The Honeckers in Chile

Erich Honecker’s funeral in Santiago in 1993. His widow Margot stands with her hands folded.

Margot Honecker, widow of the former East German leader Erich Honecker, died last week in Santiago, where the couple found a kind of refuge after the fall of the Berlin Wall. How this came to be is an interesting footnote to the Cold War, and has also spurred some debate in Chile over double standards when examining dictatorships.

After the 1973 military coup, thousands of Chileans sought political asylum in other countries and a significant number ended up in what was then East Germany. These included future President Michele Bachelet and her mother, along with prominent members of Chile’s Socialist and Communist Parties. Fast forward to Christmas 1991, when Chile had returned to civilian rule and the Berlin Wall had collapsed: Erich Honecker, now wanted for embezzlement and the killing of nearly 200 people attempting to flee East Germany during his rule, arrived at the Chilean Embassy in Moscow. The Chilean ambassador was Clodomiro Almeyda, a Socialist and former exile who had lived in East Germany and become good friends with the Honeckers, whose daughter had married a Chilean. Honecker had not officially sought asylum, but was treated as a kind of guest while Chile’s new civilian government found itself entangled in a diplomatic and political quandary as it negotiated with Russian and German authorities.

Chilean officials were divided as to whether Honecker should receive asylum in their country. Some members of the center-left coalition were strongly in favor, while others worried about what it would mean for Chile’s image if it were to protect a notorious human rights violator. Even some right wing politicians did not want to seem as submissive to Germany, which was making increasingly sharp demands for Honecker’s extradition. A year and a half later Honecker was finally escorted from the Chilean Embassy in Moscow and made to appear in a German court, after which German officials released him on grounds of his age and illness.

So Erich and Margot Honecker lived rather quietly in Santiago until the former’s death in 1993. A few years later a correspondent for Chile’s El Mercurio newspaper visited the archive at the Stasi Museum in Berlin and was able to examine some of files collected on Chilean exiles living in East Germany during the Pinochet dictatorship. Some exiles were spied on by fellow exiles, who dutifully reported to East German officials and dossiers were compiled even on younger Chileans who had little political experience. The reports noted that many Chileans complained about the jobs they were assigned, and at least 21 Chilean exiles were deported from East Germany in 1974.

“These are persons who cannot adjust to normal behavior in the RDA,” one of the files said.

But Margot Honecker, whom some called the Purple Witch for her hair dye and hardline Stalinist views, was unrepentant and occasionally surfaced in public. She was sometimes spotted taking part in activities with the Chilean Communist Party and in 2012 she said in an  interview that the Stasi secret police were a necessary institution and that those killed while trying to escape over the Berlin Wall were “stupid.”

In response, a municipal official in the Santiago suburb of La Reina, where the Honeckers had been living, declared her persona non grata and said her comments “showed no respect for life” and that the Berlin Wall had been “a symbol of intolerance and authoritarianism.” The municipal official, Francisco Oleo, just happened to be a member of Chile’s Socialist Party.

On getting kicked out of a political rally in Chile

Watching the scenes of scuffles and journalists being kicked out of Donald Trump’s political rallies made this blogger recall something that happened to a colleague in Santiago way back in the 1980s. In 1984 the Pinochet regime created its own political party, the Avanzada Nacional (AN), whose members usually had ties to the military. Tim Frasca, who had arrived in Chile the previous year, attempted to cover one of their gatherings, and offers this account of an “uncomfortably rapid education in Chilean politics” during this period:

The regime’s grip was weakening by 1983 in the country when I arrived, but it was still very much in control when I attended a rally of Avanzada Nacional in Santiago’s Caupolicán Theatre the following year, thinking I would get a taste of the ultra-right worldview by direct observation. AN was one of the dozens of political groupings then in existence, including all the banned leftist parties now functioning more or less openly despite the ongoing risks. I knew they were fanatically loyal to the military regime but was entirely unprepared for what that meant.

