40 years later, the Supreme Court of Chile sentenced seven retired soldiers for the kidnapping and murder of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara and the lawyer Littré Quiroga. At the same moment that one of them, Hernan Chacon Sotowas going to be notified by the Police and transferred to the prison where he was to serve his sentence, of 25 years in prison, committed suicide. Chacón Soto joins the list of retired Chilean soldiers who, after being convicted of crimes against humanity, chose to take their own life before going to jail.

In 2015, ex-soldier Hernán Ramírez Rurange committed suicide at age 76 shortly before entering to serve a sentence in Punta Peuco, the same prison that Chacón Soto had to enter. Ramírez Rurange had been convicted of the death of Eugenio Berríos, a former chemist from the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), kidnapped in 1991 and whose remains appeared in 1995. A couple of years earlier, in 2013, Odlanier Mena, head of Chilean intelligence during the Pinochet dictatorship, took advantage of a permit to get out of prison —where he was being held for his responsibility in the death of three socialists in 1973 and as an author of the murder of the journalist Augusto Carmona— to shoot himself in the head in his own home.

Chacon Soto, 86 years old, has also chosen to shoot himself in the head, just before entering the prison where he would serve 15 years for homicide and another 10 for qualified kidnapping, of the singer-songwriter Víctor Jara and the lawyer Littré Quiroga. He did it in his own house: “The inhabitant of said property took a firearm, shooting himself that caused his death at the same address”, explained the prosecutor before detailing that minutes later the Homicide Brigade and the PDI Crime Laboratory arrived at the same place to carry out the respective expertise, ruling out the participation of third parties.

The head of the Metropolitan BH, sub-prefect Óscar Álvarado, has indicated, for his part, that the weapon was duly registered in the name of Chacónwho apparently asked the agents to be able to take medicine, a moment that he took advantage of to take his own life.

Chacón Soto’s defense maintained throughout the long process that the brigadier was in those days of brutal repression, after the coup led by Augusto Pinochet and other senior commanders, a simple Army Major who only fulfilled the function of guarding the external perimeter of the Chile Stadium, a closed sports complex where nearly 5,000 detainees were overcrowded from September 11 and in which five days later Jara was assassinated.

However, the ruling made public this Monday assured that he had tactical and intelligence knowledge, “conditions that allowed him to intervene directly in the development of the interrogations” that were carried out in the changing rooms, “as well as in the prior process of classifying the detainees.”

According to the argument participated in the decision of who was separated to be taken for interrogation and, finally, “the ultimate 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, for which reason his statements were not credible or credible insofar as he maintained that he had only guarded the external perimeter of the enclosure, functions that do not match his high rank. degree, nor with the various elements of conviction gathered”, adds the sentence.

“I was wearing a STEYR 9-millimeter pistol, weapon fully consistent with the technical description of the injuries which, according to the forensic records, caused the death of Jara Martínez and Littré Quiroga,” he concluded.