"Hermes" was the alias used by Eugenio Berríos as a DINA agent: he was murdered between January and March 1993, and his body was finally found in April 1995 on El Pinar beach, buried face down, as was done with traitors in the Middle Ages.

As they say in mafia families: "this man knew too much." This is basically why the brilliant and sinister DINA chemist Eugenio Berríos was murdered, taking with him secrets about the assassinations of Orlando Letelier and Carmelo Soria, the attempts to eliminate various uniformed enemies of Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, the project to remove the smell of cocaine, and the strange death of Eduardo Frei Montalva.

He was not the only one eliminated by his "comrades-in-arms" to hide these crimes. Strange suicides and disappearances accompany this history of intrigue and concealment in which the main branch of the Armed Forces appears implicated "up to the parachute."

"Suicide" and uniformed disappearance

On October 22, 1977, after being visited by high-ranking DINA officers, among whom was Manuel Contreras, the Director of the Consular Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Guillermo Osorio Mardones, was found dead in his home.

The official version speaks of suicide, but all the data point to an assassination to prevent him from testifying in the trial against the DINA for the attack that claimed the lives of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffit in the United States.

The dictatorship official had been a Minister Counselor at the Chilean embassy in Argentina at the time of the bombing against General Carlos Prats and his wife, but his decisive participation in the delivery of false passports to Michel Townley and Armando Fernández Larios, who traveled to the U.S. under the names Williams Rose and Alejandro Romeral, directly implicated him in the Letelier Case.

But an even less known case, that of Guillermo Jorquera Gutiérrez, appears directly related to the tragic end of Berríos. Jorquera was an Army officer assigned to the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), who was detained on January 23, 1978, around 16:30 hours, when he was attempting to seek asylum at the Venezuelan Embassy, located at Calle Bustos 2021, in the Providencia commune.

The action was frustrated by the fixed-point Carabineros officer Carlos Garrido Sotomayor, who proceeded to detain him and take him to the 14th Carabineros Precinct, today called the 19th. At the police station, Commissioner Major Julio Mardones Ferrada, upon learning that he was a military man, placed him at the disposal of Army Captain Adolfo Fernando Born Pineda, also of the DINE, along with the firearm and the military identification card (TIM) he was carrying.

Born transferred him to the offices of the Director of the DINE, Brigadier General Héctor Orozco Sepúlveda, leaving him in the waiting room, while he went in to speak with the general, who informed him that Jorquera had been discharged, for which he ordered him to withdraw his TIM and "dispatch him," an order he carried out immediately.

Orozco specified in court that he had been discharged on the same day of his attempt to seek asylum. The cause was "service needs," for alleged alcoholism. However, in another official letter, General Orozco indicated that the request for discharge had been requested by the DINE on December 22, 1977, to the Army Personnel Directorate, a request that was reiterated on January 6, 1978.

On the other hand, Army Colonel Enrique Valdés Puga, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs at that time, had requested the services of Guillermo Jorquera from the Minister of Defense on July 29, 1976, in his capacity as a specialist in Military Intelligence with experience in the area of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to serve in the Ministerial Security Department.

This request was accepted on August 27 of that year. On November 9, the same colonel sent a confidential letter to the Director of the DINE, informing him of the excellence of the work performed by Jorquera as an advisor to the Analysis section and in charge of "Special Investigations." He served in these functions until the end of 1977, and nothing suggested he had any intention of seeking asylum, nor were there any apparent reasons for it.

Jorquera's departure coincides with the "suicide" of Osorio and an "accidental" gunshot wound to a leg that kept him hospitalized until January 12, 1978, and in a cast until the 20th, one day before his frustrated asylum attempt.

Jorquera's ex-spouse states that her husband had been marginalized from the Army "due to the loss of some documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs related to the Letelier Case." Since the very day he was at the Intelligence Directorate, Guillermo Jorquera has been forcibly disappeared.

His family suffered various acts of intimidation, and his wife, a FAMAE employee, was fired for "company needs." The DINE had begun the work of concealment.

