A member of the CEPAL (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) in the 1970s, he was assassinated by Chile's DINA agents as a part of Operation Condor.
After the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Carmelo Soria, who was a member of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE),[4] exiled himself to Chile, where he obtained double citizenship.
He then used his diplomatic immunity status to protect opponents of Pinochet by granting them political asylum in various embassies, thus making him a target for the DINA secret police.
[4] On 14 July 1976, he was abducted and his corpse found two days later in a car sunk in the Canal del Carmen in the Pirámide sector of Santiago de Chile.
Soria was first detained in the Vía Naranja house in the sector of Lo Curro, shared by DINA agent Michael Townley and where Eugenio Berrios also worked.
[7] On 15 December 1976, The Washington Post published an article confirming that Soria's death had been caused by torture at the hands of the Chilean authorities, and not a car crash, as pretended by the latter.
[12][13] This led Carmen Soria to present the following year a complaint against Chile before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), charging it with "denigration of justice.
[4] On 4 May 2001, Garzón ordered the provisional detention of former Chilean Minister of Defence Hernán Julio Brady Roche (1975–1978) on charges of genocide, terrorism and torture in relation to Soria's assassination, and requested his extradition.
[8] In October 2005, the family's lawyer, Alfonso Insunza, presented a request before the Chilean justice demanding that the General Eduardo Aldunate Herman, second-in-command of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), be heard in the Soria case.
In this statement, Ríos San Martín had accused the Brigadier Jaime Lepe, secretary-general of the Army and a close contact of Augusto Pinochet, and other DINA agents, of being responsible of Soria's death.
[6] According to the judge Madrid, the order to detain Ríos San Martín was directly issued by the Brigadier Jaime Lepe, whose promotion to General was blocked in 1997 by the former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle in 1997 following denunciations by Carmen Soria.
[6] At behest of one of Soria's relatives, Spanish High Court Judge Pablo Ruz began prosecution proceedings against seven agents of DINA, six Chileans and one US citizen, for genocide and murder charges.
[22] It was determined that the crime of genocide may have occurred because the murder of Soria was perpetrated as part of the ‘process of systematic repression and elimination of opponents of the military regime’ undertaken by Pinochet.