Five former conscripts serving prison sentences for dictatorship-era crimes are now demanding $1.5 million from the Chilean state, claiming systemic military abuse left them with severe psychological trauma.
BioBioChile reported that the plaintiffs, who are currently incarcerated at the Colina I prison, argue the state failed in its duty of protection. They were aged 18 and 19 when the abuses occurred, making them minors under the civil legislation of the era.
The Cuesta de Chada Executions
Four of the men—Juan Dionisio Opazo, Víctor Reinaldo Sandoval, Carlos Enrique Durán, and Roberto Mauricio Pinto—were convicted by the Supreme Court in June 2022 to 10 years of effective imprisonment for 38 qualified homicides in Paine.
The atrocities trace back to October 3, 1973, when Lieutenant Osvaldo Andrés Alonso Magaña Bau led an infantry contingent from San Bernardo to the Cuesta de Chada. Magaña gathered the young soldiers, asked if any were afraid, and detailed the execution plan using a two-shot signal from his pistol.
“In that instant, everyone fired the full load of their rifles,” said Carlos Enrique Durán Rodríguez, then an 18-year-old conscript, whose testimony was recorded in the ruling by Minister Marianela Cifuentes and cited by BioBioChile.
Magaña died in 2021 before serving his prison sentence. Paine ultimately recorded the highest rate of detained-disappeared and executed political prisoners during the dictatorship relative to its population, with 70 local men targeted between September and November 1973.
Gustavo Delfín Marambio Olmos Convicted for Quinta Normal Kidnappings
The fifth plaintiff, Gustavo Delfín Marambio Olmos, was convicted in May 2024 to five years and a day of effective imprisonment by the Supreme Court for the qualified kidnappings of Agustín Contreras Santander and Manuel Valencia Cáceres.
Those events unfolded on September 11, 1974, at Parque Quinta Normal facilities. The guard officer, Juan Segundo Martínez Oyanedel, subjected the detainees to brutal assaults.
Legal filings prepared by defense attorney Ricardo Bravo Cornejo assert that the conscripts faced severe physical and moral coercion, operating under immediate threats of death from their superiors. The lawsuit contends that the state’s liability does not expire due to the connection with grave human rights violations, demanding $300 million pesos in moral damages for each of the five petitioners.
While previous judicial reviews by Minister Cifuentes and the Supreme Court rejected arguments of irresistible force or insurmountable fear to overturn criminal liability, the current civil action draws a sharp legal line between criminal guilt and state liability for abuses inflicted upon young servicemen.
