Ex-Chilean army officer living in Deltona arrested
An ex-military Chilean lieutenant living in Deltona was arrested by federal authorities and will be extradited to Chile to face murder and torture charges in the killing of a popular folk artist in 1973.
In a Tuesday news release, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 74, was arrested during a traffic stop in Deltona on Oct. 5.
Barrientos’s U.S. citizenship was revoked by a federal judge in Orlando on July 14 after it was learned in a civil trial that he lied in his citizenship application papers, according to the government.
Immigration officials said they were assisted in Barrientos’s apprehension by the Volusia County Sheriff ’s Office, Melbourne police, the Florida Highway Patrol, ICE Human Rights Violators and War Crimes, and Homeland Security Investigations in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“Barrientos’s arrest is a testament to the strong law enforcement alliances forged over years of service with our state, local, and federal partners,” said Homeland Security Investigations Tampa Special Agent in Charge John Condon. “Barrientos will now have to answer to charges he’s faced within Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens.”
Barrientos is the last of eight army lieutenants to be arrested in the killing and torture of popular Chilean folksinger Victor Jara. The folk artist was killed at Chile Stadium, now renamed the Victor Jara Stadium, in September 1973 when a U.S.-backed Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende.
In July 2018, the other retired Chilean military officers were sentenced to 15 years and a day in prison for Jara’s murder.
Jara’s bullet-riddled body was found on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile.
Barrientos came to the United States in 1990 shortly after Pinochet was voted out of office.
In 2016, Joan Jara, the wife of Victor Jara, and her two daughters, sued Barrientos in the U.S. District
Court for the Middle District of Florida in Orlando.
Barrientos was sued by Jara’s family under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victims Protection Act. This U.S. civil law enables individuals to bring lawsuits against defendants living in the United States for torture and for extrajudicial killings.
A jury determined in 2016 that Barrientos was liable for the torture and extrajudicial killing of Jara and ordered him to pay Jara’s family $28 million in damages.
It was during that trial that the U.S. government learned that Barrientos was a member of the Tejas Verde, a death squad, ordered by Pinochet to detain his political opponents and critics.
Military conscripts testified that Barrientos boasted that he shot Jara in the head and that they saw Barrientos at the stadium the day Jara was killed.
Barrientos has maintained that he was not in the stadium on the day Jara was killed.
Barrientos hid that information from the U.S. government when he applied for U.S. residency and citizenship, officials said.
After the civil trial, the U.S. government petitioned the Orlando federal court to revoke Barrientos’s citizenship, which it did in July, seven years after a jury found him liable for Victor Jara’s death.
ICE officials said Homeland Security investigations currently has 160 active investigations into suspected human rights violators. It is pursuing more than 1,700 leads and removal cases involving suspected human rights violators from 95 different countries, the federal agency said.
More than 480 people have been arrested for human rights-related violations, ICE officials said.