How the US backed Pinochet's henchman Manuel Contreras

Speaking at a ceremony on 11 September marking the 42nd anniversary of the US-backed military coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet noted that justice still needs to be served for the thousands of victims of the country's dictatorship which followed. Fortunately, although the man who enforced the brutal repression under Pinochet had died a month earlier, he had in fact been brought to account for his crimes. Nick MacWilliam looks back at the bloody legacy of Manuel Contreras and the role played by the US in the terror he unleashed.

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MANUEL Contreras was the military henchman who, more than any other, enforced the brutal repression that governed Chile during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

As head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) secret police - often referred to as Pinochet's Gestapo - Contreras was responsible for the torture and murder of hundreds of people.

Today most of his victims remain among Chile's thousands of disappeared, their families condemned to perpetual grief in absentia by the inhumanity of military rule.           

Unlike his master, however, General Contreras was brought to account for the crimes he committed. When he died on 7 August at the age of 86 in a military hospital in Santiago, Contreras was serving more than 500 years in prison for human rights abuses carried out by the DINA.

In addition to the disappearances that terrorised Chile, he directed the infamous Operation Condor extermination programme which targeted dissidents across Latin America and as far away as the United States and Europe.

For Cristina Godoy-Navarrete, who in 1974 was detained and tortured by the DINA, the death of Contreras compounds the tragedy of military rule. 'If anything [my feeling] was sadness,' she says. 'We will never know what happened to so many people who disappeared because he never gave any information. He never repented or asked for forgiveness. The fact somebody thinks he can kill, murder, torture, rape, and that is right … it gives me profound sadness.'        

Her sentiments are echoed by Ricardo Brodsky, executive director of Santiago's Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which opened in 2010 to document the crimes of the dictatorship and pay tribute to the victims.      

'Contreras' death generates contradictory sensations,' he says. 'On the one hand, there is happiness that such a person is no longer part of this world but, on the other, there is frustration as we know he has taken many secrets to the grave, especially about what happened to the disappeared.'

General Pinochet came to power in a military coup that overthrew the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. Thousands of people were detained and tortured, with many of them killed. Rather than submit to the illegality of the coup, Allende fought to the end, remaining true to his vow that the only way the right would remove him from La Moneda presidential palace was in a coffin.       

The fall of democracy heralded an era of repression and cruelty as the military regime enacted the systematic elimination of its opponents. In the aftermath of the coup, General Contreras directed several detention centres at which citizens were tortured and killed. In 1974, he was appointed director of the newly formed DINA, the secret police force which snatched people off the streets or from their homes, never to be seen again. 'It created a collective sense of fear and terror that immobilised everybody,' says Godoy-Navarrete.           

But the terror unleashed by the military regime against its own people would not have been possible without the support of Pinochet's allies in the United States government. Following Allende's election in 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to 'make the [Chilean] economy scream'. This was achieved by funding a series of strikes that halted industry and exerted intense pressure on Allende's government. The CIA also ploughed millions of dollars into an anti-government propaganda campaign in the pages of El Mercurio, Chile's most influential newspaper and a pillar of reactionary dogma.

Contreras'dealings with the United States predated the coup. In 1967, he enrolled at the US Army School of the Americas, which had branches in the US and Panama, where he was trained in counterinsurgency techniques, including interrogation and torture, that had been pioneered in Indochina and would soon be implemented across Latin America. Today the centre is known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

A list of School of the Americas alumni reads like a rollcall of Latin American repression and genocide. Among those to have received training there are the architects of Argentina's Dirty War, Generals Rafael Videla, Leopoldo Galtieri, Emilio Massera and Roberto Viola; the Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer; Roberto D'Aubuisson, who ordered the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero and led the military death squads that decimated El Salvador during its civil war; the Guatemalan military ruler Efrain Rios Montt, who orchestrated a scorched-earth campaign against the country's large indigenous population; several Colombian paramilitary commanders, and on and on. In total, these men caused tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of deaths.    

