Life
Carmelo Soria was the nephew of the Spanish urban planner Arturo Soria y Mata. He had three children with his wife Laura González Vera.
After the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Carmelo Soria, who was a member of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), exiled himself to Chile, where he obtained double citizenship. He became a UN civil servant in the 1960s. Between 1971 and 1973, during Salvador Allende's rule, Soria temporarily abandoned his functions to become an advisor to the Popular Unity government. In September 1973, after Augusto Pinochet's coup, he re-joined the UN. 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.
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. There, he was tortured and, since he didn't speak, subjected to sarin gas (which had been re-invented by Berrios). Soria was then detained and tortured again in the Villa Grimaldi.
On 18 July 1976, notices of Carmelo Soria's death began to be announced on European radio stations, while it was censored in Chile.
On 4 August 1976, another member of Soria's family, Dr. Carlos Godoy Lagarrigue, the son of the ex-rector of the University of Chile and former Minister of Education Pedro Godoy, also "disappeared".
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 as a car-crash as pretended by the latter. Despite requests from UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim made in 1976, the Chilean justice apparatus refused to open new investigations on the case. The Washington Post's informations were confirmed in 1992 by the testimony of DINA agent Michael Townley. Soria's assassination at the hands of the DINA was confirmed by the Rettig Report at the beginning of the Chilean transition to democracy.
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