelids, thus preventing him from observing the location of the place to which he was transferred, the clandestine detention center called Villa Grimaldi.
There, they tortured him “in order to obtain information about other militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), managing to obtain the identification of Jenny del Carmen Barra Rosales, a Nursing student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, a member of the MIR, political name ‘Hilda’.
On the 17th of the same month, the young woman was kidnapped from Villa Grimaldi. There, according to the sentence, “Tobar Quezada heard her voice and her crying at the moments when she was being interrogated and it was she who, overcome by torture, provided the information that allowed the arrest of Hernán Santos Pérez Álvarez, a photographer and militant of the MIR, carried out on October 19 of that year in the commune of Pudahuel.” After that, the three (Tobar, Barra and Pérez) were transferred to the Simón Bolívar detention center. The judicial investigation indicates that “Jenny del Carmen Barra Rosales died, on an undetermined date, in a violent manner, as a result of traumatic events caused by third parties, after which her body was thrown into a shaft in the ‘Los Bronces’ mine in the Cuesta Barriga, a place where in 2001 only some small skeletonized fragments were found, since in January 1979, by decision of the authority of the time, agents from the National Information Center carried out an operation at that site with “in order to extract the remains of the executed prisoners, which were removed and transferred to an undetermined location.”
Sentence for the crime of Jenny Barra
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