Live
Audio Only
A Chilean judge has sentenced 35 agents from the former dictator's Augusto Pinochet repressive forces for the disappearance of a 29-year-old woman who was five months pregnant at the time of her arrest in December 1976.
One of the leading officers involved has seen his total sentence raised to 500 years.
RELATED:
Chile Top Court Rules in Favor of Abortion in Certain Cases
The victim, Reinalda Pereira Plaza, was a medical technologist and member of the Communist Party of Chile that had helped shelter those persecuted by the military dictatorship, according to the ruling handed down by special judge Miguel Vasquez of the Court of Appeals of Santiago. The ruling dictated that the case was part of "a large-scale operation that obeyed a policy of investigation, persecution and disarticulation of the Communist Party and not, an isolated fact."
Among those charged, 3 are currently in prison, serving sentences after being convicted in dozens of trials for human rights violations, some of them accumulating sentences in the hundreds of years. The others sentenced, which include agents of the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA, Pinochet's secret police, as well as seven women, were sentenced to between four and seven years, as perpetrators or accomplices of the crime.
During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinoochet, according to official data, some 3,200 Chileans died at the hands of State agents, of whom 1,192 still appear as disappeared detainees - nine cases correspond to pregnant women.
Newsletter
