The repression came down especially hard on media professionals. At least 70 people linked to the media—including journalists, photographers, camera operators, and technicians—are estimated to have died or disappeared in the struggle to keep their voices alive.

The roll call of murdered colleagues, as kept in Santiago by the Chilean Journalists Association and other organizations, begins on the very day of the military coup—September 11, 1973—with the murder of journalist Augusto Olivares inside barricaded La Moneda Palace. It continues one month later, when Carlos Berger Guralnick, 30, station director at El Loa Radio, was murdered by the Caravan of Death in Calama. The record continues with the murders of Diana Aarón, 25, of Channel 13; Mario Calderón Tapa, 31, of La Unión in Valparaíso; Máximo Gedda Ortiz, 26, a journalist and union member at Televisión Nacional, arrested in July 1974 and last seen brutally tortured in Villa Grimaldi; Channel 9 press chief Augusto Carmona Acevedo, 38, shot in the back as he arrived home in December 1977; Daniel Castro López, 68, a correspondent for Clarín newspaper in Temuco; Luis Durán Rivas, 28, the editor of Chilenuevo; José Pérez Hermosilla, 32, a contributor for Última Hora and La Nación; José Miguel Rivas, 35; Sergio Troncoso León, 31, a reporter in Chillán; José Yáñez Olave, 29, of La Provincia in Linares; Jaime Aldoney Vargas, 30, of Limache Radio; Guillermo Gálvez Rivadeneira, 50; Carlos Dewet Bascuñán, 28, editor of El Andino in the El Salvador mining area, whose body was found in the foothills of the Andes two months after he was arrested; Alfonso Gamboa, 37, station director at Atacama Radio in Copiapó; Nenhad Teodorovic Sertic, 25, a journalism student at Universidad del Norte; Rodrigo Rojas, a young independent photographer, who died after a group of soldiers commanded by Lt. Pedro Fernández Dittus burned him alive on July 2, 1986.

Two years after they disappeared, the remains of Sergio Contreras, 40, a regional government employee, and Ernesto Traubmann Riegelhaupt, 48, who worked for the National Mining Company and as a contributor for the Czechoslovakian news agency CTK, were found in the Santiago public cemetery.

On September 8, 2006, at the site where the bullet-riddled body of José Humberto Carrasco Tapia had turned up, a monument was officially opened in memory of the journalists who were murdered or “disappeared” under Chile’s military regime.