One of the cruellest enforcers of Chile’s former dictatorship, the self-confessed torturer Osvaldo Romo Mena, died in prison of heart failure at the age of 70, police sources said.
”He died alone in solitude and hopelessness” on July 4 at the Santiago prison where he was serving sentences for kidnapping dissidents in the rule of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died last year, said Romo’s lawyer, Enrique Ibarra.
”Only a few friends, myself among them, were concerned about him” at the time of his death, he said.
Romo, known by the nickname ”Guaton Romo” or ”Fat Romo”, had suffered from malnutrition and diabetes as well as depression, according to medical reports.
He confessed to having tortured hundreds of detainees during the 1973-1990 reign of Pinochet, in which he was head of the feared police intelligence force — and said he was proud of it.
”I would do the same again, and worse,” he once said, as quoted in the book Confessions of a Torturer by the Chilean journalist Nancy Guzman.
Pinochet’s military regime took over in 1973 after overthrowing Socialist president Salvador Allende. It is blamed for human rights abuses including about 3 000 deaths and disappearances, most of them by Romo’s secret police.
”Osvaldo Romo was the spectre of horror,” said Lorena Pizarro, president of the Association of Families of Disappeared Detainees, adding that among his crimes Romo was responsible for the rapes of numerous women.
”His victims will always talk of him as a most evil, most brutal torturer,” she said. — Sapa-AFP