Background

Jorge Mateluna was born on January 6, 1974, in Santiago, Chile. He is the son of Miguel and Cecilia and the fourth of six siblings. Jorge was the first of them to finish high school. Closing the school cycle was one of the greatest aspirations of this hard-working family. He recalls a happy childhood ending with the barbarism deployed by the military dictatorship installed with the 1973 coup d'état. The year 1986 has been defined as "the decisive year" in the struggle against the dictatorship. The protests were growing and so was the repression. The town where Jorge lived had all the problems of the most marginalized sectors of the country and for that reason, among others, when he was only twelve years old, he formally joined the Communist Youth as a militant.

As time went by, the situation of the country did not change and with more experience, Jorge decided to be more frontal in the way of confronting the dictatorship, and decided to join the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front. Being part of the Front, on November 9, 1992, at the age of 18, he was arrested by the investigative police, denying information to family members who asked for him and being tortured for most of the time. After ten days of detention (a period allowed by the Anti-Terrorist Law) he was taken to the Ex-Penitentiary of Santiago, where the rest of his arrested comrades were being held. He was placed at the disposal of the Santiago Court of Appeals and other criminal courts, accused of various crimes. In the mid-1990s, Jorge Mateluna was sentenced to life imprisonment for forming and belonging to armed combat groups.

In 1994, due to an escape attempt, he was transferred to the High Security Prison. Ten years later, after a long process of mobilizations and a 74-day hunger strike, they managed, as political prisoners, to obtain the approval in Congress of the Specific Pardon Law that allowed then President Ricardo Lagos to pardon them under certain requirements. Thanks to this, on August 27, 2004, Jorge Mateluna was released.

While in prison he was able, along with other companions, to study sociology, which he resumed upon his release from prison at the Arcis University. However, he did not finish his studies because he decided to change to Fine Arts at the same university, thanks to scholarships that existed at that time for political prisoners.

In October 2004 he meets Claudia, his partner, assumes the paternity of Gisselle (Claudia's daughter) and Alekos, their son, is born in August 2006. That same year he forms, together with a partner who supported his freedom, the documentary production company NovoSur. They made social documentaries, among them "Deseducados", inspired by the struggles of the student movement of the time.

In 2008 he joined the National Council for Culture and the Arts, Metropolitan Region, as territorial manager of the program "Creando Chile en mi Barrio". In mid-2011 he formally constituted Culturarte Producciones, a production company that works in the field of cultural management. Then, in 2012 he joined Codepu as a volunteer, working in the communications team and in the formulation of projects.

Current Case

On June 17, 2013, Jorge went to the Municipality of Pudahuel, in order to arrange a meeting with the person in charge of culture, to present a project he had done, which consisted in the creation of an application for cell phones, which promoted the rescue of cultural heritage in the Municipality of Providencia and Santiago. It was that day when Carabineros de Chile arrested him as a suspect for a bank robbery in the commune of Pudahuel. Without meritorious evidence Jorge Mateluna is sentenced to 16 years in the High Security Prison.

Since he was pardoned in 2004, Jorge Mateluna has turned his work to the cultural field and to human rights, social and indigenous organizations, a participation that has earned him the solidarity of these organizations and of many people who know his integrity and irrevocable commitment to justice.