Juan Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda has died. Contreras is considered the worst criminal in the history of Chile. During the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), he was the most feared man in the country. He was one of the creators and organizers of Operation Condor and the head of the National Intelligence Directorate (Dina) of Chile.
Contreras was sentenced to 25 consecutive sentences totaling 289 years in prison for kidnapping, forced disappearances and assassinations, plus two life sentences for killing the former commander in chief of the Chilean army under President Salvador Allende, General Carlos Prats, and his wife in 1974.
In prison, he suffered from colon cancer, hypertension, diabetes and kidney problems. On August 7, 2015, aged 86, he died in the Military Hospital of Santiago, still holding the rank of general.
His death was celebrated in the streets of Santiago by protesters and relatives of those who disappeared during the dictatorship in Chile.
The Dina
The National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) was the Chilean political police at the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship. It was established in 1974, with agents trained by officers of the US repressive apparatus at the School of the Americas, responsible for indoctrinating armies in Latin America. It also became known as the School of the Coups, in which were provided courses for the anti-subversive war. It is estimated that, by 1964, more than 16 thousand men had been trained in its classes [1].
The first civilian members of Dina were former members of the far-right organization Patria y Libertad (Homeland and Liberty), which helped organize the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. The Dina was responsible for, according to official data, 1,192 missing and over 1,500 executions in and out of Chile, such as the assassination of the former chancellor Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976; General Carlos Prats, Pinochet’s predecessor in charge of the army, in 1974, in Buenos Aires; and Bernardo Leighton and his wife, Anita Fresno, in Rome, in 1975.
Since the Dina’s image was much eroded, it was replaced by the National Information Center (Central Nacional de Informaciones) in 1977.
Operation Condor
The Operation Condor was a joint political repression operation of the Southern Cone governments (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) against those who rose up against the dictatorships in the subcontinent. Because of its clandestine nature, it is difficult to determine the number of murders, but they are estimated at 60,000 at least deaths and 400,000 tortured. Its actions were characterized by monitoring and annihilation, with practices such as kidnapping, illegal detention centers, torture, executions and forced disappearance of opposition members.
Key members of the Condor Operation were the governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, and their dictators, the generals Alfredo Stroessner, Ernesto Geisel, João Batista Figueiredo, Hugo Banzer, Augusto Pinochet and Jorge Rafael Videla. It was a true international state terrorism, coordinated by the US government, which provided technical support and military aid until at least 1978 through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The Colonel Manuel Contreras was paid by the CIA until 1977. He was one of the masterminds of the Operation Condor after the experience of the Operation Colombo which, in 1975, covered up the disappearance of 119 political prisoners, gone missing with the assistance of the police forces of Brazil and Argentina. In the Operation Condor, agents of the State shared information and repressive techniques and fulfilled clandestine missions in the interest of neighbors in their territories.
Documents of the United States confirm that Brazilian SNI officials went to Chile to interrogate prisoners after the 1973 coup and that Manuel Contreras received training in Brazil.
Operation Carcará: Brazil in the Operation Condor
The Brazilian dictatorship had an active role in influencing and intervening in neighboring countries, first with a clear involvement in the Bolivian, Uruguayan and Chilean coups, and then with providing police officers and techniques for repression.
In 1971, for example, João Batista Figueiredo, chief minister of the military cabinet of the dictator Emilio Garrastasu Medici, offered Colonel Juan Ayora money, weapons, planes, mercenaries and permission to install training areas in Campo Grande to support General Hugo Banzer’s dictatorship. It also was offered logistical support to military aircraft which did not even hide their badges as they delivered rifles, machine guns and ammunition at Santa Cruz de La Sierra. The troops of the Second Army, commanded by General Humberto Melo, stationed in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, which borders with Bolivia, stood ready to step in [2].
By orders of the Brazilian dictatorship, João Goulart was monitored until December 1976 in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and even in France, where he did medical checkups because of a heart condition [3]. The dictatorship forbade a necropsy on the former president.
