The Council of the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH) presented this afternoon its announced complaint for influence peddling, before the Seventh Guarantee Court of Santiago, due to the WhatsApp chats of the former judge of the Court of Appeals of Copiapó, Juan Antonio Poblete , in which he intervened in the appointment as Minister of the Supreme Court of María Teresa Letelier, asking the former Minister of Defense, Mario Desbordes, for help for this purpose.
It is worth remembering that former Minister Poblete has been charged with the crimes of interference with private life and ideological falsification of public documents, due to his participation in the so-called “Operation Topographer”, the name that the Army Intelligence Directorate gave to the telephone espionage carried out. against the journalist Mauricio Weibel, author – among others – of the book “Treason to the Homeland”, which addresses the diversion of funds from the reserved Copper law. In this case, known as the Surveyor Case, the INDH has acted as plaintiff since December 2023.
Until 2021 Letelier was minister of the court of San Miguel. Recognized as a right-wing judge, she is a member of the second chamber of the Supreme Court, and as such it is her responsibility to resolve the jurisdiction dispute in the so-called “Conscriptos Case”, a case in which the INDH is the plaintiff.
In this capacity, together with Minister Pía Tavolari and Minister Jean Pierre Matus, Letelier issued an order not to innovate, which paralyzed the investigation carried out by the Arica regional prosecutor’s office, which was headed by prosecutor Mario Carrera.
It should be remembered that the Supreme Court had Minister Matus disqualified in the case, after the INDH presented a request in this regard, arguing that said magistrate advised the Army and also acted as defense attorney in the “Topographer Case”, where he represented the former chief. of Army intelligence, Schafik Nazal, currently undergoing trial alongside Poblete. To this we must add the fact that Matus is one of the ministers mentioned in the Hermosilla case chats.
Telephone skills
Under the investigation into illegal wiretapping against Mauricio Weibel, the authorities seized cell phones, chips, computers, pen drives, external hard drives, backpacks and boxes with folders and records from Poblete under the conditions of the Intelligence Law, to which that he had access, given that when he was minister of the Santiago court he was one of the two judges appointed to review requests related to intelligence matters. The PDI carried out tests on the phones and there found conversations held through the WhatsApp application.
One of the findings in the conversations are the contacts from April and May 2021, where the now former minister made interventions to favor Letelier’s candidacy, so that she would be appointed minister of the Supreme Court, specifically with Mario Desbordes. These chats were revealed by Ciperchile, a medium that also announced that in the conversations between Letelier and Poblete she asked him about his relationships with “Cisternas, father and son”, in relation to the former minister of the Supreme Court Lamberto Cisternas and his son, the criminal lawyer Gonzalo Cisternas who, as revealed The counterare very close to the political and judicial power.
In the chats released by Ciper there is also one in which Lamberto Cisternas asks Poblete for support to appoint the wife of Eugenio “Pingüino” González, a well-known operator of the Chilean judicial system, as Lo Barnechea’s notary.
The Desbordes version
Through his X account, Mario Desbordes followed the same line as Mayor Daniel Jadue, ensuring that all of the above is a political operation against him. In this regard, he said that this began when “they named me a candidate to compete against the communist candidate, the mayor of Santiago Irací Hassler, the most important candidate for the Communist Party in all of Latin America and perhaps in the world.” He assured that the INDH went outside its legal framework, when announcing the complaint against him, ensuring that “my actions comply with the law and that it is the correct thing to do and, therefore, I am very calm, because I am the candidate for mayor and I am going to beat Irací Hassler despite all these types of operations.”
