Pinochet spy chief lies about 'dirty war': Allende

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Allende: Pinochet Spy Chief Lies About 'Dirty War
SANTIAGO, Chile September 20, 2013 (AP)
By MARIANELA JARROUD Associated Press

The daughter of toppled President Salvador Allende says that those convicted of human rights violations during Chile's long dictatorship should be moved to common prisons, and out of the relatively luxurious lockup where they are serving multiple life sentences.

President Sebastian Pinera says that he's thinking about closing the prison, where inmates enjoy tennis courts, gardens and cable TV.

Among those held is Manuel Contreras, the former spy chief of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Contreras gave interviews ahead of the 40th anniversary of the coup claiming that all of the thousands of disappeared were armed leftists killed in gunfights.

Sen. Isabel Allende also said in an AP interview Thursday that the claim is a lie that shows Contreras doesn't deserve privileges.

"Listening to (Contreras) is repulsive, he lies shamelessly and it is a slap, of course, to the families, to the victims, to the truth. Frankly, it is repugnant," she said.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/allende-ap-pinochet-spy-chief-repulsive-liar-20311327

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(Short article, no more at link.)

[Judi Lynn]

1. Privatization Profiteers from Pinochet’s Chile May Yet Face Prison

Privatization Profiteers from Pinochet’s Chile May Yet Face Prison
by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog
September 19th, 2013

Julio Ponce, the billionaire owner of Sociedad Quimica & Minera de Chile (SQM), faces ten years in prison for insider trading. A beneficiary of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Ponce is charged with buying company shares at below market prices and selling them at a profit.

SQM – often referred to as Soquimich - is one of the world’s biggest producers of potassium nitrate, iodine and lithium which it produces with raw materials sourced from its caliche ore and brine mines in the Atacama desert. Originally a state enterprise, SQM was privatized by Pinochet in 1988 at the bargain basement price of $120 million on the advice of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The man in charge of privatization in Chile was Ponce, who trained as a forestry engineer, but had the good fortune of marrying Veronica Pinochet, the daughter of the president. Pinochet appointed Ponce to the board of SQM before it was privatized.

“Call it business savvy plus political connections on overdrive,” writes Erin Carlyle at Forbes magazine.

Ponce became president of the privatized nitrate company in 1987. Several of his relatives became major stockholders and had positions on the board of directors of the company.
Today SQM is worth $9.2 billion. Ponce has 84.1 million shares in the company, according to SQM filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) making him worth $3.3 billion.

"It is obvious that Ponce Lerou's family ties and public posts helped him to put together the prosperous economic state that he enjoys today," Maria Olivia Monckeberg, author of "The Looting of the Chilean State by the Economic Groups," told the New York Times. "He created a network of relatives and business partners that came to occupy the highest posts in some of the most important state companies, not just Soquimich, but also the state-owned copper and steel companies."

More:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15871

[dipsydoodle]

4. Highly appropriate family name

Ponce.

[delrem]

2. These people deserve to be at bottom of the prison ladder.

Now, I could ask them, how was the prison ladder defined in their military dictatorship? Would the muck beneath that lowest rung belongs to them, or would we have mercy?

[Judi Lynn]

3. Kissinger and Chile: In an Age of Vigilantes, There Is Cause for Optimism

Kissinger and Chile: In an Age of Vigilantes, There Is Cause for Optimism
Thursday, 19 September 2013 09:18 By John Pilger, Truthout | Op-Ed

The most important anniversary of the year was the 40th anniversary of September 11, 1973 - the crushing of the democratic government of Chile by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state. The National Security Archive in Washington has posted new documents that reveal much about Kissinger's role in an atrocity that cost thousands of lives.

In declassified tapes, Kissinger is heard planning with President Richard Nixon the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. They sound like Mafiosi thugs. Kissinger warns that the "model effect" of Allende's reformist democracy "can be insidious." He tells CIA director Richard Helms, "We will not let Chile go down the drain," to which Helms replies, "I am with you." With the slaughter under way, Kissinger dismisses a warning by his senior officials of the scale of the repression. Secretly, he tells Pinochet, "You did a great service to the West."

I have known many of Pinochet's and Kissinger's victims. Sara De Witt, a student at the time, showed me the place where she was beaten, assaulted and electrocuted. On a wintry day in the suburbs of Santiago, we walked through a former torture centre known as Villa Grimaldi, where hundreds like her suffered terribly and were murdered or "disappeared."

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18933-in-an-age-of-realists-and-vigilantes-there-is-cause-for-optimism