At the beginning of the 20th century, this property was part of the complex of buildings that made up the Instituto de Higiene. Between 1977 and 1990, it was used as a torture and detention center by agents of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), the Pinochet regime secret police. During the 1980s, relatives of the disappeared-detainees by the military regime brought to light the human rights violations that were carried out here through protests led by the Sebastián Acevedo Movement against Torture. In 2016, the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales, the national government agency in charge of the preservation of natural and cultural sites, declared the Cuartel Borgoño a «Site of Memory» under Decree Nº 346.