The secret police of the Pinochet regime was the Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional, or DINA. Within it, a sub-unit formed in April 1974 called the Lautaro Brigade carried out operations directly for the agency's leadership. Early in 1975, this brigade - then about twenty agents, later closer to thirty - moved into a property in La Reina. The agents had come from Villa Grimaldi, another DINA site, and they brought its methods with them. Captain Juan Morales Salgado commanded the facility. Among the agents was a nurse, Gladys Calderon, one of the few women in the unit. What set this place apart from the regime's many other detention centers was its singular, deliberate purpose.

By 1975 and 1976, DINA had largely crushed the armed left and turned its attention to the clandestine leadership of the Chilean Communist Party. Members in hiding were hunted, seized, and brought to Simon Bolivar Street. Roughly eighty of them passed through. Among the disappeared was Victor Diaz Lopez, one of the party's most senior underground leaders - a man with a family, a political life, and decades of organizing behind him. He met the same end as the others held there: killed by his captors, his body then loaded aboard a helicopter and dropped into the sea so that no grave would ever be found. The strategy was disappearance itself - to erase not only the person but the evidence that they had ever been taken.

For more than thirty years the site stayed hidden. It was missing from Chile's two landmark truth commissions, the Rettig and Valech reports, because none of the perpetrators talked and none of the victims survived to describe it. The wall finally cracked in 2007. A man named Jorgelino Vergara Bravo, who as a young servant had worked inside the DINA world - he had been a household domestic for the agency's chief, Manuel Contreras - came forward and described what he had seen. His testimony to investigators, later confirmed before Judge Victor Montiglio in the Calle Conferencia case, revealed the facility for the first time. In 2011 his story reached a wider audience through the documentary El Mocito, 'The Young Butler.'

The house itself is gone. After the dictatorship it was demolished and sold to a private owner, and the residential complex that replaced it carries no official memorial - a sharp contrast to sites like Villa Grimaldi, which were preserved and reopened as places of remembrance. On 4 April 2016, human rights organizations inaugurated a small memorial in a nearby plaza, a modest marker for people who were denied even a burial. It is a quiet, almost easy-to-miss tribute. But in a city still working to name what was done in its own neighborhoods, the act of marking this ground at all - of insisting that the eighty be remembered as people - matters.