During the Pinochet dictatorship, the CIA viewed Contreras as an asset within Chile. Documents declassified in 2000 state that 'the US Government policy community approved [the] CIA's contact with Contreras, given his position as chief of the primary intelligence organisation in Chile, as necessary to accomplish the CIA's mission, in spite of concerns that this relationship might lay the CIA open to charges of aiding internal political repression'.

With regard to the atrocities committed under Contreras' watch, the file states that 'by April 1975, intelligence reporting showed that Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta, but an interagency committee directed the CIA to continue its relationship with Contreras'.

A few months later, Contreras was invited to Washington, and soon after he was paid for services to the US government.    

At the same time, Contreras was orchestrating Operation Condor, a collaboration of military regimes in South America working to eliminate leftists across the continent. Atrocities committed under the Condor banner included Operation Colombo, in which 119 Chilean militants were murdered in 1975. The Chilean media, led by dictatorial mouthpiece El Mercurio, reported that the deaths were due to communist infighting, a deliberate mistruth intended to allow the authorities to maintain their killing spree while denying any knowledge of the fate of the disappeared.

Even involvement in a terrorist act in the US capital itself failed to sever contact between Contreras and the US authorities. In 1976 Contreras arranged the killing of Orlando Letelier, Allende's foreign minister, in a Washington DC car bombing that also claimed the life of Letelier's young assistant. Two years earlier he had conspired to assassinate General Carlos Prats, a committed constitutionalist who under Allende had served as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Minister of the Interior. Prats and his wife were killed by a car bomb while exiled in Buenos Aires.           

'It's clear that the repressive coordination of the security services of Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, the Condor Plan, was assisted by the United States, especially during the Nixon-Kissinger era,' says Ricardo Brodsky. 'The murder in Washington of Orlando Letelier distanced the US from the DINA and from Pinochet.'     

Even so, while the declassified CIA documents say that 'by the end of 1976, contacts with Contreras were very infrequent', they also confirm that the agency continued to liaise with him for at least several more months after the Washington bombing. The files state that 'during 1977, [the] CIA met with Contreras about half a dozen times; three of those contacts were to request information on the Letelier assassination'. The report does not say what was discussed at the other meetings.

'The United States has a big responsibility about what happened to the victims of the regime,' says Cristina Godoy-Navarrete. 'Everything we experienced in terms of repression, torture, it was a consequence of the political decision of the United States to overthrow Allende.'

In 1993, Contreras was convicted by a Chilean court for his part in the Letelier murder and sentenced to seven years in prison. So began a series of trials in which the ex-DINA commander was convicted time and time again of the abduction, disappearance and murder of Chilean citizens, including two life terms in 2008 for the murder of Carlos Prats and his wife. He later accused Pinochet of ordering the Letelier and Prats killings.

In spite of the severity of his crimes, Contreras served his sentence in relative comfort. 'For the more than 20 years Contreras spent in jail, the majority were without doubt in military enclosures where he enjoyed unacceptable privileges,' says Brodsky. This included an extended period at Penal Cordillera, a converted holiday camp used to hold ex-military officials. Following public indignation at its luxury facilities, the 'prison' was closed in 2013 and the inmates transferred elsewhere. But Contreras' final months were far removed from those of his victims. 'He probably died very well looked after,' says Godoy-Navarrete. 'It's so different to the people he tortured and killed. They died under the most horrendous conditions.'  

Can anything be gained from Contreras' passing? 'Trying to be optimistic, maybe now that he's died, other people will begin to talk, to denounce within military rank and file,' says Godoy-Navarrete. 'Nobody has ever said much. If that occurs, it will be the best outcome of his death.'         

Nick MacWilliam is a freelance journalist who writes for several publications. He is co-editor of Alborada, the UK's first magazine devoted entirely to Latin America, and assistant editor of Sounds and Colours, an online magazine for South American music and film. This article is reproduced from the teleSUR English website (www.telesurtv.net/english).

*Third World Resurgence No. 300, August 2015, pp 36-37