Fugitive Chilean colonel arrested in Argentina on human rights violations
June 12, 2021
8:25 PM CDT
Reuters
2 minute read
Police in Argentina arrested a retired Chilean army colonel in Buenos Aires on Saturday after he fled neighboring Chile, where he was convicted of human rights violations committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chilean authorities and local media reported.
Walter Klug Rivera was convicted in the disappearance and murder of 23 workers in 1973, shortly after Pinochet took power in a coup that resulted in the ouster and death of sitting president Salvador Allende.
"Walter Klug Rivera was apprehended outside the ... hotel where he was staying, which he intended to leave in the next few hours in order to continue evading justice," Chile's police said on Twitter.
More than 3,000 people died or disappeared in political violence during Pinochet's military regime from 1973 to 1990. The secret service and the army also tortured and drove into exile thousands of dissidents and leftists, truth commissions and police investigations have shown.
More:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/fugitive-chilean-colonel-arrested-argentina-human-rights-violations-2021-06-13/
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Older article, Google translation:
FORMER CHILEAN MILITARY OFFICER WALTHER KLUG RIVERA CONVICTED OF TORTURE AND DISAPPEARANCE LIVED IN GERMANY UNDER IMPUNITY
13 August 2020
By Ute Löhning
For four years he lived quietly in Germany, in a picturesque town on the banks of the River Rhine, 100 kilometers south of Cologne: Former military officer Walther Klug Rivera, who was convicted of his participation in the kidnapping, murder and disappearance of 23 workers at the El Toro and El Abanico hydroelectric plants in the Andean sector near Los Angeles. Only on one trip to Italy did the police arrest the Chilean-German wanted by Interpol in the summer of 2019. In early February 2020, Italy extradited the 69-year-old former officer to Chile. There he is now back in court.
From the first days after September 11, 1973, he, then 23-year-old Lieutenant Walther Klug Rivera, organized a detention and torture camp. He set up this camp in the stables of the Infantry Regiment No. 3 of Los Angeles Mountain. " Hundreds of prisoners were tortured there, many of them killed. Klug was constantly visiting the local jail looking for prisoners to transfer to the regiment. According to human rights organizations, most of the more than 100 disappeared from the Biobío region passed through this camp.
Prisoners who managed to survive characterized Klug as particularly brutal and sadistic. Human rights lawyer Patricia Parra, who represents relatives of the disappeared against Klug, explains that Klug, together with the commander of the Alfredo Rehren Pulido Regiment and the head of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM) of this Regiment, Patricio Martínez Moena, were the main responsible of torture and murder at that military base.
However, Klug was able to continue his career - during the dictatorship until 1990 and also afterwards - and rose to the post of colonel. Only in October 2014, shortly after his retirement, the Chilean Supreme Court sentenced him to ten years and one day in prison in the so-called ENDESA case. He is sentenced for his participation in the qualified homicide of seven workers and for the qualified kidnapping of fourteen other workers at the El Toro and El Abanico hydroelectric plants, near the city of Los Angeles, in 1973. Other criminal proceedings are pending against him for the disappearance of prisoners.
But Klug evaded Chilean justice. Because his grandfather was German and had emigrated to Chile in his time, Walther Klug under German law is entitled to German nationality. Therefore, in November 2014, he received a German passport at the German embassy in Santiago and shortly after he fled Chile. Why did the German embassy authorize the delivery of the German passport to a military man who was sentenced for crimes against his compatriots by the Chilean Justice? Could or even should the embassy have refused to issue Klug's passport? According to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its representations abroad such as the embassy check "if the applicant is registered in the German search book", as this could be an obstacle to the issuance or distribution of a passport.
Since the Chilean authorities did not prevent Klug's escape, he arrived in Germany at the end of 2014. Since then he has lived unhindered for more than four years in Vallendar, a beautiful town of 9,000 inhabitants on the banks of the River Rhine near the city of Koblenz; This was confirmed by the landlord of the apartment in which Klug lived. She knew him as a person of always correct behavior who from the beginning did not speak German and did not learn it over the years either. He always paid his rent on time in cash, and sometimes - when he left - even a few months in advance.
