Punta Peuco Prison (''Penal de Punta Peuco''), officially Centro de Detención Preventiva y Cumplimiento Penitenciario Especial Punta Peuco, is a prison located in the municipality of Tiltil,

Santiago Metropolitan Region Santiago Metropolitan Region ( es, link=no, Región Metropolitana de Santiago) is one of Chile's 16 first-order administrative divisions. It is the country's only landlocked administrative region and contains the nation's capital, Santiago. Mos ...

. Punta Peuco is a special facility specifically built in 1995 for individuals convicted by the

Judiciary The judiciary (also known as the judicial system, judicature, judicial branch, judiciative branch, and court or judiciary system) is the system of courts that adjudicates legal disputes/disagreements and interprets, defends, and applies the law ...

of "

crimes against humanity Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the ...

" and "

human rights abuses Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hum ...

" during the

Military dictatorship of Chile (1973–90) A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. It is typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with its members identifiable by their distinct ...

. The Judiciary uses the old criminal procedure system originated in 1906 for these cases, without the guarantees introduced with the reform carried out between 2000 and 2005. The prison, which holds approximately 130 inmates, is considerably more modern than a standard Chilean jail. After considerable military protest and insubordination in response to the sentences against violations of the human rights, Punta Peuco was built within a military community, but the prison is administered by the

Chilean Gendarmerie The Chilean Gendarmerie ( es, Gendarmería de Chile), (abbreviated to ''GENCHI'') is the title of Chile's uniformed national prison service military . The title is historic, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary describes a gendarme as "a soldier wh ...

, the national prison service, similar to the country's other prisons. In June and October 1995, convicted Caravan of Death commanders Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza were incarcerated at the prison, respectively. 22 July 1995 some 1,500 people, many of them members of the army, attended a rally outside the Punta Peuco prison in solidarity for Brigadier Espinoza. Inmates have included Manuel Contreras,

Raúl Iturriaga Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann (born 23 January 1938) is a Chilean Army general and a former deputy director of the DINA, the Chilean secret police under the Augusto Pinochet military dictatorship. He was in charge of a secret detention cen ...

, Miguel Krassnoff,

Pedro Espinoza Pedro is a masculine given name. Pedro is the Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician name for ''Peter''. Its French equivalent is Pierre while its English and Germanic form is Peter. The counterpart patronymic surname of the name Pedro, meaning " ...

and

Marcelo Moren Brito Marcelo Luis Manuel Moren Brito (July 27, 1935 – September 11, 2015) was a Chilean retired Army colonel and former agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the defunct Chilean secret police Secret police (or political police) ...

. Between 2020 and 2021, during the height of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, the prison suffered an outbreak. Nearly 70 percent of the inmates (~80 out of 110+) fell ill. Five of them died: * General Héctor Orozco, 93, died on 26 October 2020. Since 2017, he had been serving a 10-year sentence for his role in the murders of two left-wing activists. * Colonel Jaime García Zamorano, 85, died on 3 September 2021. Since 2014, he had been serving a 7-year sentence for his role in the massacre of 18 peasants. * Miguel Estay Reyno, 68, died on 4 September 2021. Since 1995, he had been serving a life sentence for his role in the kidnapping and murder of three Communists. * Air Force commander Luis Enrique Campos Poblete, 82, died on 5 September 2021. Since 2017, he had been serving a 17-year sentence for murder of a leftist and the kidnapping of another leftist. * Marco Antonio Bustos Carrasco, 61, died on 11 September 2021. Since 2017, he had been serving a 5-year sentence for his complicity in the kidnappings of five leftists who were later murdered.

Inmates

* Manuel Contreras *

Álvaro Corbalán Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla (born 14 December 1951 in Santiago, Chile) is a retired Chilean major general who belonged to the National Information Center (''Central Nacional de Informaciones'', CNI), an organization associated wit ...

* Miguel Krassnoff * Jorge del Río *

* José Zara Holger * César Manríquez *

Hugo Salas Wenzel Hugo Salas Wenzel (30 October 1935 – 11 August 2021) was a General in the Chilean Army during the Dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In August 2007 he was the first former senior military official sentenced to life for human rights violations in ...

* Carlos Herrera Jiménez * Guillermo González Betancourt * Juan Fuentes Castro * Claudio Salazar Fuentes * Alejandro Saez Mardones * Patricio Zamora Rodríguez * Manuel Muñoz Gamboa * Fernando Valdés Cid * Fernando Torres Silva

References

{{coord, 33.1150, S, 70.8169, W, source:wikidata, display=title Prisons in Chile Military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990) Buildings and structures in Santiago Metropolitan Region Deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile Prisoners who died from COVID-19