Rodrigo Rojas

Rodrigo Andrés Rojas De Negri (7 March 1967 – 6 July 1986), known as Rodrigo Rojas, was a young photographer who was burned alive during a street demonstration against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

Rodrigo Rojas was born in the port of Valparaíso, the son of Verónica DeNegri, a communist party activist. In 1976 at the age of 10, and after the Chilean coup of 1973, he was sent to live with relatives in Canada. Soon thereafter, his mother was arrested for political activities against the government of General Augusto Pinochet and later exiled. They were reunited and settled in the Washington D.C. area of the United States. There he attended Woodrow Wilson High School, and later studied photography. In 1986, Rojas-DeNegri, by then a young American photographer, decided to visit Chile for the first time since he had left for the exile.

During this time Chile was experiencing widespread political instability and human rights abuses. A national protest was organized for 2–3 July 1986. Rodrigo Rojas, who had been in the country for only six weeks, decided to try to participate and document the barricades that were going up in different areas of Santiago.

At 8:00 am on 2 July 1986, he was among a small group of people that were setting up a barricade in the Los Nogales neighborhood, in the municipality of Estacion Central. According to the official report, endorsed and quoted at a speech by General Pinochet himself, the group was carrying five old tires, a molotov cocktail and a gallon of gasoline. They were intercepted by an army patrol that was clearing barricades in the area of General Velázquez Avenue. All escaped except for Rojas and Carmen Quintana, an engineering student at the University of Santiago. The patrol, under the command of Lieutenant Pedro Fernández Dittus, was composed of three officers, five noncommissioned officers, and 17 soldiers.

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