Rodrigo Rojas de Negri (on the banner) — © AFP
In Chile, the Supreme Court has sentenced four retired soldiers from the era of dictator Augusto Pinochet to 20 years in prison for the murder and attempted murder of two youths who were burned alive.
Sunday January 7, 2024 at 8:23 AM
The events took place on July 2, 1986, against the backdrop of a national strike against Pinochet’s military regime. A military patrol arrested two youths who tried to set up a barricade. The soldiers sprayed them with fuel and set them on fire alive. They were dumped in a suburb of Santiago.
The atrocities are known in Chile as the ‘Caso Quemados’. 18-year-old student Carmen Gloria Quintana survived the severe burns, unlike 19-year-old photographer Rodrigo Rojas de Negri: he died four days later from his injuries.
After 38 years, the Supreme Court on Friday sentenced army officers Pedro Fernandez Dittus, Julio Castañer Gonzalez, Ivan Figueroa Canobra and Nelson Medina Galvez to 20 years in prison for the murder of Rojas de Negri and for the attempted murder of Carmen Gloria Quintana.
The verdict “brings an end to a long, arduous trial, in which we had to refute the official thesis of the dictator, who stated that the young people had burned themselves because they were carrying incendiary devices under their clothes,” said Carmen Gloria Quintana’s lawyer, Nelson Caucoto, on local radio.
Caso Quemados is one of the most emblematic cases of the last years of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), who was responsible for more than 3,200 deaths and missing persons.