Although there were certain prior precedents, this operation began to take concrete form with the appearance of a notice in the publication Novo O'Día (Curitiba, Brazil) on June 25, 1975, which reported the murder of 59 MIR militants in clashes with Argentine government forces in the town of Salta.

According to information gathered by Brazilian researcher Maria Helena Wiechmann, with the collaboration of Josefina Palazzo Ayres of the Paraná State Documentation Division, and cited by journalist Ernesto Carmona, the archives of the Curitiba Public Library show that the old newspaper O Día released three editions in 1975, modifying its name by placing the adjective "Novo" before its old logo.

Novo O'Día appeared on April 15, May 31, and June 25 of that year. The newspaper, which was directed by Almir H. De Lara, was founded on July 2, 1870, and relaunched in 1896, 1901, 1923, and 1975—the year it printed its three editions at Cromográfica Editora Limitada, located at Rua Augusto Stelfels 793, on behalf of Imperium Sociedade Jornalistica e Publicitaria Ltda.

The financing for this action in Brazil, as established in several trials, came from the then-state-owned Línea Aérea Nacional (LAN) and the Chilean embassy in Brazil, noting the responsibility of DINA agent Gerardo Roa Araneda, who was a LAN official at the time.

In its June 25 edition, the newspaper Novo O'Día, in Curitiba, Brazil, reported the death of 59 Chilean "Marxist extremists" killed in Salta, Argentina, and included their full names. Under the headline "Chilean terrorists in the interior of Argentina," it reported that terrorist actions in Argentina had been increasing in recent days, with clashes having been recorded with security forces in Salta, Tucumán, Mendoza, Córdoba, and Rosario.

The report concluded by noting that in those encounters with Argentine security forces, members of the MIR had been identified among the dead, and it provided a list of 59 full names, ordered alphabetically by surname.

Various publications and reports on the subject indicate that the person responsible for managing the appearance of this information in that newspaper was the press attaché of the Chilean Embassy in Brazil, Jaime Valdés, who acted as coordinator of DINA's activities in this matter.

Source: ciper.cl, March 21, 2006

The role of the media in Operation Colombo

The 98 indictments issued this week by special judge Víctor Montiglio speak to the magnitude of the organization behind Operation Colombo, which ended in the murder and disappearance of 119 opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship.

But the judicial decision is missing actors: the press and the man who orchestrated the disinformation campaign, Álvaro Puga, as well as the journalists and members of the Argentine security agencies who actively participated in the most massive of the political executions of that era.

On July 24, 1975, Chileans encountered bloody headlines at newsstands: "MIR murders 60 of its men abroad" (La Tercera), "60 Miristas identified, executed by their own comrades" (El Mercurio), "Bloody MIR struggle abroad" (Las Últimas Noticias), and the emblematic "Exterminated like rats" (La Segunda).

The four newspapers left printed for history the countless lies fabricated to hide Operation Colombo, the same operation for which special judge Víctor Montiglio this week indicted 98 people for their responsibility in the murder of 119 opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Despite the nearly one hundred people charged, the judge did not delve into the role of the press of those days, which was key to achieving the "success of the plan." That history was addressed two years ago by the Ethics Tribunal of the Journalists Association, which, in a 35-page ruling, established who wrote and published those false reports, decreeing sanctions.

The summary established the responsibilities of the then-directors of El Mercurio, René Silva Espejo, and La Segunda, Mario Carneyro, although both were declared immune from prosecution due to their deaths.

Former directors of Las Últimas Noticias, Fernando Díaz Palma, and La Tercera, Alberto Guerrero, were also sanctioned with public censure and a six-month suspension of their professional membership. Additionally, El Mercurio journalist Beatriz Undurraga was sanctioned with a three-month suspension.

The author of this report was admonished for not testifying in the process. Although the summary refers to the culmination of the operation, it began earlier, with news published by the newspapers La Tercera, El Mercurio, Las Últimas Noticias, and La Segunda on June 12 and 13, 1975—days of curfew, of cars without license plates roaming streets and houses, capturing citizens who then disappeared.