As a retired officer in the army, Klug did not have to worry about money: The Chilean state paid him a monthly pension - a privilege that even condemned soldiers in Chile enjoy, a practice highly criticized by lawyer Patricia Parra. According to his rank, Klug continues to receive a basic salary of approximately 1,200,000 PCL per month, to which are added various increases.
There is no clarity on why Klug in 2014 came to Vallendar, that small town in Southwest Germany. But it seems that he had or was looking for contacts with the Schoenstatt Catholic Movement based in Vallendar. In March 2015, Klug was invited to a Spanish course at the Marienschule Schoenstatt, a Catholic high school for girls in that town. As reported by the local newspaper "Blick aktuell", Klug as an "insider" presented Chile with its special meals and spectacular landscapes to the female students, who took "wonderful images". When questioned, the current management of the school regrets "that this criminal has been in our institution." He points out that the then principal, the teacher and the students of the Spanish course are no longer at school,
However, Klug is already the second "outstanding" Chilean in the field of the Schoenstatt Movement, to which the Marienschule school belongs ". Francisco Cox, former archbishop of La Serena, accused of multiple sexual abuse, lived in Schoenstatt for more than ten years. In 2004 he was accused of a new case of abuse of a child under 17 years old in Germany, he was fired from the clergy by Pope Francis in 2018, and finally returned to Chile in 2019 to be investigated.
The Schoenstatt Movement was founded in 1914 in the town of Vallendar as a renewal movement. Since then it has become an international institution. In Chile it maintains religious institutions and private schools and has powerful supporters such as the Kast family for example. A spokesman for the Schoenstatt Press Office, for his part, explained that according to his knowledge "there have not been nor are there any relations between Mr. Walther Klug and the Schoenstatt institutions in Germany and Chile." But that Klug had participated in the Spanish-speaking masses in Schoenstatt and had sought contacts. Other Chilean visitors to those masses - according to him - would have recognized Klug and informed the Chilean consulate in Germany. According to that account, the consulate would have recommended that he stay away from Klug, who as a German citizen was not going to be extradited to Chile. The Chilean consulate in Frankfurt in turn declares that it has no information on this.
Anyway, Klug spent four fairly quiet years in Germany. It was only discovered when he traveled to Italy with his partner in early June 2019. It was in a hotel in the city of Parma, based on an international arrest warrant for another ongoing judicial case: the case of Luis Cornejo Fernández. It is about the alleged participation of Klug in the kidnapping and disappearance of the 23-year-old student leader and member of the Communist Youth of Chile whose traces were also lost in 1973 in the Infantry Regiment No. 3 of Montaña Los Ángeles. "
Chile had not issued any search warrant for Klug through Interpol for the final judgment in the ENDESA case, nor had it requested that Klug serve the corresponding sentence of ten years in prison in Germany. In July 2019, the Chilean Justice requested the extradition of Klug based on the search warrant in the Luis Cornejo case, only then did it issue an international arrest warrant for the ENDESA case and then in October it also requested the extradition of Klug in connection with that case. On December 4, 2019, the Supreme Court of Italy ultimately granted the Chilean request referring to a bilateral extradition agreement with Chile and mentioning that it involved crimes against humanity.
Finally, on February 6, 2020, Klug was extradited to Chile. He is being held in preventive detention in the city of Concepción, as confirmed by the Undersecretary of Human Rights in the Chilean Ministry of Justice. On June 2, the Supreme Court denied a request for provisional release. Klug was presented to Judge Carlos Aldana, competent judge in the case for the disappearance of Luis Cornejo, and will also have to serve his final sentence of ten years and one day in prison for the seven murdered workers and the 14 disappeared workers in the ENDESA case in Chile. . Patricia Parra, a lawyer representing Luis Cornejo's sisters, hopes that Klug will also have to be prosecuted in another trial for disappearance: in the case of Adelino Pérez Navarrete.
