Patricio Abarzúa, the executioner that Bolaño turned into myth

On Saturday, September 15, 1973, a Jeep Toyota of the Regiment No. 3 of Mountain Infantry “Los Angeles” stopped in front of a house in the José Ríos passage in the Orompello population, not far from military unit. Unlike the violent raids that multiplied in various several neighborhoods of the city, there was no armed irruption, screams or threats.

The military even waited for the 24 -year -old to finish dressing his crossed terno and adjust the sobaquera with a Luger gun before getting into the vehicle and returning to the detachment. The cordiality would hide a plot that would be the beginning of a horror story.

Patricio Abarzúa Cáceres, former supporter of the left, would be transformed into one of the fundamental gears in violent repression undertaken in the first weeks of the military dictatorship in the province of Biobío. His name was related to dozens of arrests, brutal torture and ignominious disappearances.

Killer poet

Years later, Abarzúa would be one of the inspirations for “Carlos Wieder”, the “distant star” poet, Roberto Bolaño’s most intensely Chilean novel.

The future writer, who would play the literary sky worldwide, had met him at the Los Angeles Men Lyceum in the mid -sixties. They crossed in the football matches on dirt courts and at socialist youth meetings.

After the coup, the writer – who had returned from Mexico to support Salvador Allende’s political project, but did just a couple of day before the installation of the military dictatorship – he saw him again, but turned into a dreaded repressor agent. In Wieder, Bolaño encrypted the fright of the intimate traitor: the monster that arises from a family face, from the monster that emerges from the same neighborhood, from the betrayal that comes from a well -known and close face.

Abarzúa entered the regiment in the midst of a regiment restructuring to have absolute military control of the area.

His epitome was the arrest of Health Officer Hugo Segura Brandt, accused of alleged links with the MIR, and in the decision to bring together all political prisoners (scattered in several detention centers) to a prison field within the same regiment. Since September 15, repression increased exponentially in the area with the increase in search, arrests, murders and disappearances. In order for this repressive machinery to work perfectly, precise information should be had on who should be sought, detained and interrogated. That information was provided by Abarzúa.

His godfather, the noncommissioned officer Eduardo Paredes Bustamante, in charge of the Second Military Intelligence section in the “Los Angeles” regiment. It was the operational arm of the dreaded SIM, whose function was to interrogate prisoners to locate socialist leaders, communists or miristas, or to know the barretines where weapons were supposedly hidden, or any indication that confirmed a subversive path in progress. Except for a couple of shotguns and revolvers, there were no more findings.

The Advisory Committee

The Hierarchical Superior of Paredes was Major Patricio Martínez Moena, who would become a brigade general. The judicial files reveal that, from the coup, Moena formed and headed the so -called “advisory committee” that was established in each military unit. In Los Angeles, their tasks were “elaborating people elimination strategies and advertising justification strategies, apparent causes of future deaths.” Martínez’s power, who now purges condemns Punta Peuco for about twenty crimes and disappearances, was absolute: only he decided whether he was released or not.

The officer ordered walls to obtain information from the detainees. It didn’t matter how. Paredes was not alone. He was accompanied by the army sergeants, Mario Pacheco Pacheco and Mario Contreras Brito. In addition, as part of the instructions taught by the Advisory Committee, Sergeant José Miguel Beltrán Gálvez added to that group, which stopped spears and monreros in the Carabineros Civil Commission; and detective Domingo Bascuñán Saldías.

That same September 15, Abarzúa received a sig rifle, camouflage uniform, bullets and grenades. His initial contribution was a detailed list of university and neighborhood leaders. Not only did he point out: he participated in raids, interrogations and executions. His previous links with socialist youth and as a secondary leader they gave access to names and homes.

In judicial testimonies, his name is repeated together with crimes against students such as Juan de Dios Sepúlveda, Luis Ángel Cornejo and Jaime Franklin Araya; Professor Juan Heredia; Forest and merchants. The list is very extensive. Many of them are still missing.

With deeply green eyes, tall, thin and always well dressed, Abarzúa was an attractive man, although many knew him for frequenting the brothels in the city, paying the security of the enclosure in exchange for sex with women.

Homeland and freedom

Some saw him near the leaders of Patria y Libertad, the organization of the extreme right that violently opposed the government of popular unity, but no one imagined their rapid integration into repressive devices. In his own version, delivered years later to a minister on visit, he only said to be just a scribe who took detainee data to be corroborated by other instances. The files contradict him: he was direct actor in torture, murders and disappearances.

The stories of the survivors in the torture sessions in the room adjacent to the stables – which was enabled as a concentration camp against political prisoners – remind him of perfection.

For reasons that are unknown, in January 1975 he left the regiment’s sim, although he maintained the links with some of the torturers. Its trail appears in chips of the Dignity neighborhood, that immense archive of more than 45 thousand people who were spied by the German enclave, placing it at the Los Angeles headquarters of the University of Concepción, most likely to investigate the political background of students. In the University Headquarters there is no formal record of its presence. Those same chips accuse him of meeting with lawyers who were opponents of the dictatorship, but also to smuggle weapons that he brought from Argentina and to traffic drugs.

Prisoner for narco

In 1999 he fell for drug trafficking, one of the first police blows against cocaine in Los Angeles. It was assorted of cocaine that came by entrustment and then marketed customers of a brothel that ruled. He served five years and one day. When leaving, human rights causes reached. He was a fugitive for several years in various places, but in 2005 he was arrested by the Human Rights Brigade. Before Justice, he repeated: “I was just a link in the chain.”

By 2017, with several pending convictions, he asked for help to former political adversaries to face their increasingly serious health problems. However, he died in the early hours of March 6, 2019, at 70, in a bed in the Los Angeles Hospital, suffering from respiratory problems.

The real character that inspired Bolaño was much more than literature. He was a neighbor, friend, accomplice, traitor and executioner. His story remembers that horror does not always come from afar: sometimes he lives on the other side of the wall, who knows his victims very well and that he only expects the time to act. And that memory is not an exercise of the past, but an alert for the present.