Days of terror. "Chilean extremists train in Tucumán" was the headline of one of the morning papers. Other dispatches coming from Argentina reported in the following days on new movements of that insurgent army that was preparing to cross the Andes to overthrow the Military Junta.

And in the midst of that information intended to instill terror among those supporters of the dictatorship who were beginning to voice criticism of the extreme violence of the repression, another piece of contraband was slipped in that prepared the greater blow: "It was also highlighted that among the extremists there is a large number of elements from the MIR and other Marxist groups who publicly appear as disappeared" (La Tercera, June 13).

Another alleged dispatch from the Argentine Foreign Ministry, disseminated by Reuters Latin, reported on June 16: "Argentine Gendarmerie surrounds guerrillas" in the border areas. Until July 24, when the headlines that head this report were published, reporting on an execution within the ranks of the MIR abroad.

For several days, it was highlighted that for all the dead, writs of amparo (habeas corpus) had been filed, "which demonstrates the lie that the Marxists have fabricated about the action of the security services." Only one piece of data provided by the press was truthful: the 119 Chileans who appeared as killed by their comrades had writs of amparo filed for them, in which data and evidence were provided on how they had been detained, and even the address of the secret prison where they were last seen alive.

But the judges rejected them without further procedure, simply by attaching the report from the Ministry of the Interior that denied the detention. Desperation invaded the families and friends of the 119 Chileans named there.

They knocked on hundreds of doors trying to get someone to listen and examine the evidence proving that their loved ones were imprisoned in Chile in some secret jail. It was useless. Also in the prisons and detention camps, then overflowing with political prisoners, moments of harsh tension were experienced.

Many prisoners had been witnesses to the brutal torture to which a large part of the 119 Chileans supposedly murdered by their own companions in Salta, Argentina, had been subjected in DINA prisons. The hunger strike, led among others by the imprisoned journalist José Carrasco (murdered in 1986 by a CNI commando), did not provoke a single reaction from the judiciary either.

The account given to the Journalists Association tribunal by the then-leader of the victims' families, Alicia Lorca, illustrates the climate of those days: "We asked for an interview with the director of the newspaper El Mercurio.

They received us very kindly, and when we told the director why we were there, he became so furious that he threw us out, shouting at the top of his lungs. I can tell you that many people who were in the building came out to see what was happening.

We had to run down the stairs because he even threatened to have us removed by the guards." They were not even allowed to place a paid advertisement. There was no possibility of the truth being known.