 I didn’t show my press badge when entering as it didn’t occur to me that I would need to huddle with other reporters. (I later learned that none of the openly opposition Chileans I had become friendly with would be caught dead at an AN rally—though perhaps that is an unfortunate turn of phrase.) 

 I climbed to the bleachers in an upper tier and pulled out my notebook to collect my thoughts on paper while waiting through the warm-up acts for the Big Guy. There were pro-Pinochet performers and minor political figures, and I casually noticed that the mostly male audience was populated with a lot of burly types you’d more expect to see standing outside the entrance to a popular nightclub.

 When Pinochet arrived, the crowd erupted. It dawned on me that this was not a routine event when a crowd of men just to my right, all wearing sunglasses (inside, at night), stood and roared while giving the general the Nazi salute.

 It soon became clear that the fact that I had remained seated and was writing something on a pad was attracting a lot of attention. Two of the cheering group came over to ask me who I was and what I was doing, looked at my press pass, and promptly snatched the notebook out of my hands and began to read it with great interest. They didn’t touch me but made it clear that I might want to leave now. I did make a futile effort to recover the notes through the security guards who simply laughed in my face.

My Chilean colleagues laughed at my innocence but also were alarmed and concerned. They told me to be more careful in the future, to ask their advice about where to go, how and with whom. It was only afterward that I realized that AN had a heavy presence of members of the regime’s secret police who were used to acting with complete impunity.

 Over the years I quickly learned to recognize the particular barely repressed fury bubbling around a pinochetista march or rally—the instant threats, the demands that you bow to their position (by cheering Pinochet), the hatred of the press (“Tell the Truth!” was their constant chant since it was an article of faith that media hostility was the only thing weakening their hero), and eagerness for violence against the nearest scapegoat. I suspect these are shared characteristics among all authoritarian movements. Isolated protest at a Trump rally is therefore not recommended or tactically appropriate though challenging his backers for control of the streets is another matter.  

Postscript: A year or so later, I put together a feature story on Chile’s Jewish community and interviewed the head of the local branch of B’nai B’rith. The Chilean dictatorship—unlike its viciously anti-Semitic counterparts in Argentina and Uruguay—was not particularly hostile to Jews though of course there were Jewish victims of the repression. But when the B’nai B’rith figure expressed mild approval of the dictatorship for its managerial performance, I told him about seeing the Nazi salute at the pro-Pinochet rally. He replied that it was impossible and that it could not have happened. As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is extremely difficult to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it.”

Chile’s state controlled television stations covered AN rallies, but their broadcasts tended to avoid wide shots, which might have revealed the party’s small membership. Pinochet himself seemed to believe the party was a growing force, for its adherents appeared wherever he did. “I have seen this Avanzada Nacional grow from a small child to a man, but we must sow enough energy into it so that it becomes the first, the first among the political parties, the greatest of all,” he told supporters in 1987.

The following year Pinochet lost a one-man presidential plebiscite and in 1989 free elections were held for a new president and congress. Avanzada Nacional failed to win any seats in either the Chilean Senate or Chamber of Deputies.

 

The Caravan of Death

Retired General Sergio Arellano, charged with some of the most egregious human rights violations during Chile’s military regime, died without ever going to prison.

General Sergio Arellano Stark, sometimes referred to as “the butcher” for his role in a series of summary executions in wake of Chile’s 1973 military coup, has died. Here’s part of the story from his notorious tour.

The northern city of Calama, located near Chile’s massive Chuquicamata copper mine, was relatively tranquil on the morning of September 11, 1973, the day the country’s military overthrew the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. The commander of the local army regiment, Colonel Eugenio Rivera, was meeting with a municipal government official to discuss plans for Chile’s two-day fiestas patrias celebrations to be held the following week. When the radio broadcast news of the military uprising, that meeting ended abruptly and Rivera telephoned the army general in charge of the region for instructions. As it turned out, neither he nor the general had been informed of the plans for the coup, as was the case with a number of senior Chilean military officers.

