Political and social organizations in Chile are rejecting a Supreme Court decision this week to release former dictatorship agent César Manríquez, a 95-year-old convicted repressor responsible for the aggravated kidnapping of 16 victims during the Augusto Pinochet regime, after the court’s Second Chamber ruled in a split decision to free him due to alleged mental incapacity.
Manríquez was one of the top chiefs of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the secret police of Pinochet’s 1973–1990 dictatorship. He was in charge of several detention centers and, according to local reports, is linked to 86 cases of forced disappearance, two of torture, and one murder.
For the Socialist Party (PS, in Spanish), it is particularly serious that the resolution was adopted without oral arguments in the courtroom and without hearing from the prosecuting parties—the victims and their families.
“This undermines citizen confidence in justice and projects a worrying signal of impunity,” the PS warned in a statement published on social media.
The prosecuting lawyers noted that the psychiatric reports used to justify the release do not meet international standards for declaring a convict mentally incapacitated. “Victims and their families deserve justice, not privileges for those who committed crimes against humanity,” the Socialist Party added.
According to the Association of Relatives of Political Executed Persons (AFEP), other repressors who could also benefit from similar decisions include Héctor Osses, responsible for murders in the San Gregorio neighborhood, and Jorge Mandiola, an agent who participated in the so-called Operation Alpha Carbón.
The recently appointed head of the Human Rights Program under the Ministry of Justice instructed prosecuting lawyers in these cases not to appeal judicial decisions favoring repressors on mental or medical health grounds. The Association of Employees of that program called the decision arbitrary, warning that in practice it creates a system of “passive pardons.”
Author: Victor Miranda
Source: agencies
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