O’Día and Lea: an editorial miracle

The sources of the disseminated information were the newspaper Novo O’Día of Curitiba, Brazil, which on June 25 reported the murder of 59 MIR militants—and provided their names—in "clashes with Argentine government forces in Salta"; and the magazine Lea of Buenos Aires on July 15, which provided another list of 60 "Chilean extremists eliminated by their own comrades in struggle." More than 10 years would pass before the mystery of O’Día was unraveled, an old Brazilian newspaper that only reappeared on June 25 with the sole objective of making public the list of the 59 extremists "murdered" by their comrades. In August 1992, the author of this chronicle, with an investigation in hand, went to the offices of the Metropolitan Intendancy where Gerardo Roa worked as head of Communications; in democracy, he continued to hold the same position he held during the dictatorship. He had no choice but to admit that he had indeed been the man who negotiated the reappearance of O’Día, and that the instructions, as well as the list of the dead, had been given to him by Manuel Contreras. The first part was true, the second was not. Because the person who gave him the article that would be published was Álvaro Puga, director of Civil Affairs of the Military Junta and head of Psychological Operations for DINA. The above was published in the newspaper La Nación (August 13, 1992), but Roa continued in his seat at the Intendancy for a long time. As for Lea, its edition, which lists Juan Carlos Viera as director, was edited by Codex, dependent on the Argentine Ministry of Social Welfare, whose head was José López Rega, the leader of the "Triple A" paramilitary group that was already beginning to leave a death toll in the neighboring country by those days. That 20,000-copy edition was also the only one. It never hit the newsstands again. The name of this operation, as well as the details of its planning abroad, were found in the secret DINA archive kept by its agent in Buenos Aires, Enrique Arancibia Clavel (sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime of General Carlos Prats and his wife, but today on parole), which the author of this chronicle found in the judicial archives of that country in 1986. It was through those documents that it became known that DINA had baptized that mass crime as "Operation Colombo." In those papers is the copy of Official Letter No. 3 of May 16, 1975, sent by Arancibia Clavel from Buenos Aires to DINA's central headquarters in Santiago: "Colombo Case: Vicente informed me that Interpol Argentina sent all the background information as requested on Friday, May 9, by air. With that information and prior consent from COPIHUE SANTIAGO, the publicity operation will begin using the services of Carlos Manuel Acuña, director of the Prensa Argentina news agency and also a journalist for the newspaper La Nación in Buenos Aires. A newspaper clipping service has been contacted for this case." There was the link between Arancibia and DINA with Interpol and the executioner groups to make atrociously burned bodies appear in those days as if they were Chileans murdered by the MIR, photographs of which Arancibia also kept in his archive and whose identity is still unknown. But another key protagonist was missing. In other official letters that Arancibia dispatched to Santiago, the detail is there. For the creation of the false foreign records that proved the passage of the 119 Chileans to Argentina, they counted on the help of Héctor García Rey, then Undersecretary of Internal Security and later a trusted man of former President Carlos Menem. And in a special section, there were also handwritten sheets with the names of the 119 Chileans grouped behind each mountain pass where they would be made to appear crossing the Andes. All of this was coordinated by the then-head of DINA's Foreign Department, Colonel Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann. In Chile, the man in charge of orchestrating the dissemination of information regarding Colombo was Álvaro Puga. This was proven by the summary conducted by the Journalists Association upon receiving the testimonies of the journalists who wrote the reports of those days, which show that Puga delivered them in the Diego Portales building itself, where the Military Junta operated. During those days, in addition to working alongside Pinochet and Manuel Contreras, Puga wrote columns in La Segunda, which he signed with the pseudonym "Alexis." He still calls himself that sometimes on Despierta Chile, the ultra-Pinochetist website he has directed for some years. His discourse has not changed one bit. Three years ago, he gave an interview to The Clinic and repeated a version of the disappeared that at this point sounds like science fiction: "Many of them died in combat. According to what the military says."

How they see it thirty years later

One of the most revealing elements of the professional organization's summary is the transcription of the versions provided by different journalists who were questioned. The sanctioned Fernando Díaz Palma, then director of Las Últimas Noticias, acknowledged that it was an operation and a fraud. "30 years later we have come to hear many things about what was happening...

Dead, disappeared, digging people up... Of course, if we had been able to or had known those things, we would have had to investigate them, regardless of the risks... We failed to cover things and to have done our own investigations." Looking back, Alberto Guerrero, director of La Tercera at the time, declared: "Maybe I would have preferred to have more of a hero's soul and have risked it, but with the environment we were living in..., I don't know, one has a family, one takes care of their source of work...

With the perspective of time, maybe I would say I don't care, I'll risk it and let happen what may." The current news services editor of El Mercurio and then-deputy director of La Tercera, Héctor Olave, also reflected on the times that were being lived. "The question is why it is published and why it is not verified, why it is not 'checked.' And you have to have been living in those years...

The issue was not that simple," he declared.

John Dinges: revelations about Álvaro Puga

One of the most significant testimonies in the Journalists Association summary was that of CIPER co-director John Dinges. He was in Chile during those days and until 1978 as a correspondent for the Washington Post, Time magazine, Latin America Press, and ABC radio. "At the end of July 1975, I traveled to Buenos Aires with extensive documentation on the case of the 119 and the result of my journalistic investigation.