There was little open resistance to the coup, and many of the prisoners arrested in its aftermath had complied with radio and television announcements ordering them to report to authorities. Detainees were prosecuted by a provincial military court, which sentenced them to jail terms but found no evidence of weapons or armaments. One of the shorter sentences, sixty-one days,  was for the director of a local radio station, who had defied orders to shut down the station on the day of the coup.

But the Calama military court’s handling of these cases did not satisfy the authorities in Santiago, and the tribunal’s commander was ordered back to Santiago, where he was arrested, court-martialled and held in three different military installations where he was interrogated and tortured. On October 19 the Calama army base was visited by a senior army general from Santiago, General Sergio Arellano Stark. No one had been told the reason for the visit, and in an interview years later Colonel Rivera told this blogger that he had prepared a schedule for the general that included a formal luncheon and a visit to the copper mine. The Calama troops were standing at attention and the regiment’s band was waiting to perform when a Puma helicopter landed. General Arellano and his committee emerged, dressed in combat uniforms and brandishing their weapons “as if they expected to be met with enemy fire,” Rivera recalled.

Arellano showed Rivera a document designating him as General Augusto Pinochet’s delegate, and asked to see the files on political prisoners held at the base. After looking through the papers the general announced that a military tribunal would be convened after lunch. One of Arellano’s officers asked for and received permission to interrogate the prisoners before the tribunal met, and Rivera took the visiting general on a tour of the Chuquicamata copper mine.

When they returned to the base Rivera asked about the war tribunal and was told it had finished. There was a dinner for General Arellano that evening, and Rivera noticed that one of his officers seemed agitated. When the general and his committee left in the helicopter, the official told Rivera that the war tribunal had convened but when they ordered the prisoners to appear they were told that the twenty-six men had just been executed on the orders of Arellano’s officer. He and the other officers at the Calama base seemed in a state of shock, Rivera recalled, and said that one of the executed prisoners happened to be the brother of one of the regiment’s non-commissioned officers.

Calama was the last stop on what would become known as the Caravan of Death, a seven-city tour in which 97 prisoners were summarily executed. In 2008 Arellano and six other officers were sentenced to prison for their role in the killings, but by then Arellano was suffering from Alzheimer’s and was spared jail time. He ended his days in a Santiago nursing home.

Here’s a link to a radio interview by my friend and colleague Lezak Shallat with Zita Cabello-Barrueto, the sister of one of the men killed by the Caravan of Death: https://soundcloud.com/lshallat/zita-cabello-barruetos-search-for-spring-how-the-sister-of-pinochet-victim-prevailed-in-a-us-court The interview will air on March 15 at 7 pm in the show La Raza Chronicle on KPFA 94.1 FM.

And a link to Zita’s book, In Search of Spring: a sister’s quest to unearth the truth about her brother’s assassination by Chile’s Caravan of Death:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Search-Spring-sisters-brothers-assassination/dp/1500256757/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457627941&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=zita+cabello+barrueto+arch+of+spring

 

A special prison in Chile, now full to capacity

Chile’s Punta Peuco prison, the special prison that opened in 1995 to house inmates convicted of human rights abuses during the military dictatorship, is now overcrowded, according to justice officials. The news came as six retired military officers were sentenced this past week for their role in the notorious Caravan of Death case, a series of summary executions of prisoners in several cities in the Atacama desert in wake of the 1973 military coup.

According to Chilean officials, the prison was built to hold 112 inmates and was already filled to capacity before this most recent judgement. And more prisoners are expected when the Supreme Court rules on another infamous case later this year. La Tercera has this story http://www.latercera.com/noticia/nacional/2016/02/680-668050-9-ingresan-seis-internos-a-punta-peuco-y-penal-excede-limite-maximo.shtml

Some haunting images, and an old bank heist

A woman begging on a city street, part of Marcelo Montecino’s photographic essay in Chile’s urban cultural journal Bifurciones.

