A new chapter has been written in the history of human rights violations in Chile, after an ordinary prisoner was admitted Thursday to the military-designated prison known as Punta Bioco.
This law has fulfilled a request that has been made for years … By relatives of the victims who asked the state to end the privileges granted to those convicted of crimes against humanity.
he Punta Bioco prison It was built during the government of Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle, but its incarnation led, at the end of 1994, to a severe crisis within the Christian Democratic coalition after the then Minister of Public Works, Ricardo Lagos Escobar, refused to start works without obtaining legal approval from Congress and threatened to resign from his position.
Located 43 kilometers north of Santiago, this prison has a capacity of 130 people, but like other prisons in the country it is already overcrowded and currently houses 141 former members of the armed forces, carabineros and investigative police who have been convicted by the courts of justice.
He was imprisoned there until shortly before his death in 2015. Former General Manuel Contreras Head of the Intelligence Service (DINA) during the first years of the dictatorship. Currently, former officers like miguel krasnov marchenko, who is serving an accumulated sentence of 1,047 years; and Pedro Espinosa Bravo, He was convicted of the murder of Orlando Letelier.
The conversion of Punta Bioco into a combined prison, which Gabriel Buric had promised since the beginning of his administration, was achieved at the beginning of November when the President announced that the Comptroller’s Office had accepted the decree he had signed. “It is an act of justice,” he declared at the time.
Controversial decision
On Thursday, the Gendarmerie transferred a 75-year-old man, convicted of raping a 14-year-old minor, to that facility.
Although international treaties stipulate that convicted state employees must be separated from the general population, the construction of Punta Bioco has always been a source of conflict between the left, the Chilean center-right, and the far-right. In fact, in the current presidential campaign, candidates Jose Antonio Cast and Johannes Kaiser They expressed their opposition to the action taken by Buric.
Former President Sebastián Piñera was the first to accept the request of relatives of victims of human rights violations when he closed in February 2013 the Cordillera prison, a correctional complex controlled by the gendarmerie inside an army compound in a town at the foot of the capital. The act was precipitated after Contreras stated, in a television interview, that gendarmes were on his duty and “carried him with a stick.” This defiant stance meant that Piñera ordered the closure of that prison and thus forced the transfer of the former DINA president to Punta Bioco.
Although Michelle Bachelet Victim groups promised to close Punta Bioco, but this did not materialize because the former governor waited until the last minute of her second term and tried to dictate the necessary decree just hours before handing over leadership to Piñera, on the morning of March 11, 2018. The law failed because the Minister of Justice, the radical Jaime Campos, refused to sign the document indicating the illegality of the measure. Years later, Bachelet recalled in an interview on CNN, “I shut it down… and gave the order. It wasn’t possible to do it. They didn’t pay any attention to me.”
Minister of Justice this morning Jaime GajardoHe confirmed the joint prisoner transfer, pointing out that from now on, “Punta Bioco is no longer a private facility.”
Meanwhile, the Director of the Gendarmerie, Ruben Perez, explained that the prisoner does not represent a coexistence problem with the other people there for the prison administration.
In any case, the arrival of high-risk prisoners at Punta Bioco was ruled out. “Given the physical characteristics of the facility, the technology available, and the age range of most inmates, we would be very careful that the characteristics of the people who are placed there do not present a high likelihood of serious violent events and, therefore, rule out the presence of high criminal commitment inmates,” he said.
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