translated from Spanish: Captain spied by Army indicated judges “could be deceived” to authorize wiretaps

Captain Rafael Harvey said the judges who authorized spying on him for reporting irregularities and corruption inside the Army may have been deceived. The revelation of Radio Bío Bío and the newspaper “La Tercera”, where it was known that the Army intervened the telephones of the uniformed, who reported cases of institutional corruption, both publicly and judicially, today had a new chapter when it was found that ministers Juan Antonio Poblete and Maritza Villadangos were the ones who visad military espionage. In 2015, inside the No. 1 Tacna Artillery Regiment in St. Bernard, Harvey was accused of inducing 13 soldiers to defect, after denouncing improper charges, ill-treatment and threats from superiors. He subsequently targeted a network of protection against the corruption of military personnel who would have ascended within the Army. After making the allegations he was convicted of the crime of sedition, however, the Court of Martial acquitted him in June of this year. The Castrense court challenged the appealed sentence after establishing that there is no record to convict him of incitement to sedition or mutiny. Regarding wiretaps, Harvey told partner media outlet CNN Chile that the dates of the wiretaps released by Radio Bío Bío, “they matched that we were planning our defenses.” On what the objective of the operation would be, he noted that it was a move to preempt some maneuvers they were performing to prove their innocence from the charges charged. To obtain permission for wiretapping, the Army argued that uniforms might be handing over information that would affect the institution and national security, or in the worst case, military. For this point, he stated that if they had carried out any of the offences mentioned above, they would already be in jail. He added that he is not suspicious of the responsibility of the minister of the Court of Appeals who authorized the wiretaps and said that “they may have been misled in the invocation of the causal.” Harvey stated that he does not feel protected by the commander-in-chief of the Army, as, he added, “he was the one who chaired the board that called me to retire. The one who has protected me is Minister Thorn.”

Original source in Spanish