Bautista van Schouwen
These friends,[3] together with an elder brother of Miguel Enríquez (Marco Antonio) and a new comrade they met at the first year of medical studies at the University of Concepcion (Jorge Gutiérrez Correa) started the secret group Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario in 1962.
The government implemented a nationwide persecution of the thirteen most known leaders of the organization at that epoch (among those wanted were Miguel Enríquez, Luciano Cruz, Bautista Van Schouwen, Nelson Gutierrez, Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Anibal Matamala, Jose Bordas, José Goñi, Juan Saavedra Gorriategy, and others).
By then Bautista Van Schouwen had moved to Santiago and had taken the political leadership and the editor-in-chief post of El Rebelde, MIR's official newspaper.
Although official declarations of the epoch, MIR had not a truly uniform ideological stand until the Congress of 1967 (see Movement of the Revolutionary Left) in which prevailed the Leninists positions represented by the new elected General Secretary Miguel Enriquez.
However, it has been put forward that van Schouwen would have been a closer follower to the doctrine of Rosa Luxemburg, favouring general strikes over cadre-organization political work as in Leninists traditions.
Later on another military patrol discovered the corpses of Munita and Van Schouwen (with no identifications) and – unaware of the above facts – followed routine and took them to the forensic station in Santiago.
On the 16 February 1974, again in a secret operation – this time presumably under the direct orders of Augusto Pinochet to General Ernesto Baeza, the Interior Minister [11]- DINA arranged the exhumation and incineration of Bautista Van Schouwen's remains.
[14] Nevertheless, Amnesty International informed in their first report about the human-rights violations by the Chilean Junta that Van Schouwen was held prisoner and had been transported to a variety of detention sites by the military.
The Chilean human-rights organizations, for their part, for years went on demanding clarity on the "disappearance" of Bautista Van Schouwen and his case was included in a variety of judicial processes that ensued around the missing ones in Chile (those whose whereabouts were unknown).
As late as 1998 his friend and MIR co-founder Marcello Ferrada de Noli, then a university professor in Norway, filled in European courts a criminal case against Augusto Pinochet [15] for the assassination or disappearance of Bautista Van Schouwen and Edgardo Enriquez.
In 2007 an Appeal Court in Santiago de Chile processed the former DINA commander, Army General (R) Marcelo Moren Brito, for the criminal killing of Bautista Van Schouwen and his lieutenant Patricio Munita.