Marcelo Montecino has a photographic essay entitled Indiferencia in the Chilean journal of urban culture, Bifurcaciones http://www.bifurcaciones.cl/2016/01/indiferencia/ . In one photograph an exhausted-looking woman cradles her child on the steps leading to the Santiago metro while an older child sits behind her. Another shows a street musician sitting on the ground with his guitar, little noticed by pedestrians. There are ten black and white photographs in all. Bifurcaciones began publishing in 2004 and its stated mission is “to support and promote critical and rigorous reflections on contemporary urban life.

The news site OZY (which takes its name from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” published a piece by Jose Fermoso on a 1981 bank robbery in northern Chile http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-heist-that-broke-pinochets-back/65254 committed by two of the Pinochet regime’s security agents. The case gave Chileans a brief glimpse of the criminal elements operating within the secret police organization, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). It’s a good read.

Non, je ne regrette rien

It happens with depressing regularity in Chile: seemingly out of nowhere, a witness comes forth to give an account of a horrific crime from the Pinochet regime. This week it was a former conscript, Guillermo Reyes Rammsy, who called a popular talk show to say he was considering suicide and went on to describe his involvement in 18 executions following the 1973 military coup

“We shot them in the head and then blew up the bodies with dynamite, there was nothing left, not even their shadow,” he said. Though he did not give his name, or that of any of those killed, Chilean police quickly tracked Reyes Rammsy down and charged him with the murders of two members of the country’s Socialist Party. The Guardian has this story:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/11/former-chilean-soldier-charged-murder-radio-confession

Meanwhile, there has been some acknowledgement of the military regime’s human rights abuses from an unexpected source: Augusto Pinochet Molina, the late dictator’s grandson. The former army captain came to public attention nine years ago when he gave a speech at his grandfather’s funeral, praising the elder Pinochet’s “war against the Marxists” and saying that he had produced a stable and prosperous country. The Chilean army responded by forcing Pinochet Molina to retire, along with another general who had given a speech praising the dictator.

But this past week Pinochet Molina told Chile’s La Tercera newspaper that in fact there had been some crimes committed under his grandfather’s rule.

“There were serious human rights violations during the military government, which in some cases were really criminal situations, like the assassination of Tucapel Jimenez,” he said, referring to the 1982 murder of the president of Chile’s public employees’ union. But Pinochet Molina maintained that there was a “dirty war against insurgents” and that “millions of people in Chile and all over the world have enormous affection” for his grandfather.

http://www.latercera.com/noticia/politica/2015/12/674-659491-9-nieto-de-pinochet-reconoce-que-hubo-violaciones-a-los-ddhh-durante-el-regimen.shtml

Chileans in Paris

Outside the French Embassy in Santiago.

At least three Chileans were among those killed in the Paris attacks, including a musician, the niece and grandniece of the country’s ambassador to Mexico, Ricardo Núñez.  The ambassador told the Chilean press that the two women  had been in the Bataclan concert hall.

“They were taken hostage and we know they were murdered one by one in a cold and brutal way,” he said. http://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2015/11/14/cancilleria-informa-de-tres-chilenos-muertos-en-los-atentados-de-paris/

There are approximately 26,000 Chileans residing in France, many of whom arrived as political asylum seekers during the Pinochet dictatorship. In Santiago, a small crowd gathered outside the French Embassy to lay flowers and sing La Marseillaise.

“A blatant example of a chief of state’s direct involvement in an act of state terrorism”

The United States has turned over a collection of newly classified documents on the 1976 car bomb murder of Orlando Letelier and his American colleague, Ronni Moffitt in Washington in 1976.  Letelier was a former Chilean ambassador to the United States and cabinet minister under the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-73); he and Moffitt worked at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank. A subsequent grand jury investigation resulted in an extradition request for the head of the Pinochet regime’s security agency, Colonel Manuel Contreras and two other Chilean intelligence agents—which the regime rejected.