My boss at Time, Rudolf Rauch, and I considered that it was too dangerous to write about the case from Chile, so Rauch asked me to travel to Buenos Aires. My investigation demonstrated the falsehood of the news that appeared in Chile, based on Lea and O’Día, and that the people named in the lists had disappeared in Chile.

The first report came out in Time, without my byline. Later, I wrote a more complete report in the magazine National Catholic Reporter, under the pseudonym 'Ramón Marsano.' In that last one, I speak of the actions of Álvaro Puga as one of those responsible for the development of the plan and the distribution of the material both to the Argentine and Brazilian press organs and to journalists in Chile." "In the two years that followed, I had the opportunity to meet him and to confirm his work at DINA.

The first time was in 1977. Puga was exercising supervisory functions over foreign correspondents and summoned me to his office to officially introduce him to Karen DeYoung, chief correspondent for Latin America for the Washington Post.

I had already had serious problems with the government: in February of that year, they had decreed my expulsion for alleged 'acts against Chile.' Through the intervention of the American ambassador David Popper, the decree was left without effect.

Popper, according to declassified cables that I have in my possession, argued in two confidential conversations with the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs that such an action against me would cause serious problems for Chile with the US.

So when months later I went to see Puga with Ms. DeYoung, he ordered me to enter his office alone. There he told me that it was a mistake that the government could not expel me because my journalistic works were anti-Chilean.

More or less verbatim, he said that, since they couldn't throw me out, they couldn't protect me either, and that there were 'many terrorists' on the streets who could run me over while I was walking." "Through the years, through my research for the two books I have written about the dictatorships in Chile and the Southern Cone, I was able to learn more about Álvaro Puga and his connection with DINA, about his work in the 'psychological' department and directly with Manuel Contreras.

More recently, I have discovered secret documents that would also establish a link between Puga and DINA's international work, especially related to Argentina."

Source: ciper.cl, May 29, 2008

The "Case of the 119": Ethical sanction for Chilean journalists involved in Operation Colombo

The families of the 119 forcibly disappeared persons of the so-called Operation Colombo expressed satisfaction with a ruling by the Ethics Tribunal of the Chilean Journalists Association that sanctioned the professionals involved in the setup that in 1975 attempted to disguise the fate of 119 victims of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

Lawyer Hiram Villagra and Roberto D'Orival, top leader of the "Corporation Collective of Families and Friends of the 119," led a press conference that announced the future legal actions they will undertake following the ethical ruling.

The victims' families spoke to the press with an impressive wall behind them covered with photographs of each of the 119, among whom are journalists Mario Eduardo Calderón Tapia, 31 years old in 1975, and Luis Eduardo Durán Rivas, 29.

D'Orival said that the Journalists Association settled a debt with the victims, their families, their own peers, and Chilean society, while also valuing the work of the ethics tribunal. The press conference was oriented toward foreign correspondents due to the lack of interest from Chilean media in addressing the ethical sanction as news, D'Orival said.

