four Pinochet regime soldiers sentenced to 20 years in prison for the homicide and attempted homicide of two young Chileans in 1986

On July 2, 1986, a military patrol arrested, beat, doused and burned two young Chileans.

A conviction thirty-seven years after the events. The Supreme Court of Chile sentenced four retired military personnel to 20 years of imprisonment on Friday, January 5, for the homicide and attempted homicide of two young Chileans in the “Quemados” (“Burned”) case, a episode of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The events took place on July 2, 1986, against the backdrop of a national strike against the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. On that date, a military patrol arrested, beat, doused with fuel and burned two young Chileans. Carmen Gloria Quintana, a student at the time, survived her serious burns, unlike Rodrigo Rojas de Negri, a 19-year-old photographer, who died four days later.

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Chile sentenced Pinochet regime officers Pedro Fernandez Dittus, Julio Castañer Gonzalez, Ivan Figueroa Canobra and Nelson Medina Galvez to 20 years in prison, for the homicide of Rojas de Negri and the attempted homicide by Carmen Gloria Quintana.

A long, “very trying” process

This judgment puts “end of a long, very trying process”, commented Carmen Gloria Quintana’s lawyer, Nelson Caucoto, quoted by a local radio. “It was necessary to challenge an official theory established by the dictator, according to which the young people had burned themselves because they were carrying incendiary bombs under their clothes.”

The “Quemados” affair is one of the most emblematic of the last years of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), which left more than 3,200 people dead or missing.