The new batch of documents was delivered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a meeting with President Michelle Bachelet this past week in Santiago. As I write this, only two have been published and they confirm what most people familiar with the case already knew–that Pinochet ordered the killings.  One is a 1987 memo from then Secretary of State George Schultz to President Ronald Reagan states

“We have long known that the Chilean secret police/intelligence service was behind this brutal act, perhaps the only clear case of state-sponsored terrorism that has occurred in Washington, D.C.”  Schultz then speculates whether the U.S. government would want to indict Pinochet himself, and that his role in the assassinations and cover-up “is of the greatest seriousness and adds further impetus to the need to work toward the complete democratization of Chile.”

The other document is a State Department cable sent early in 1987, with a couple of source names deleted and mentions assertions by Contreras that Pinochet had ordered the Letelier assassination. Contreras told another senior army official that he had hidden sealed documents in several locations “in the event of his, Contreras’ death.”

More documents to follow, and the National Security Archive web site, with its lengthy file on other declassified material on the case and on Chile, is a good place to find them:

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB532-The-Letelier-Moffitt-Assassination-Papers/

Abortion and human rights in Chile

It’s a famous image from the time of Chile’s 1973 military coup, a stark black and white photograph of prisoners sitting on bleachers in the National Stadium, where thousands were detained, interrogated, tortured and in many cases killed. It recently appeared on a billboard in Santiago, without photographer Marcelo Montecino’s permission and in a way many would find offensive.

The caption reads “ABORTION is torture, death and disappearance,” and the billboard is part of a campaign against a proposed law to allow the procedure in order to save the woman’s life or in cases of rape or non-viability of the fetus.  Chile has one of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws, with an absolute ban on all pregnancy terminations imposed at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1989. There have been around a dozen proposed bills to loosen this ban since 1991 and the current bill faces opposition from even from some in the ruling center-left coalition—particularly Chile’s Christian Democrats.

Amnesty International has issued a statement calling Chile’s current law draconian and saying it treats women as second-class citizens. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/09/chile-extreme-anti-abortion-law-creates-climate-of-fear-and-substandard-health-care-for-women/

“The most dangerous man in Chile”

Manuel Contreras with General Augusto Pinochet

He was the terrifying fist in the dictator’s glove, but even the dictator was afraid of him. Manuel Contreras, the Chilean army officer whose secret police agency, the Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), brought a new level of fear and terror to Chileans at home and abroad. died in Santiago’s Hospital Militar,  the same facility where General Augusto Pinochet died in 2006.

It was just a few months after the 1973 military coup that ousted President Salvador Allende, a socialist, when Contreras appeared at a meeting of Chile’s military commanders, cabinet and the intelligence directors of the army, air force, navy and national police, the carabineros. Pinochet announced that then-Colonel Contreras would be heading a new security agency, the Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). Some of the officers expressed misgivings—the country was already under tight control, a state of siege was in effect and political prisoners were being rounded up and in many cases executed, so why the need for even more security services? The carabinero intelligence director, General German Campos, thought the new agency sounded like “a bunch of vulgar bodyguards” reminiscent of Salvador Allende’s Cuban-trained security detail.

Contreras’ DINA, which reported exclusively to Pinochet, proved to be much more than a group of bodyguards and would enable Pinochet to maneuver his way from one of four junta members to Supreme Leader of the Nation. Drawing officials from all the branches of the military, plus right-wing civilians, the new security agency expanded its tentacles, organizing secret detention centers throughout Chile. Every government ministry had its DINA informants; former junta member and air force commander General Gustavo Leigh told this blogger that he was surprised to discover a DINA agent working in his department. The junta’s press secretary once found that DINA agents had broken into his office and stolen press credentials, in order to disguise themselves as journalists. Contreras ingratiated himself with Pinochet’s wife Lucia, and obliged when she asked him to tap the phones of other military wives.

