The mystery of Pinochet’s pistol: Dictator’s gun used by 15-year-old gang member in drug turf war shooting

On April 9, at around 8 p.m., four members of a drug gang fired at least 25 shots at a house where the mother of the leader of a rival gang lived. Some of the bullets flew through the windows of the house next door, where there were children. The attack, in which no one was injured, occurred in the Los Jazmines neighborhood in the city of Valdivia, some 850 kilometers (530 miles) south of Santiago, Chile. When Investigations Police (PDI) agents arrived at the scene, the attackers fled. One of the gang members, aged 15, threw a pistol into a backyard as he ran away. The following day, a resident called the police to report that he had found the gun on his property. It was a .380 Pietro Beretta, with a brown grip and a name embossed on it: Augusto Pinochet U.

After running the weapon’s serial number, the General Directorate of National Mobilization confirmed that the pistol was registered in the name of Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, the former Chilean dictator who died in 2006. The system also showed that the gun had been reported as lost. The question authorities are now asking is: how did a pistol belonging to the general who staged the 1973 coup d’état find its way into the hands of a teenage member of a street gang in the south of the country?

The Pinochet family lost track of the gun a decade ago. In April 2014, Marco Antonio Pinochet Hiriart, the dictator’s son, reported the pistol missing at a police station in Lo Barnechea, in the province of Santiago, along with 17 other weapons including a rifle and several pistols and revolvers. There are around 770,000 registered firearms in Chile. Of those added to the registry over the last three years, at least 60% have been reported as lost or stolen, chief prosecutor of the North Central Metropolitan Region, Tania Sironvalle, said in an interview last November.

Marco Antonio Pinochet noticed the missing weapons when he decided to make an inventory of his late father’s objects in what had been his residence during his final days, a property located in the municipality of Lo Barnechea, one of the most affluent areas of the Chilean capital. According to the police report, as quoted by the newspaper La Tercera, the fourth of the dictator’s five sons said “a large number of weapons of different brands and calibers were missing, and that they were duly registered with a collector’s description and one of them was defined as a weapon for personal defense.” According to sources familiar with the case, Marco Antonio told the police it was a case of “misappropriation.”

At the end of 2014, Lucía Hiriart, Pinochet’s widow, sold the mansion where the former dictator resided from 2000 following his return to Chile after being arrested in London. The following year, the new owners — who bought the home for $1.6 million — demolished the 1,500 square meter property to build a condominium.

Almost three months after the complaint lodged by Marco Antonio Pinochet, the Eastern Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office ruled out investigating the case due to a lack of evidence. However, now that Pinochet’s Beretta pistol has resurfaced as part of a criminal investigation, the original case has been reopened. The Regional Prosecutor’s Office of Los Ríos, led by Juan Agustín Meléndez, has decided to separate the investigation of the attack on the house in Los Jazmines into two branches: one will deal with the two rival gangs of drug traffickers, in which 10 people have already been arrested, and the other will work toward solving the theft of Pinochet’s small personal armory in 2014.

The local prosecutor in Valdivia, Tatiana Esquivel, said that the 10 detainees in the gang case have been charged with attempted homicide, illegal possession of firearms and the unjustified discharge of weapons on public streets. Among the charges being brought against the 15-year-old gang member who discarded Pinochet’s pistol is illegal possession of firearms. On the night of the shooting, the teenager was also carrying a black bag containing 26 grams of cocaine and three shotgun cartridges. The PDI’s Anti-Narcotics and Organized Crime Squad arrested him almost a month after the attack, along with nine other members of his gang and a criminal organization known as Población Libertad, of which the son of the woman whose house was shot at was a member. He is currently in prison in Valdivia for drug-related crimes.

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