The Diplomat in Spain

The Diplomat

The acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, celebrated yesterday that “justice has been done” in the case of the murder of Spanish national Carmelo Soria in 1976 in Chile, after the country’s Supreme Court convicted several people for the crime.

“Justice has been done for a crime that could not go unpunished,” the minister said in a message on his X account, celebrating that the Chilean Supreme Court had “sentenced to prison terms the perpetrators of the murder of the Spanish international civil servant Carmelo Soria”.

On Tuesday, the Chilean Supreme Court sentenced six former agents of the now defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the secret police of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990), and two former military officers for the murder of Carmelo Soria, a Spanish official of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and communist militant, who was kidnapped in Santiago de Chile on July 14, 1976.

In particular, two senior DINA officers, Pedro Espinoza Bravo and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, were each sentenced to 15 years and one day’s imprisonment. In addition, the military officer Juan Morales was sentenced to ten years and one day in prison. These three, convicted as perpetrators of the murder, are currently in prison for committing other human rights violations.

The others sentenced are agent Guillermo Salinas Torres (15 years and one day in prison for the murder and 541 days for illicit association), René Quilhot and Pablo Belmar (10 years and one day in prison each for murder and 541 days for illicit association.

In addition, Eugenio Covarruvias Valenzuela, a former general in the Chilean army, was sentenced to four years in prison for false declaration under oath, and Sergio Cea Cienfuegos, a former military prosecutor, to 600 days in prison for falsification of a public instrument.

The sentence indicates that the DINA “operated systematically and clandestinely against multiple political opponents of the military government and its collaborators, including Carmelo Soria”, who worked for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and was kidnapped, tortured for 48 hours and finally murdered.