MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Antarctic tragedy: Chilean Army officers prosecuted

Two Chilean top military officers are facing prosecution on charges of manslaughter and falsifying reports after an investigation lead by a Punta Arenas military judge revealed severe negligence regarding an Antarctic accident when an officer and two servicemen were killed.

The two former commanders of the Bernardo O'Higgins Antarctic base Armando Ibañez Changarotti and Mauricio Toro Pardo, currently under arrest, apparently were trying to cover up a previous incident where valuable equipment was lost.

The official story until now was that the three men, Capt. Enrique Encina Gajardo and Sub-officers Fernando Burboa Reyes and Jorge Basualto Bravo, lost their lives after their vehicle fell into an ice crevasse September 28 while returning from maintenance operations on a nearby shelter.

However, the military investigation has found out that the whole incident actually began mush earlier, on September 6 when an official expedition headed by the three above mentioned plus two other servicemen left for the "General Boonen" shelter and had to stop when their snow vehicle hit a snow-covered crevasse.

The first vehicle made it over the crevasse but a second attached behind carrying valuable telecommunications equipment, mountain climbing gear, tools and other supplies fell into the crevasse. The men leading the expedition left the scene immediately, knowing that it was dangerous to stick around the crevasse-ridden area.

However the commanders of the base, Ibañez and Toro decided not to report the accident to the Army's Antarctic Department and ordered junior personnel to keep quiet since they had in mind sending a new mission to rescue the lost equipment.

Despite warnings about the dangers of the area, Captain Encina and the team obeyed orders and went to search for the equipment, only to run into tragedy.

The military investigation reports that at a certain point the team realized it was dangerous to continue the expedition because of severe weather conditions and decided to return to the "Abrazo de Maipú" shelter and continue their search the following day.

It was then that the snow vehicle hit a crevasse and fell some 15 meters but since the engine with the tracks kept rolling the vehicle actually drilled in another 15 metres.

However Sargent Raúl Poo Barra who managed to jump before the fall immediately sprung into action and with ropes and other equipment managed to recover three of the men in the hole that had been travelling in the vehicle's bucket.

After realizing that there was nothing they could do to save the three men trapped in the cabin, Poo, along with the three other rescued men, walked over a kilometre back to the shelter, so they wouldn't freeze to death.

The three trapped men were never rescued and the report concludes that they all died of hypothermia and not of injuries suffered during the fall. Their bodies were recovered by helicopter at a later date.

Following the accident colonels, Ibañez and Toro tried to cover up what really happened by falsifying documents and stating the men were involved in a "service" expedition.