Testimony of Laura Elgueta

I am Laura Elgueta, sister of the Chilean Luis Elgueta Diaz, who disappeared during the Condor Operation en Buenos Aires, on July 27th 1976. A year after my brother’s disappearance, one of my sisters in law and I were kidnapped, in Buenos Aires, the place in which we lived.

In that occasion we were “questioned” by Chilean and Argentinean agents about the operations that my brother Luis was supposedly doing in Chile. This happened on July 12th 1977. Besides the proper consequences of these kinds of experiences, it gave us the evidence of something: the Chilean agents were working in Argentina, participating in the kidnappings and the questionings. After identifying one of the torturers, our case was summoned to court and the Argentinean justice sentenced Enrique Arencibia Clavel, responsible of this action, to 12 years in prison.

I presented my case in the Valech Commission, because I considered the Chilean state co-responsible of my kidnapping, that's why, I felt that a compensation was obligatory. To my surprise, the commission considered that it didn’t have attributions (under the presidential term of office) to judge cases occurred out of the Chilean territory, something that was questionable from the legal point of view.

I made a explicit appeal explaining, among other things, that letting out cases like mine – beyond the personal things- by an institution created to “admit the torture that Chileans suffered”, mean an imminent discrimination, for myself and a few survivors of the Condor operation.

The Condor Operation, as it was shown in many occasions, was planned and created by the Chilean DINA, and agents of the State participated in it in an active way, organized even in a Foreign Department, which used resources of the State to do their operations. The proves that Enrique Arancibia Clavel was an agent from the DINA, who was paid with money from the State, are at this point unquestionable and convincing, and they have been completely admitted in two cases, in which he has been condemned. (Prats´s and mine)

To denounce this fact seems fair to me. I think there has been a wrong legal criteria that based on a legal technical term has taken not just the “spirit “of the Supreme Decree 1.040, such as a cause that exceeds a lot a person, and in my opinion this fact questions and even puts in risk one of the most difficult fights that we, (the relatives of the missing Chileans out of the country) have carried out: to admit that our relatives were chased beyond our territory. We feel again as in the beginnings… “in nobody’s land”…