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Rodrigo Rojas de Negri
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Carmen Gloria Quintana was left disfigured after soldiers doused her and Rodrigo Rojas with petrol and set them on fire. Photograph: Gregg Newton / Reuters/Reuters
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By Steve Hendrix
July 26, 2015 at 3:43 p.m. EDT
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Veronica DeNegri, mother of photographer Rodrigo Rojas de Negri, left, with Alicia Lira, president of the Association of Relatives of Political Prisoners Executed and human rights lawyer Francisco Ugas, leave court in Santiago, on Friday. (Claudio Reyes/AFP/Getty Images)
Veronica De Negri waited almost three decades for the news she received last week at her Washington-area home: Officials in Chile were preparing to arrest the men who allegedly burned her son to death during a protest march in Santiago in 1986.
Within hours, she was headed back to her native country, arriving a day before seven former members of the Chilean military were taken into custody and charged in connection with her son’s killing.
. . .
The killing of 19-year-old Rodrigo Rojas De Negri — and his mother’s ceaseless campaign to hold his killers accountable — were defining events in Washington’s tight-knit community of Chilean exiles and human rights activists. “When she spoke, people paid attention,” said Joe Eldridge, the campus chaplain at American University and longtime friend of De Negri who was a resident of Chile during the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. “It affected all of us, but nobody suffered as much as Veronica.”
“Soldiers would beat him with their gun butts. They would make him lie face down on the sidewalk. Then, witnesses say, a young lieutenant would drench him with gasoline, light him on fire and watch.”
Remnick wrote that “more than 5,000 people attended Rodrigo’s funeral. Mourners came with flowers, candles and signs, many of them seeing this death as an emblem of what Chile had become — a state under siege with the highest percentage of political exiles in the world.”
. . .
On Tuesday, Carroza charged six former officers and soldiers with killing Rodrigo Rojas and with the attempted homicide of 18-year-old Carmen Quintana, a protester who was also burned but survived with disfiguring scars. A seventh soldier was charged as an accomplice.
De Negri — who plans to keep advocating on behalf of political prisoners in Chile and against the pension system that pays corrupt former members of the military — said she is encouraged by the arrests in her son’s case. But in Chile, she knows that justice is never assured.
“They could replace the judge,” she said. “They have done it before.”
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-mothers-29-year-quest-for-justice/2015/07/26/9a03d432-331e-11e5-8353-1215475949f4_story.html
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