"Yellowing splinters of skull with some traces of head hair; some loose, black, hairs; torn clothing which can be recognized as being from a pair of jeans, a man’s sweater..." (A description by the assistant director of the Hoy magazine, Abraham Santibañez, of the human remains found in the limestone ovens in Lonquen, November 30, 1978.)

Those were some of the remains of the 15 men arrested on the 7th of October 1973, in the rural community of Isla de Maipo, and whose whereabouts were unknown until the end of 1978, when the ovens of Lonquen were discovered. The discovery, which shook public opinion, became a painful landmark in the history of the disappeared in Chile - a story that began in 1973 with the military coup - for it confirmed the suspicion held by many relatives of the disappeared that their loved ones were indeed dead. The regime could no longer continue claiming - as Sergio Diez, the Chilean delegate before the United Nations General Assembly did on November 7, 1975- that "many of the supposedly disappeared do not legally exist."

Mass for the victims of Lonquen. The husband and four sons of Purisima Munõz de Maureira (center) were among the victims. Sept. 15, 1979. Photo: Luis Navarro

It was in the Isla de Maipo police headquarters that the 15 men, aged between 17 and 51, were last seen alive. Sergio Maureira Lillo and his four sons, Rodolfo Antonio, Sergio Miguel, Segundo Armando and Jose Manuel; Oscar Hernandez Flores and his brothers Carlos and Nelson; Enrique Astudillo Alvarez and his two sons Omar and Ramon; and four young men: Miguel Brant, Ivan Ordoñez, Jose Herrera and Manuel Navarro, all disappeared after being arrested by Isla de Maipo Carabineros police under orders of police chief Lautaro Castro Mendoza. Their relatives, whose intense search for their loved ones led invariably to nothing, learned of the men’s fate only five years later, when their remains were discovered in the abandoned limestone ovens of Lonquen.

The First Visit To The Ovens

On November 30, 1978, the Vicaria de la Solidaridad human rights defense organization, under the direction of Cristian Precht, sent a specially created committee to Lonquen to verify statements made by an elderly man who claimed to have come across a large quantity of human remains concealed in the abandoned mines of Lonquen.

The committee - comprised of Enrique Alvear, assistant bishop to Santiago; Vicaria priests, Precht and Javier Egaña; the Vicaria’s leading attorney, Alejandro Gonzalez; the attorney Maximo Pacheco; the director of Que Pasa magazine, Jaime Martinez and the assistant director of Hoy magazine, Abraham Santibañez - traveled to Lonquen where they found the old ovens, two chimneys measuring about nine meters each. They were located in the agricultural cooperative El Triunfador, some 14 kilometers from the town of Talagante.

"Upon their arrival, the lawyer, Alejandro Gonzalez removed the dirt and placed himself in the cavity. He began scraping upward, starting from the base of the oven right to the first layer of soil, when a human thorax fell on top of him. Slowly, they realized the oven chimney was covered by a tangled mass of metal bars and railings, which concealed a mixture of bones, clothes, limestone and rocks."

The committee returned to Santiago, and on the following day, December 1, formally announced their finding to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court president, Israel Borquez, designated the Talagante criminal judge, Juana Godoy, to verify and investigate the case. Godoy informed Investigations police of the discovery before departing for Lonquen with a group from the Vicaria, this time led by the priest Gonzalo Aguirre. The group also included Luis Navarro, the first photographer to enter Lonquen. The Vicaria contracted a construction company to begin digging and after three days, all the bodies had been removed from their clandestine burial ground.

False Testimonies

The analyses by the Legal Medical Institute confirmed that the human remains belonged to families from the Isla de Maipo rural community whose relatives had disappeared after being arrested less than one month after the military coup. On December 6, 1978, the Supreme Court appointed the Santiago Appeals Court judge, Adolfo Bañados Cuadra, as special prosecutor in charge of the Lonquen case. Bañados’ inquest established that the 15 disappeared men had all been arrested at different times on October 7, 1973, by police personnel from the Isla de Maipo police headquarters. The judge also concluded that the testimonies given by the eight police officers allegedly involved in the murders of the 15 men, were false.

The police claimed the men had died in a confusing nighttime armed confrontation. Appearing before Judge Bañados, Lautaro Eugenio Castro Mendoza, Carabineros police chief at the Isla del Maipo headquarters at the time of the arrests, claimed that the 15 men were taken to Lonquen after one of them informed Castro that they had hidden arms in the area by the limestone ovens. According to Castro, the men were afterwards to be taken to Santiago’s National Stadium, one of the regime’s detention centers during the first months of the coup. The police chief claims that on arriving at the ovens, he and the eight to 10 policemen that accompanied him were subjected to a sudden firearms attack from the surrounding hillsides, to which they responded also by shooting. When the confrontation was over, says Castro, he and his colleagues realized the 15 detainees had all died. However, none of the police present received one single bullet wound.

On April 4, 1979, Bañados declared himself incompetent in the case, which was then handed over to the military courts. At this point, however, Bañados had come to some important conclusions. According to the judge there had been no armed shoot-out, and he described police chief Castro’s version as "intrinsically unbelievable." "In none of the 15 skeletal remains, analyzed by the Legal Medical Institute, was there any evidence of perforations, fractures or other type of damage that may have been caused by the impact of bullets from firearms against a live body; thus, the death of the 15 people must be attributed to another cause." In the opinion of some, not all those who were found in Lonquen were dead at the time of interment.

Indictment and Impunity

On July 2, 1979, the military prosecutor ordered the arrest of police chief Lautaro Castro Mendoza, and of policemen Juan J. Villegas Navarro, Felix Sagredo Aravena, Manuel Muñoz Rencoret, Jacinto R. Torres Gonzalez, David Coliqueo Fuentealba, Jose Belmar Sepulveda and Justo Romo Peralta, charging them all with the deaths of the 15 men arrested on October 7, 1973. Nevertheless, on August 16 of the same year, by virtue of the Amnesty Law decreed April 19, 1978, the case was definitively closed. This decision was confirmed by the Military Court on October 22, 1979. To date, no one has answered for the terrible crimes committed in Lonquen, which as the Committee of Attorneys for Democracy stated in 1979, "affects the moral foundations of the nation."

The Disappeared Have Names

Once the investigation was concluded, the relatives of the 15 victims asked for the bodies to be returned so that they could give them a proper burial. However, despite the military prosecutor’s order that the remains be returned to the families, they were surreptitiously removed overnight from the Legal Medical Institute and buried in a mass grave, thus avoiding any type of public demonstrations against a military regime which time and time again had claimed the disappeared were an invention of the left.

Indeed, six months before the Lonquen discovery, Interior Minister Sergio Fernandez, in response to pressure by relatives of the disappeared as to the whereabouts of their loved ones, said, "...it is very feasible that the large majority of the allegedly disappeared have gone into hiding or have died in armed shoot-outs carrying false identity papers, thus preventing their identification." However, Lonquen proved the contrary. For the first time in the short but violent history of the regime, the discovery contradicted the claims of the high-ranking regime officials and suddenly the disappeared not only had names and identities, but in this case had been killed under suspicious circumstances and their bodies purposefully concealed.

Remembering the Past

In March 1980, the new owner of the Lonquen land dynamited the ovens, thus changing forever the face of the site which had become a place of pilgrimage for the relatives and friends of the 15 men killed there. Despite the efforts to eradicate Lonquen from the map of Chile’s collective memory, neither the place, nor the people who died there have been forgotten.