Chile: Six exaggerated Pinochet condemned for the assassination of former President Eduardo Frei

In a landmark judgment, a Chilean judge sentenced Wednesday 3 to 10 years in prison six agents of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, accused of their responsibility in homicide of the former president Eduardo Frei Montalva in 1982.

After more than 15 years of investigation, Judge Alejandro Madrid has decided to sentence the six defendants to "Homicide after surgery" to which former President Frei (1964-1970) went to the Santa María de Santiago clinic on November 18, 1981, in the midst of a dictatorship, said a statement by the judiciary.

The exmandatario entered the clinic of Santa Maria following a hiatal hernia that he had to undergo surgery, but after the intervention, his health condition deteriorated inexplicably until his death on January 22, 1982.

The medical report indicated that his death was due to medical complications, but after various investigations and the insistence of his family, the theory that he was killed strengthened.

Penalties of 3 to 10 years in prison

In the judgment, more than 800 pages, the magistrate sentenced the doctor and former Under Secretary of Health Patricio Silva ten years in prison as the perpetrator of the crime of homicide for driving the operation to to provide Frei with poison until death; Luis Becerra, personal driver of the former president and informant of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), and Raúl Lillo, civilian agent of the secret police, sentenced to seven years in prison as co-perpetrators of the ;homicide; to Dr. Pedro Valdivia to five years in prison as an accomplice to the homicide and to sociologists Helmar Rosenberg and Sergio González to three years in prison as accessories.

These last three can comply with the sentence in freedom. In public statements, the judge stated that "There was a chemical that obviously contributed to the final situation that the former president had"The presence of foreign chemical substances has been revealed by badyzes carried out on Frei's corpse after two exhumations in 2009 and 2016.

"An unpublished crime in Chile"

The trial sentence was described as historical by the lawyers of Frei's family because it is the first conviction in the history of Chile for the murder of a former head of state.

"We must rejoice that after a long investigation, an unprecedented crime has been pronounced in Chile," said Nelson Caucoto, a lawyer for the Frei family.

The dictatorship ordered the death of Frei because the figure of the former president he became one of the biggest opponents of Pinochetwhose regime, established following a coup in 1973, began to face the first social demonstrations in the early 1980s, when the military junta was severely questioned.

"The phrase It establishes that my father was murdered by the dictatorship of Pinochet"The former senator Carmen Frei, daughter of the former president, told the press in front of a statue of his father.

Frei was a iconic figure of the Christian Democratic Party (DC), for decades the most important in Chile. His daughter Carmen and his son Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle – also outgoing president (1994-2000) – have always encouraged the need to seek the truth about his death.

"A decisive step has been taken in the causes of the badbadination of President Frei Montalva," said Eduardo Frei Jr. in a speech delivered after the announcement of the decision.

For his part, President Sebastián Piñera condemned "indignantly" the murder of Frei and offered his condolences to the family.

The doctor denied the crime

After the decision, Dr. Patricio Silva Garín, 89, told the newspaper La Tercera that the verdict "is stupid, completely false" and adds that all the facts that are attributed to him "are false" and that they do not. have no proof. "The doctor said that Frei" died of a disease that could not be corrected, that's the only truth here. "

Frei died in the same clinic as poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, who died nine years ago, who had also been the subject of an investigation during its production under the Pinochet regime.

The military dictatorship of Pinochet claimed more than 3,200 lives and about 38,000 were tortured, according to official figures.