HUIDOBRO LILLO, Secretary to This conforms to what is found in the book referred to. Santiago , November 3, 1883 . R. LILLO, July 24, 1882

Sentence of the court.

This process is founded in a diplomatic claim directed to the Government of Chili by Mr. W. Henry Trescot, special envoy extraordinary of the United States of North America, for the abstraction and opening of the correspondence directed by the Cabinet of Washington to Mr. Adams, minister resident at La Paz. In fact, four packets thus directed had arrived in the hands of Señor Benjamin Vicuña MacKenna, which the latter delivered to General Foote, United States consul, this being the origin of the claim.

The minister of foreign relations of Chili at once made active efforts, though without result, to discover the office where the act had been committed, until the receipt by the said minister of the letter in copy, dated the 19th, in which Don José’ Gregorio Fariña Bravo, employé of the custom-house and post-office of Cobija, announced himself as the author of the abstraction of the four referred-to packets. Being put in prison, the said Fariña Bravo confessed to have taken them, in order to send them to Señor Vicuña MacKenna, in which be said that the latter might become acquainted with their contents if he thought it convenient; and he added that he sent them with the belief that the correspondence might have some interest for the cause of Chili; that he had sent them himself without the counsel or co-operation of any other person, and that this is the only act of the kind that he has done during his service as an employé. During the course of this process the chief of the post-office in Cobija, Don Manuel Varas Arriagada, and another employé of the office, Don Vicente Gutierrez, were placed in prison upon suspicion of culpability in unduly retaining correspondence arriving at that port destined to La Paz, but having proven themselves guiltless, they were discharged for the offense of June 2 last.

In regard to the prisoner, considering first that the prisoner, Fariña Bravo, confesses to have abstracted the four packets of correspondence alluded to from the post-office in which he was serving as employé, diverting them from their proper destination; second, that there is in favor of the prisoner the circumstance of his having denounced himself and spontaneously confessed the offense; third, that the correspondence had not been opened since the four packets had been placed in the hands of Mr. Foote by Señor Vicuna MacKenna with their seals unbroken; fourth, that neither was there any serious delay in the sending of the correspondence from Cobija to La Paz on account of the interruption of communication between the said port and the interior of Bolivia; fifth, that this communication being suspended, the office at Cobija was not obliged to send by another route correspondence directed to the latter for transmission to La Paz, or any other place in the interior, for reasons given by the director-general of the postal department in his report to the 5th, remembering also the disposition of the laws (2d chapter 13, part 3:26th chapter, 1st part, and articles 11, No. 8, paragraph 2d, and 156 of the penal code), I condemn the said Don José Gregorio Fariña Bravo, native of Linares, married, and who knows how to read and write, for abstraction and interception of correspondence in the post-office in Cobija, to sixty-one days of solitary confinement, which are to be counted from the 29th of March last the date upon which he was placed in prison; I acquit him of the other charges of the accusation.

Let it be noted.