On the morning of Monday, June 17, 2013, three people entered a Santander Bank in the Enea industrial sector in the Pudahuel commune. Minutes later, Carabineros personnel managed to arrest the suspects, including the ex-frontist Jorge Mateluna Rojas. After a questioned trial by his defense, the defendant was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The case had an extensive back and forth. In 2018 he was again in the fore for a review appeal in the Supreme Court and today, almost five years later, it is once again in question, after the pardon granted to it by President Gabriel Boric. But, what is the judicial path of this investigation?
The sentence against Mateluna dates back to October 31, 2014, when the Oral Court of Santiago handed down a sentence against Alejandro Astorga Valdés, a former member of Túpac Amaru from Peru; René Sanhueza Molina, who was linked to the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), and Jorge Mateluna, who had also been part of that organization. According to the case history, On the day of the robbery, the three defendants forced the bank’s customers to lie on the ground, while they robbed the boxes of money. A civilian policeman entered the place, who was reduced by the criminals.
These same records revealed that after the robbery, the defendants fled the scene, meeting other plainclothes policemen, thus beginning a pursuit that included a shooting in Américo Vespucio. Carabineros managed to arrest all the suspects, in an operation that also allowed the recovery of a grenade and a war rifle, weapons that were used in the robbery.
It was not the first time that the ex-frontist faced justice. On November 9, 1992, he had been arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for forming and belonging to armed combat groups, for being part of the FPMR. He was also charged with the crimes of illicit terrorist association, a series of attacks, a robbery with homicide and two robberies with intimidation. During the government of Ricardo Lagos, Mateluna accepted the Pardon Law for ex-subversives, with which in 2004 he was granted the benefit and was released after spending 12 years in prison. This, in exchange for renouncing the use of violence.
After being released from prison, Mateluna began working at the National Council for Culture and the Arts in the Metropolitan Region, as manager of the “Creando Chile en mi Barrio” program. This, until he was involved in the assault on the Santander bank, whose trial lasted for a year and two months. Throughout this process, the defense of the ex-frontist He maintained that his arrest had taken place while he was going to the Municipality of Pudahuel to speak with the person in charge of culture of the commune, at which time he met a police patrol, who arrested him.
From the surroundings of Mateluna they maintain that there were a series of errors in the trial. One of them, according to his defense, was that a police officer directly involved him in the case despite the fact that during a round of recognition of the accused, one of the witnesses accused another subject as the author of the robbery.
Along with this, the defendant’s defense also accused that there were other evidence that did not coincide with that presented by the Public Ministrysuch as the height of the thief that was captured on the security cameras and the transfer times from that place to where he was finally arrested.
From then on, the ex-frontist was supported by the Legal Clinic of the University of Chile, counting as part of his defense the now former dean of the Faculty of Law of that house of studies, Davor Harasic. Lawyer filed an extension of the complaint against the police officers who conducted the investigation for alleged irregularities detected in the 2014 trial.
In this context, the Central North Prosecutor’s Office formalized Major Juan Muñoz Gaete for the crime of falsifying a public instrument, after the prosecutor accused him of adulterating the certificate and police report. However, on March 9, 2019, the Seventh Guarantee Court of Santiago requested the closure of the investigation and decided not to persevere, since there was no background to found an accusation against Muñoz.
But before, the Supreme Court had something to say. On December 27, 2018, the highest court confirmed the sentence against Jorge Mateluna by dismissing the review appeal that the ex-frontist’s defense filed that same year and with which he sought to annul the sentence against him.
The text stated that “contrary to what was stated in the declaration of the oral trial, theThe defendants do not participate in any persecutionThey were never behind the vehicle that was fleeing from the police, nor were they victims of shots directed at the radio patrol, they were never in a position to see a subject getting out of the truck that they were supposedly chasing.”
However, the second room of the Supreme Court rejected the appeal, arguing that “the new document used (a report from the PDI) must be sufficient in itself to prove the innocence of the convicted person, which obviously implies suitability of evidence to lead to that procedural result.” In this sense, they added that the information presented in the legal action had already been known in the oral trial, therefore, they were not new means in the case, since “Juged thing”.
With this sentence, the claims of Mateluna’s defense to obtain an acquittal were practically at zero, until former President Bachelet intervened, at the end of his government, in 2018.
The President wanted to grant him the benefit of pardon again, but his Minister of Justice, Jaime Campos, did not agree. In an interview with the newspaper El Mercurio, Campos assured that “from La Moneda, not from the Ministry of Justice, they sent me a draft pardon decree, by virtue of which Mr. Mateluna was pardoned, accepting his request and maintaining that Mr. Mateluna was innocent. Well then, Before this request from the Presidency, I replied that I could not sign this decree for two reasons: first, because the cause that was granted was unconstitutional”.
This assessment, now, did not have the Minister of Justice, Marcela Ríoswho, as explained by Mateluna’s defense, was the one who received the formal proposal for the pardon of the ex-frontist by those who made up his defense.