In 1978, as part of the Operation Condor, the Operation Zapato Rojo (Red Shoe) was mounted. DOPS agents from Porto Alegre helped officers of the Counterintelligence Company of the Uruguayan Army in the capture of militants [4].
In November of that year, with the consent of the Brazilian dictatorship, Uruguayan army officers crossed the border. In Porto Alegre, they kidnaped Universindo Rodriguez and his partner Lilian Celiberti, activists of the political opposition in Uruguay, along with their two kids Camillo and Francesca, five and three years old respectively. The operation failed because two Brazilian journalists warned, through an anonymous phone call, that the Uruguayan couple had disappeared. That is why they were not dead. But Rodriguez and Celiberti were arrested and tortured in Brazil and then taken to military prisons in Uruguay, where they spent five years.
The police officer Pedro Seelig, head of the DEOPS in Rio Grande do Sul, identified as the man in charge of the operation in Porto Alegre, was processed. However, Universindo and Lilian, who were in prison in Uruguay, could not testify, and he was acquitted for lack of evidence.
The military who ran the secret service of Itaipu [the largest hydroelectric power station in South America, on the borders of Brazil and Paraguay) during its building developed the Operation Mesopotamia, led by the General Costa Cavalcanti, which consisted of thorough investigations of Latin Americans who worked on the project. Several workers suspected of being subversives were delivered to the Argentine military. [5] “The dictatorships brought down geographical and political boundaries, abolished treaties for the protection of refugees and disregarded international conventions on Human Rights,” writes Leoncio Mata in his book “The Major Curió and the guerrillas of the Araguaia.”
On the other hand, the Brazilian military government used the instruments provided by the Operation Condor to hunt opposition members abroad. Several Brazilian political refugees were captured outside the country. In return, it provided repression experts, like Colonel Sebastião “Curió” Rodrigues de Moura, who worked at the National Intelligence Service (SNI), led by João Batista Figueiredo, and went to other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Peru, with the names of Sergio Mario Landario and Marco Antonio Luchinni.
The Operation Condor reached its peak between 1976 and 1979. The Chilean Dina, headed by Contreras, and the Secretariat for State Intelligence (Side), led by General Carlos Alberto Martínez, were absolutely in tune with the Brazilian SNI, commanded by General João Batista Figueiredo. Figueiredo was often asked for lectures and directions in Paraguay.
The Operation Condor officially ended with the overthrow of the Argentine dictatorship in 1983, although the killings went on for some time after that.
In Brazil, impunity goes on
At least, the Chilean people had the honor of sentencing Contreras to 516 years in prison for human rights violations. He was still waiting another six judgments in the Supreme Court, which amounted to 69 more years in prison, plus 27 cases decided in the first instance, which would cost him another 339 years.
That is very unlike to happen in Brazil, which has the shameful brand of never having arrested any torturer of the dictatorship. Not even today, the Popular Front government that has the president Dilma Rousseff, who took part in the armed struggle, has imprisoned any torturer.
In addition to the torturers within the country and state agents who helped repression agencies abroad, there are several hints that Brazilian diplomats and ambassadors collaborated with the Operation Condor. The agreements between the Itamaraty (the Foreign Relations office in Brazil) and San Martín Palace, in Argentina, were coordinated by the Nobel Peace Prize Henry Kissinger, who was already in the White House in 1970. For example, Jefferson Cardim Osorio was kidnapped in Buenos Aires and tortured by members of the Argentine Federal Police with the consent of the Brazilian ambassador Francisco Azeredo da Silveira, promoted to chancellor by the President Ernesto Geisel [6]. Brazilian and Argentine ambassadors were articulated with the intelligence services in a repressive clockwork machine. They also have to be tried and punished exemplarily.