His most ambitious project was Operation Condor, a joint security program with the military regimes of Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia to monitor and eliminate leftists and any former officials who might prove troublesome. Chileans who had fled their country and found refuge in Argentina were arrested and made to disappear. María Cecilia Magnet was kidnapped, along with her Argentine husband, Guillermo Tamburini, at their home on July 16, 1976.  Luis Elgueta was arrested 11 days later with his wife and sister-in-law. None were ever seen again.

Cecilia Magnet and Guillermo Tamburini, who disappeared in Buenos Aires in 1976 and were never seen again.

General Carlos Prats, Pinochet’s former army commander, was killed with his wife in a car bomb explosion in Buenos Aires in 1974. Two years later former defence minister Orlando Letelier and his American co-worker were killed by another car bomb in Washington, D.C., sparking an FBI investigation leading to a U.S. extradition request for Contreras and two other DINA officials. Pinochet refused the extradition request, and reorganized the DINA into a supposedly more benign agency, the Central Nacional de Informacion (CNI). Pressure from Washington continued, and Contreras was finally removed, though not before Pinochet promoted him from colonel to general. A series of suspicious bombings rocked Santiago, which the carabinero police investigated and found to be the work of Contreras’ agents.

As civilian Contreras formed a private security agency headquartered in downtown Santiago, and many suspected he continued to do jobs for the Pinochet regime. He was also on the board of a private company, Telefonica Manquehue, which received an exclusive contract to provide phone coverage in one of Santiago’s expanding eastern neighborhoods. (This blogger lived for a time in this area—and the service was terrible.) But change was coming to Chile, and in 1988 Pinochet lost a one-man presidential plebiscite and would be forced to hand over the government to an elected civilian.

Contreras was understandably nervous. According to a declassified U.S. State Department cable, in February 1989 Contreras sent an intermediary to the American Embassy with a strange message. He claimed to have had four separate meetings with “gringos” in which it was agreed that neither government would reveal any information damaging to Contreras, Pinochet or U.S. officials. The U.S. had broken this agreement with recent initiatives on the Letelier case, and if a new understanding was not reached, Contreras was prepared to take unspecified actions against the U.S. He was willing to give a sworn statement in Chile on the Letelier assassination, provided that he and U.S. officials could agree on an “appropriate story,” such as stating that Letelier had been a pro-Castro Cuban agent killed by Cuban exiles. As if to show he could still provide useful information, Contreras indicated that one of his agents had been involved in drug trafficking with one of Pinochet’s sons. The cable, written by deputy chief of mission George Jones described Contreras as “the most dangerous man in Chile” and that the possibility of “a Contreras-initiated terrorist act” could not be excluded. A handwritten note attached to the cable suggests ways to drive a wedge between Contreras and Pinochet:

“I would be rightly surprised if any USG {US government] person made any such deal with this piece of dogshit—we should talk with (deleted) how this could be used to further pressure Contreras—the best defence may be an offense, e.g., telling the For Min [Foreign Ministry] that this guy is threatening us and that we will hold the GOC [Government of Chile] responsible if any of this is carried out—might signal in our way that Contreras is obviously willing to make up stories about everybody to blackmail them into protecting him (i.e., that we realize Pinochet et al are in the same boat) and imply that it would behoove Pinochet to go ahead and cut this guy loose.”

Pinochet did eventually cut Contreras loose, but it would take years and the new civilian governments were wary of provoking a rebellion by the Chilean army, which Pinochet still controlled. Chile’s Supreme Court, which had rejected the U.S. extradition request, reopened the Letelier case in 1991. Four years later Contreras was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the double murder, and it would take several months of negotiations with his lawyers and family before Chilean officials could finally take him into custody. He was sent to the Punta Peuco prison north of Santiago, specially built to hold human rights violators. More investigations by Chilean prosecutors followed, and at the time of his death Contreras was serving combined jail sentences of over 500 years.