Dirty Wars and Democracy

In Chile, “moment has come” for ex-soldiers to reveal secrets of Pinochet dictatorship

By EVA VERGARA, The Associated Press

SANTIAGO, Chile

Hundreds of former military draftees rallying outside Chile’s presidential palace were asked Sunday to come forward and reveal crimes they committed and witnessed during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The draftees have long feared that if they name names and reveal where bodies are buried, they will face prosecution by the courts or retaliation by those who ordered them to torture and kill.

But now the information they once promised to carry to their graves has become both a heavy psychological burden and a bargaining chip. By offering confessions, some of these now-aging men believe they can improve their chances of getting government pensions and mental health care.

“Perhaps today is the day when the moment has come, for us to describe what we saw and what we suffered inside the military bases, the things that we witnessed and that we did,” said Fernando Mellado, who leads the Santiago chapter of the Former Soldiers of 1973.

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Latin American Herald (Caracas), Oct. 17, 2009

SANTIAGO – The Chilean government said it will invoke a controversial Pinochet-era anti-terrorism law to prosecute acts of violence in the southern region of Araucania, where armed Mapuche Indian militants have set two trucks on fire over the past 48 hours.

“We’ve taken the decision to invoke the Anti-Terrorist Law to prosecute these groups of people who only want to cause disorder, commit crimes and stir up trouble in a region that wants a peaceful path” to resolving land disputes, Deputy Interior Minister Patricio Rosende said.

“We’re not going to allow or tolerate actions of this type again by these groups,” Rosende said, referring to the protesters’ burning of two trucks and other acts of violence in recent days.

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NPR, September 2, 2009:

Listen to the Story

A judge in Chile has issued arrest warrants for more than 100 former security officials. They are accused of the worst killings and other human rights violations during the rule of General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990. Peter Kornbluh, director of the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archives in Washington, talks with Ari Shapiro about the crimes committed during the so-called “dirty war.”

Por J. Escalante / J. Rebolledo / La Nación (Chile), 2 septiembre 2009

Entre los encartados hay al menos 60 nuevos ex agentes que hasta ahora no habían caído en las redes de la justicia por delitos de lesa humanidad. Del total de procesados, todos en retiro, 50 son del Ejército y el resto de la FACh, Armada, Investigaciones y Carabineros.

El más masivo procesamiento en la historia de los juicios por violaciones de los derechos humanos, dictó ayer el juez Víctor Montiglio en contra de 120 ex agentes, todos de la DINA.

Entre los encausados hay cerca de 60 nuevos ex represores que hasta ahora no habían sido procesados en algún juicio por delitos de lesa humanidad cometidos durante la dictadura.

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Pascale Bonnefoy, Global Post.com, Sept. 1, 2009, 19:45 ET

A Chilean judge ordered today the arrest and indictment of more than 120 former intelligence agents from the Pinochet dictatorship under charges of crimes against humanity in three major operations that took place in the 1970s.

Judge Victor Montiglio’s decision marked the first massive indictment for human rights crimes here since the courts began serious efforts in 2000 to investigate human rights violations during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

The crimes include the disappearance of the entire Communist party leadership in 1976, in a case known as “calle Conferencia,” in reference to the street where they were abducted, and an operation known as “Colombo,” in which 119 opponents were made to disappear in 1975. This was a scandalous case — the regime, with the cooperation of its counterparts in Argentina and Brazil, mounted a cover-up operation by fabricating newspapers in those countries listing the names of the victims as having been killed in political infighting within their own organizations.

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Hugh O’Shaughnessy, The Independent on Sunday, August 23, 2009

British authorities and the financial sector are linked for the first time to the late Chilean dictator’s £1bn fortune. Hugh O’Shaughnessy reports

Pascale Bonnefoy – GlobalPost.com

A sister’s quest to find out what happened to the only U.S. citizen who disappeared during Chile’s military dictatorship.

SANTIAGO — On his death bed in a Santiago prison hospital, the 88-year-old German child molester, weapons trafficker, torturer and sect leader Paul Schafer still refuses to say what happened to the only U.S. citizen who disappeared during Chile’s military dictatorship.

Boris Weisfeiler, a 43-year-old Russian-born mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University, was last seen in January 1985 during a hiking trip in a remote area in the Andean foothills, 250 miles south of the Chilean capital and near a secretive German settlement called “Colonia Dignidad.”

Two months later, a far from thorough police inquiry determined that Weisfeiler had drowned trying to cross a river, and no more questions were asked. Almost a quarter of a century later, the only sure thing about Weisfeiler’s disappearance is that it was no accidental drowning.