The Association agreed on various sanctions against those responsible for the news setup that in June 1975 presented in the press the disappearance of 119 citizens as if they had "exterminated themselves like rats." For the journalists' deontological tribunal, "those responsible for handling the information did not fulfill their professional obligation and their commitment to society to work with the truth, thereby failing in their essential ethical duty." Fernando Díaz Palma, who at the time directed the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias, of the El Mercurio chain, was sanctioned with "public censure and suspension of his status as a member of the Journalists Association for six months" for violating the Code of Ethics. The same sanction fell on Alberto Guerrero Espinoza, who served at that time as director of the newspaper La Tercera de la Hora. Beatriz Undurraga Gómez, of El Mercurio, received "public censure" and a three-month suspension, while Mercedes Garrido Garrido, of the evening newspaper La Segunda, also of El Mercurio, was acquitted due to lack of evidence. René Silva Espejo and Mario Carneyro, directors of El Mercurio and La Segunda during the publication of the false news, were declared "immune from prosecution" because they had died. Mónica González, director of the newspaper Siete, and Juan Pablo Cárdenas Squella, 2005 National Journalism Award winner and regional councilor of the Institute for Press and Society (IPYS) of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), were "admonished" for violating Article 13 of the Regulations for Summary Instructions for the Ethics and Discipline Tribunals of the Association, the text of which establishes "that no member journalist may refuse to provide a statement in a summary or to attend the hearings to which they are summoned for that purpose, unless there is a legitimate cause for excuse." The affected journalists appeared to testify, in an explicit recognition of the Association's authority to judge their ethical conduct. Most justified their professional performance due to company demands and possible economic reprisals from the government through the military regime's advertising spending. Others acknowledged a lack of professional rigor. None of the affected parties appealed the ethics tribunal's first-instance ruling, accepting the sanction of their peers, which was executed last week. The instructor of the summary was journalist Alfredo Taborga Molina, author of a 300-page file, whose content of statements and testimonies constitutes a valuable X-ray of the Chilean journalism of the era. The sanction was approved unanimously by the members of the Regional Ethics and Discipline Tribunal of the Metropolitan Regional Council (Santiago) of the Association: Doris Jiménez Villarroel, Enrique Contreras González, Víctor Abudaye Soto, and Ricardo Urzúa Munita. The oversight of professional associations over the ethical conduct of their members was restored by a reform of the Political Constitution introduced in 2005, although there is still a need to legislate the special tribunals that will have to air deontological accusations against professionals not associated with those organizations. Membership in the associations has not been mandatory for any profession since the "legal" reforms introduced by the military dictatorship.

FUTURE LEGAL ACTIONS

The ruling left "a record of the pernicious performance of the then-civil servant of the military government Álvaro Puga in the manipulation, intimidation, censorship, and persecution of journalists and media." According to the tribunal, because he was an "individual who is not a journalist and therefore not a member of the Chilean Journalists Association," lawyer Puga "is not subject to this summary," although he practiced "opinion" journalism and signed press articles under the pseudonym "Alexis." Lawyer Hiram Villagra announced that the information provided by the journalists' ethics tribunal will allow for the initiation of legal actions against those responsible for a sort of psychological warfare division of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), later called the National Information Center (CNI). The future defendants will be the same Álvaro Puga and Anthal Lipthay, a stateless person of Hungarian origin linked to the CIA who arrived in Chile as a "psychological specialist" in the service of the dictatorship, became a financial operator for dictator Augusto Pinochet, and became a millionaire. This character married Baroness Ildiko de Orgovanyi-Hanstein in 1983 at Schwarzenegg Castle, near Graz, Austria; he currently resides in Miami and is attributed the status of "intimate friend" of Lucía Pinochet Hiriart, the sixty-something daughter of the former dictator, who visits him frequently in the US according to photographs in the social pages of La Tercera. Another character who is in the judicial sights of the victims' families of Operation Colombo is retired aviation colonel Mario Jahn Barrera, who served as deputy director of DINA and, since he retired in the mid-80s, has directed the Aeronautical and Space Museum, dependent on the Civil Aeronautics Directorate. Jahn Barrera used the pseudonym Luis Gutiérrez to travel the world as an "itinerant ambassador" for the Air Force and participate in intelligence actions such as Operation Condor. He has never been brought before a tribunal. Another subject that the victims' families do not lose hope of sitting in the dock is Gerardo Roa Araneda, a DINA agent who, while an official of Línea Aérea Nacional (LAN), obtained the financing to release three editions of the Brazilian newspaper Novo O Día, of Curitiba, where he published articles signed with his real name. This publication, plus the magazine LEA that appeared only once in Buenos Aires, provided the starting point for the Operation Colombo setup, which was extensively amplified by the Chilean press led by El Mercurio, La Tercera, Las Últimas Noticias, La Segunda, La Mañana de Talca, among other print media, plus the radio and television of the era.

Source: cubaperiodistas.cu, May 23, 2008