Outstanding questions to the German judiciary:
A parliamentary interpellation of the deputy in the Bundestag Jan Korte of the Left party (Die Linke) managed to gather some information. In response to this inquiry, the German government corroborates that since 2015 the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs were aware of a search warrant for Klug through Interpol. They report that Klug was not wanted in Germany because of his German nationality. Reference is made to article 16 of the German Constitution which determines that Germany does not extradite German citizens to non-European Union states.
However, on the part of the German judiciary it would have been possible to open independent criminal investigations against Klug, and as deputy Korte emphasizes, "it was the least that could be expected." Indeed, in March 2016, the Koblenz prosecution examined the initiation of criminal investigations against Klug - and rejected them, as senior prosecutor Rolf Wissen explains. In the Interpol search warrant in the case of Luis Cornejo, which was available to the prosecution at that time, it was only mentioned “that in 2013 the wanted man was supposedly running a detention camp in Chile, where he was he transferred a person who did not reappear later ". According to the prosecutor, this crime would have prescribed according to German law; exclusively the crime of homicide does not prescribe;
After so many years of being missing, it did have to be considered a qualified homicide, says Andreas Schüller of the "European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights" (ECCHR). An attorney general should examine these cases and a person of this rank could also be expected “to have knowledge of crimes against humanity committed in the 1970s in Chile and elsewhere, and that he, therefore, should also know correctly interpret indications of such activities in this period and in this context ”. In the end, these were not minor crimes, but the most serious violations of human rights and crimes of the State.
According to the UN's "International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance" that entered into force in 2010, the widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity. As a State Party, Germany is obliged to investigate cases of enforced disappearance and "to include in the German Penal Code its own criminal offense of enforced disappearance", declares the representative of the commission against enforced disappearances at the UN, Barbara Lochbihler. Germany just had to submit a report to the United Nations on the progress made in this area.
In this it states that it considers the existing criminal offenses in German law sufficient for the investigation of crimes in cases of enforced disappearance. However, it confirms that it has not concluded the examination on possible alterations to German law.
If the position of non-implementation were maintained - criticizes the former Green Party deputy in the European Parliament Lochbihler - it would be "a wrong signal in the political-legal sphere" and would affect the credibility of Germany.
Deputy Korte of the Left party demands that at least for the future, the German government must ensure "that Germany is not a Safe Haven, a safe haven for German criminals fugitives from the dictatorship" and that it must bring perpetrators to the courts of justice in Germany.
And Klug is not an isolated case: ECCHR lawyer Schüller notes that "the German criminal prosecution authorities have the responsibility to investigate, because German citizens were involved", and continues to criticize that "the German judiciary has been looking the other way for decades. "There is the case of the Argentine-German Luis Esteban Kyburg, second commander of the Agrupación Buzos Tacticos de Mar del Plata during the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. He has been wanted since 2013 by Interpol for alleged crimes against them. humanity, he fled Argentina and was found in Berlin in July.
Lawyer Schueller also appeals to the German responsibility in the cases of investigations of crimes committed in Colonia Dignidad ». In this German sect based in southern Chile, political prisoners were tortured and murdered. German criminal investigations aimed at clarifying these facts came to nothing. In 2019, the investigations against the former sect doctor, Hartmut Hopp, considered a key person in contact with the DINA, were closed. Currently the Duesseldorf General Prosecutor's Office has to decide whether to reopen these investigations against Hopp and other leaders of the German sect.
"The political will is lacking, even if all these events happened a long time ago, they must be clearly addressed," says Schüller, saying that "simply letting these cases expire on time is unacceptable!"
https://www.agenciadenoticias.org/ex-militar-chileno-walther-klug-rivera-condenado-por-tortura-y-desaparicion-vivio-en-alemania-bajo-la-impunidad/
