U.S. Homeland Security Department officials in Florida said they took into custody a former Chilean army official wanted in Chile for “torture and extrajudicial killings” following the 1973 military coup that forced out then President Salvador Allende.
The special investigative unit from Tampa’s Space Coast office last week apprehended and arrested 74-year-old Pedro Paulo Barrientos Nunez in Deltona, north of Orlando. The unit is called Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI. It investigates transnational crime.
The detention of Barrientos comes seven years after a federal jury in Florida found the former Chilean military lieutenant liable for the torture and murder of revered Chilean folk singer Victor Jara in the early 1970s.
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Jara’s family sued Barrientos 2013 in Jacksonville, Fla., accusing him of ordering soldiers to torture Jara, and of personally firing the fatal shot that killed him while playing a game of “Russian roulette” inside a locker room in Santiago’s Estadio Chile. The stadium was used by Chilean military under Gen. Augusto Pinochet to detain some 5,000 supporters of Allende, a socialist and the country's democratically elected president.
Jara’s family invoked rarely used U.S. laws that address human rights violations committed elsewhere to bring the legal action in 2013 against Barrientos, who was then living in Florida.
In July, said federal authorities, a federal court revoked Barriento’s U.S. citizenship based on a complaint filed by the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation. The court found Barrientos “willfully concealed material facts related to his military service in his immigration applications.”
That federal court action prompted the DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations unit to launch its investigation, which culminated with Barrientos’s arrest in Deltona last Thursday.
“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” said HSI Tampa Special Agent in Charge John Condon in a statement to media following the arrest.
Barrientos is currently in custody of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. He is being held at an ICE detention facility in Baker County, Fla. It's unclear when he will be returned to Chile.
The Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center and the HSI unit in Buenos Aires assisted in the investigation. Other law enforcement agencies involved in the arrest include U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, Melbourne Police Department and the Florida Highway Patrol.
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