The spectacular "escape of the century" from a maximum security prison in Chile on December 30, 1996

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"We did not leave the prison kneeling or walking.
This response that Patricio Ortiz Montenegro gave to journalist Víctor Gómez, from the Chilean magazine The Clinic, can perfectly define what happened on December 30, 1996.
The short story says that four prisoners - sentenced for crimes of murder and kidnapping - escaped from a Chilean high security prison aboard a helicopter, under the stunned gaze of the guards.

And hours later, this time under the eyes of millions of Chileans who followed the news and listened to what had happened.
The news also confirmed the identity of the four prisoners who had flown out of jail: Mauricio Hernandez Norambuena, Ricardo Palma Salamanca, Pablo Muñoz Hoffman and the aforementioned Ortiz Montenegro.

All were members of what was known as the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), which had been accused of perpetrating, among other attacks, the assassination of Pinochet senator Jaime Guzmán in April 1991.

It was the FPMR that decided to get them out of jail that end of the year, in an operation called "Flight Justice" and that remained forever in the Chilean collective imagination as "the flight of the century."
5 spectacular leaks of prisons that exceed the police films
None of those who fled that day have returned to a Chilean jail.

                         
The division
The FPMR had been created in Chile in 1983 in response to the de facto regime imposed by Augusto Pinochet in September 1973.
One of the objectives of the organization was to sabotage, with different actions, the viability of the Pinochet government.
As pointed out by several local media, such as the newspaper La Tercera, after multiple attacks with explosives and some kidnappings of prominent figures of the Chilean right, in 1991 - when democracy had been restored - they decided to kidnap Senator Guzmán.
For years, Guzmán had been considered one of the "ideologists" of the regime.
But something went wrong along the way and the former minister and senator ended up dead on the campus of the Catholic University.

In 1992, after several operations, Hernández Norambuena and Palma Salamanca were captured and sent to the High Security Prison (CAS) of Santiago de Chile.
There they met with other militants of the group, such as Ortiz and Muñoz Hoffman, who were serving sentences for different crimes.
And in just under four years, together with the FPMR members, they planned one of the most cinematographic leaks that Chile and South America remember.