What will it take for Chilean Australians to have peace from Pinochet's heavies?
What will it take for Chilean Australians to have peace from Pinochet's heavies?
Adriana Rivas, a woman close to the top in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, is working as a cleaner in Sydney. Chile’s exiles demand she be brought to justice
Antonio Castillo
theguardian.com, Friday 8 August 2014 22.00 EDT
Decades have passed since the end of the Chilean military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, but for exiled Chileans still living in Australia there is no forgiving or forgetting – especially when former Pinochet heavies can still call Australia home.
Adriana Rivas González, aka “La Chani”, was the personal secretary of General Manuel Contreras: the former head of the secret police, and the second most powerful man after Pinochet, now serving life in prison.
She has been been living peacefully in Australia since 1978, when she married and settled in Sydney. After recent reports from the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent programme, it is understood that she now works as a nanny and cleaner.
It is also alleged that La Chani was also a member of the Lautaro Brigade, an elite unit charged with exterminating members of the Communist party. She was detained in Chile in 2006 for four years, while an investigation was conducted into her involvement in the disappearance of three Communist leaders .
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/09/what-will-it-take-for-chilean-australians-to-have-peace-from-pinochets-heavies
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Adriana Rivas González with Manuel Contreras
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Her husband, Manuel Contreras, Wikipedia:
Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda (born May 4, 1929) is a Chilean military officer and the former head of DINA, Chile's secret police during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. As head of DINA he was the most powerful and feared man in the country, after Pinochet. He is currently serving 25 sentences totaling 289 years in prison for kidnapping, forced disappearance and assassination.[
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Contreras
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Manuel Contreras headed D.I.N.A.,
described in this Wikipedia:
~snip~
DINA internal suppression and human rights violations[edit]
Under decree #521, the DINA had the power to detain any individual so long as there was a declared state of emergency. Such an administrative state characterized nearly the entire length of the Pinochet dictatorship. Torture and rape of detainees was common:
In some camps, routine sadism was taken to extremes. At Villa Grimaldi, recalcitrant prisoners were dragged to a parking lot; DINA agents then used a car or truck to run over and crush their legs. Prisoners there recalled one young man who was beaten with chains and left to die slowly from internal injuries. Rape was also a reoccurring form of abuse. DINA officers subjected female prisoners to grotesque forms of sexual torture that included insertion of rodents and, as tactfully described in the Commission report, "unnatural acts involving dogs."[2]
Foreign involvement[edit]
The United States backed and supported the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, and continued to aid the Pinochet dictatorship until it ended. Documents declassified from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in September 2000 revealed that the head of the DINA in 1975 was a "paid CIA asset".[3] The CIA actively supported the junta after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. The head of the DINA, General Manuel Contreras, was made a paid asset despite continuing CIA reservations concerning the human rights abuses of the organization. Eventually the CIA became aware of DINA's "possible" involvement in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C., but it continued to maintain him as an asset. The CIA reports remain heavily excised.
DINA foreign assassinations and operations[edit]
Further information: Operation Condor and Operation Colombo
The DINA was involved in Operation Condor, as well as Operation Colombo. In July 1976, two magazines in Argentina and Brazil appeared and published the names of 119 Chilean leftist opponents, claiming they had been killed in internal disputes unrelated to the Pinochet regime. Both magazines disappeared after this one and only issue. Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia eventually asked Chilean justices to lift Pinochet's immunity in this case, called "Operation Colombo", having accumulated evidence that Pinochet had ordered the DINA to plant this disinformation, in order to cover up the "disappearance" and murder by the Chilean secret police of those 119 persons. In September 2005, Chile's Supreme Court ordered the lifting of Pinochet's general immunity from prosecutions, with respect to this case.
Assassinations of Carlos Prats and Orlando Letelier[edit]
Main article: Letelier assassination
The DINA worked with international agents, such as Michael Townley, who assassinated former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC in 1976, as well as General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974. According to a CIA document released in 2000, French Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) member Albert Spaggiari also acted as intermediary for the DINA in Europe, as well as Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie (alias ALFA).[4] In a 1979 letter declassified in 2000, Michael Townley stated: "There were meetings between him (Contreras), his Excellency (President Pinochet), and the Italians in Spain after Franco died. Also the Italians carried out numerous acts of military espionage against the Peruvians and Argentines not only in Europe, but also in Peru and Argentina".[5]
Michael Townley described numerous meetings between Pinochet and Italian terrorists and spies as well as Pinochet's meetings with anti-Castro Cubans.[6]
Michael Townley worked with Eugenio Berríos on producing sarin gas in the 1970s, at a laboratory in a DINA-owned house in the district of Lo Curro, Santiago de Chile.[7] Eugenio Berríos, who was murdered in 1995, was also linked with drug traffickers and agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).[8]
Colonia Dignidad[edit]
Main article: Villa Baviera
Investigations by Amnesty International and the Chilean National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report have verified that Colonia Dignidad, long alleged as a center used for rituals of ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer, was used by the DINA as a concentration camp for the detention and torture of political prisoners. Most accounts have this happening between 1973 and 1977 but precise dates are not known. Boris Weisfeiler, an American Jewish professor of Russian origin, is thought to have disappeared near Colonia Dignidad.
The son of DINA head Manuel Contreras claims that his father and Pinochet visited Colonia Dignidad in 1974, and that his father and Schäfer were good friends. The current leader of the since-renamed Villa Baviera admits that torture took place within the old colony, but claims that Villa Baviera is a new entity.
In March 2005, former DINA agent Michael Townley acknowledged links between Colonia Dignidad and the DINA, as well as relations with the Bacteriological War Army Laboratory. He spoke about biological experiments conducted on detainees, with the help of the laboratory and the DINA house in Lo Curro.[citation needed] According to Townley, former Christian Democrat President Eduardo Frei Montalva was assassinated by a poison made at Colonia Dignidad.[9]
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direcci%C3%B3n_de_Inteligencia_Nacional
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There's a ton of information available online on this man. I just heard of his wife when I found the original article tonight.