[News] 1973: the day two detectives saved Roberto Bolaño

[FNX Magokiler]

Roberto Arriagada was a young PDI officer on September 11, 1973. In less than two months he had to be detained on Quiriquina Island, experience the death of a colleague of his centimeters away, and then, together with another detective, meet a peculiar detainee, with whom there were high school classmates in Los Angeles. It was the writer Roberto Bolaño, whom they helped during the period in which he was detained at the barracks where they worked.

It was the night of September 29, 1973 when the then young detective Roberto Arriagada, 20 years old at the time and assigned to the Homicide Brigade of the Investigative Police (PDI) of Concepción, received the instruction to be part of a group that he would go to Vilumilla street, in that city, in order to arrest an alleged left-wing extremist. Together with a group of detectives almost as beardless as him, Arriagada took a submachine gun from the locker, but another officer, Hernán Bustos (who was only a little older than him) told him to pass it on, because according to the regulations that was what was required. .

"Pass the submachine gun, kid boy," he ordered, slinging the gun over his shoulder.

Investigative Police officials arrived at the address where they had been sent. Some entered to the second floor and four others, including Arriagada and Bustos, remained sheltering below, in a corner. Out of the corner of his eye, the first saw that a soldier was looming on the other side, something very dangerous in times of curfew and easy and nervous triggers.

Given this, they quickly identified themselves and the soldier greeted them, but only seconds later a shot fired by another uniformed officer (a lieutenant, who arrived behind the first) killed Bustos, who was next to him.

 

 

"We're stupid policemen, don't shoot!" Do not shoot! shouted Arriagada, convinced that one of the shots had hit him. However, although he didn't know it at the time, he was unharmed. It was only the impression, although he experienced it as if it were real, as if the shots had pierced his flesh as well.

—I felt the impacts. He was trying to catch my colleague and he fell. I ran and got behind a military jeep. The lieutenant put the gun to my head and I put the revolver in his stomach,” he recounts, explaining the strange position in which both of them were left.

He takes a sip of his milk tea and adds a reflection that shakes him to this day:

"Perhaps, if Bustos hadn't asked me for the machine gun, he would have touched me," says Roberto Arriagada, sitting in his cousin's restaurant, overlooking Salto del Laja.

It was the second time in 15 days in 1973 that Arriagada saw death face to face. The early morning of September 11, he remembers, he was on patrol until late. The previous night there had been a series of attacks with Molotov cocktails in Concepción and that is why at dawn on the 11th I was with other detectives in the vicinity of the University of Concepción, when they all heard a roar and saw how a car burst into flames. at the same time that another mobile left starting from the sector.

After a brief chase, they intercepted the second car and arrested its occupants, whom they suspected might be involved in the fire. When they were handcuffing them, however, something unusual happened: at about 2 in the morning he observed two trucks full of soldiers moving silently down Chacabuco Avenue. The occupants of both trucks stared at them, while Arriagada and the other detectives pointed their weapons at the suspects.

 

https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2023/07/18/1973-el-dia-que-dos-detectives-salvaron-a-roberto-bolano/