Documents declassified in 2000 told an entirely different story from the official line, leading Weisfeiler’s sister Olga to open a judicial investigation. But it has been dragging on for nine years, with no visible progress. She came to Chile this July for the eighth time.

The secret memos and reports revealed not only negligence and inaction by the U.S. government to determine his whereabouts at the time, but evidence indicating that her brother may have been abducted by the military and handed over to Colonia Dignidad under the suspicion he was either a Russian or Jewish “spy.” A still unidentified U.S. Embassy source using the alias “Daniel,” spoke of seeing Boris living in “animal-like conditions” in Colonia at least two years later.

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Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 10.22 BST

Victor Jara, who was killed in the first few days of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Photograph: Reuters

It was the atrocity which symbolised Chile’s descent into dictatorship: soldiers used rifle butts to smash the hands of Victor Jara, a political activist and folk singer, so he could not play guitar. Then they shot him 44 times.

Yesterday, almost 36 years later, justice caught up with one of killers. José Adolfo Paredes Márquez, a former conscript in Augusto Pinochet’s army, was charged with murder.

The burly 54-year-old was tracked down in San Sebastian, a spa town outside the capital Santiago, where he was working as a waiter and gardener.

Activists who have campaigned for the case to be reopened welcomed the announcement but urged authorities to focus on arresting commanding officers. “There are other people responsible – those who ordered the torture and the execution,” said Joan Turner Jara, the singer’s English-born widow.

Jara, a political songwriter and poet and high-profile supporter of socialist President Salvador Allende, was among thousands swept up in the aftermath of Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup in September 1973. The author of El cigarrito and Manifiesto was herded into Santiago’s football stadium which was used as a mass jail.

Soldiers broke the musician’s hands before shooting him in the head and riddling his body with bullets, one of 3,100 murders committed by Pinochet’s forces during military rule which lasted until 1990, when democracy returned to the South American country.

After the rightwing dictator died in 2006 activists stepped up efforts to find Jara’s killers despite apparent foot-dragging by prosecutors and the army.

In 2008 the case was closed after Mario Manriquez, a retired army colonel who was commanding officer at the stadium, was found guilty of the murder but was deemed not to have pulled the trigger.

Judge Juan Fuentes reopened the investigation after fresh evidence was presented and earlier this month Paredes was tracked down. The former conscript, who was 18 when the crime was committed, confessed his participation but said blame rested with commanding officers.

Campaigners have long sought a notoriously brutal commander, a tall, fair-haired officer nicknamed “El Principe” (The Prince), as the man mostly responsible. Paredes has identified him as Nelson Edgardo Haase Mazzei, a former lieutenant. He allegedly remained seated at a desk while ordering conscripts to torture and shoot prisoners, including Jara.

The stadium has since been named after its most famous victim.

Associated Press, updated 1:27 p.m. ET, Mon., April 20, 2009

SANTIAGO, Chile – A retired army general and two other officers have been indicted in the killing of 14 dissidents in the early days of the 1973-90 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The Santiago Court of Appeals says judge Victor Montiglio indicted Gen. Gonzalo Santelices, Maj. Patricio Ferrer and Lt. Pablo Martinez as accomplices in the killings in 1973 in northern Chile.

The three retired officers were being held Monday at a military barracks.

The killings are tied to the Caravan of Death, a military party that left more than 90 political prisoners dead as it traversed the country shortly after the 1973 military coup led by Pinochet.

At the time of his retirement in 2008, Santelices was commander of the Santiago army garrison, Chile’s largest.

CIPER-Chile: Full Story (Dec. 15, 2008)

El ministro Alejandro Madrid sigue arrojando sorpresas. A punto de terminar la pesquisa sobre la extraña muerte de Eduardo Frei Montalva, acaba de concluir una investigación que entrega una nueva versión sobre el robo de una sucursal bancaria en Calama, que terminó en 1981 con dos empleados dinamitados y un botín de $45 millones desaparecido. Los autores, dos agentes de la CNI, fueron fusilados y su jefe, el mayor Juan Delmas, se suicidó. El equipo policial de Madrid descubrió que Delmas fue asesinado por otros hombres de los aparatos represivos –tal como en las mejores historias de espías- para impedir que se develara que el robo fue parte de un plan organizado por los propios mandos CNI para financiarse. Y para ello debieron seguir matando a otros agentes, crímenes que hoy son investigados por un juez de Arica. El factor común: la temible Brigada Mulchén, hasta ahora intocable, la que siguió operativa años después de su disolución en 1977.

Por Sebastián Minay, CIPER