On August 26, 2015 it was completed the 36th year of the Amnesty Act in Brazil, which granted self-amnesty to the State agents who tortured, killed and kidnaped. In this sad day, social movements demanded a new interpretation of that Act by the Judicial Authorities so that these criminals can be convicted, before their crimes are prescribed.
The Convergência Socialista and Operation Condor
During the government of Salvador Allende, about 3,000 Brazilian went into exile in Chile. The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in Chile found that Brazilian state officials have acted directly on the repression in the National Stadium of Santiago, where was executed, among other Brazilian militants, Roberto Cardoso Quintiliano, from the group Ponto de Partida (Starting Point), which led to the formation of the Convergência Socialista [7].
Documents found at the police station of the Federal Police in Foz do Iguaçu register joint espionage information between Brazil and Paraguay through the binational company Itaipu. For 15 years, the Special Information and Security Advisory (AESI) spied, issued reports and kept direct and constant correspondence with enforcement agencies of the dictatorships of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile. From 1973 to 1988, Itaipu was a stronghold of military and police torturers. Some of these agents worked in a parallel apparatus maintained by the Unicon construction consortium [8].
Antonio Fernandez Neto, a militant of the Convergência Socialista, worked in the consortium that built Itaipu. He was an active participant in the formation of the Union of Construction Workers of Foz do Iguaçu, living on the border, establishing democratic contacts with sectors of Paraguayan opponents of the military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. He was monitored for these international activities by the Operation Condor.
Arrested by the Paraguayan political police, he was taken to the capital city of Asunción, where he was interrogated by the main agents of the country’s political repression, notorious torturers: Alberto Cantero and Pastor Coronel. Expelled from the country, returning to work on the hydroelectric plant at Itaipu, he had as one of his supervisors the Captain Roberto Henrique Helbling, coordinator of the AESI and denounced as an articulator of the Operation Condor.
* Américo Gomes is a member of the Committee for Political Prisoners and Persecuted of the Convergência Socialista
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Notes:
1. BAUER, Caroline Silveira. O Departamento de Ordem Política e Social do Rio Grande do Sul: Terrorismo de Estado e polícia política durante a ditadura civil-militar brasileira. In SOUZA, Fabiano Farias de, Operação Condor: Terrorismo de Estado no Cone Sul das Américas, Revista Ágora, Vitória, Nº 5, 2007, pp. 1-31.
2. BANDEIRA, Moniz. O governo João Goulart, as lutas sociais no Brasil, 1961-1964, p. 391.
3. http://cartamaior.com.br/?/Editoria/Internacional/Cartas-de-Geisel-a-Videla-mostram-elos-da-Operacao-Condor/6/27786, João Goulart was the last president of Brazil before the military coup in 1964.
4. CASSOL, Gissele. Prisão e tortura em terra estrangeira: a colaboração repressiva entre Brasil e Uruguai (1964-1985), MSc’s thesis, Santa Maria (RS): Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM), 2008, in SOUZA, Fabiano Farias, Operação Condor: Terrorismo de Estado no Cone Sul das Américas, http://www.sumarios.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/65109_7371.PDF
DEOPS: Departamento Estadual de Ordem Política e Social, the states’ political polices during the military dictatorship in Brazil.
5. PALMAR, Aluizio. Revelada ação de Itaipu nos anos de chumbo.
From the newspaper Brasil de Fato, http://www.midiaindependente.org/en/blue/2004/01/271305.shtml, accessed in 04/01/2004.
7. Convergência Socialista (Socialist Convergence) was a Brazilian left clandestine party founded in Argentina by four people in 1974, influenced by the ideas of Nahuel Moreno, which gave the base for the foundation of the PSTU in 1994, the Brazilian section of the IWL-FI.
8. PALMAR, Aluizio. Revelada ação de Itaipu nos anos de chumbo. From the newspaper Brasil de Fato, http://www.midiaindependente.org/en/blue/2004/01/271305.shtml, accessed in 04/01/2004.
