MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile: One of Víctor Jara's murderers kills himself

Víctor Jana

Eighty-six-year-old Retired Chilean Army General Hernán Carlos Chacón Soto committed suicide Tuesday moments before he was to be transferred to the Puntateuco jailhouse to begin serving his 25-year sentence for the 1973 abduction and murder of singer-songwriter Victor Jara and Prisons Bureau Director Littré Quiroga, it was reported in Santiago.

 Security Forces went to his home in the Las Condes neighborhood Tuesday to arrest him, at which time the officer asked to take some medicine and seized the moment to take his own life.

Chacon Soto's defense had argued that at the time of the murders, their client was merely a simple Army Major following orders from General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who had staged a coup d'état against democratically-elected President Salvador Allende.

As per the Chilean Supreme Court's ruling on Monday, Chacon Soto had tactical and intelligence knowledge “that allowed him to intervene directly in the development of the interrogations” that were carried out in the locker rooms of Santiago's Nacional Stadium, “as well as in the previous process of classification of the detainees.”

He was found to have participated in the decision on who was separated to be taken to interrogations and, finally, “the final destination of these, being of all evidence that inside the Chile Stadium there was an order imposed by the rigid structure of the existing command.”

“Several testimonies corroborated that he participated in the selection tasks, reporting them to his superiors, so his statements were neither credible nor plausible insofar as he only claimed to have guarded the external perimeter of the premises, functions that are not consistent with his high rank, nor with the various elements of conviction gathered,” the sentence adds.

“At the time he was carrying a 9-millimeter STEYR pistol, a weapon that fully coincides with the technical description of the injuries that, according to the forensic records, caused the death of Jara Martínez and Littré Quiroga,” the Supreme Court also noted.

See: 

Chile: Sentences against Víctor Jara's murderers upheld