The secrets of "Hermes"

Eugenio "Hermes" Berríos was one of Manuel Contreras's favorites in DINA work. The chemist was considered a genius in scientific research and the use of his inventions for the purpose of eliminating enemies, which is why he was assigned to work in the house that served as headquarters for Michel Townley, located on Calle Vía Naranja in La Dehesa.

Among the secrets that died along with Berríos is the fate of the chemical weapons he manufactured, including Sarin gas, and drug trafficking actions that could involve not only common criminals but also Chilean, Peruvian, and American authorities of that time.

His wife, Gladys Schmeisser, knew of his friendship with Jorge Ricardo Alarcón Dubois, a former detective who worked as an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, better known as the DEA, which is accused from various quarters of being the largest international drug trafficking mafia.

Another of his friends was Máximo Isidro Bocanegra Guevara, a Peruvian agent of Vladimir Montesinos and a drug trafficker who was looking for potential channels for the commercialization of cocaine and the work of purifying that drug in Chile, for which Berríos's knowledge was absolutely necessary.

Carlos Wahr Daniel, with a record for robbery and fraud in Spain, who transported cocaine abroad for Hernán Monje Defonso, another major drug trafficker, was also a frequent visitor to his house. Other friends of Berríos were Luis Gerardo de Azcuénaga González and the chemist Samuel Rojas Zúñiga, with whom "Hermes" sought ways to disguise cocaine in the form of powdered boldo and created boldine.

Some time later, on a plot of land in Melipilla belonging to Máximo Bocanegra, a complete laboratory for refining cocaine would be found. In 1993, when the Investigations police raided Berríos's house in the Providencia commune, they found a laboratory of that type. That same lead led the police to Iquique, where they found another similar one.

Project Andrea

In the "field" of chemical weapons, it is known that Berríos was in charge of the development of Sarin gas, discovered by Nazi scientists during the Second World War, to convert it into an untraceable poison and thus use it in the elimination of political opponents, as well as a weapon of mass elimination in case of war, since at that time the situation with Peru or a possible triple confrontation including Bolivia and Argentina was pressing.

Sarin was tested on at least two occasions: in the case of the assassination of the Real Estate Registrar, Renato León Zenteno, and later in that of Manuel Leyton, a security agent who had disobeyed orders.

Its possible use to assassinate Orlando Letelier was also considered, for which a bottle of Chanel Nº5 perfume loaded with this gas was introduced into the United States. The plan to use Sarin gas was known as "Project Andrea," and three other experts participated, of whom only their code names are known: Gaviota, Canario, and Dag.

One of them could be the biochemist Francisco José Oyarzún Sjoberg.

Eugenio Berríos had a powerful imagination regarding lethal procedures. He doubted whether Sarin was truly undetectable, as he knew that a strange chemical element can be traced with increasingly sophisticated procedures. That is why he thought of a "more natural" system that would kill without leaving traces.

The "Special Unit"

When investigations into crimes against humanity began to advance, once the dictatorship had ended, the so-called "Special Unit" was established under the wing of the DINE, headed by Hernán Ramírez Rurange, an organization that would dedicate itself to the protection of the accused and their commanders. All those prosecuted for the murder of Berríos are related to this operational unit.

The "Special Unit" would be in charge of taking Carlos Herrera Jiménez out of the country when the net of the trial for the death of Tucapel Jiménez began to close; it also took Luis Sanhueza Ross when he left for Argentina and then Uruguay, at the end of 1992, upon his authorship in the death of businessman Aurelio Sichel, financier of La Cutufa, and his participation in the assassination of Jécar Neghme becoming known.

In the case of Eugenio Berríos, the plan included a trip to Punta Arenas, a land exit to Argentina, and then transport by boat to Montevideo, where he spent some time with Herrera Jiménez. To bring Berríos his salary, which would have amounted to three thousand dollars per month, both Arturo Silva and Jaime Torres Gacitúa arrived in Uruguay, accompanied by Lieutenant (R) Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez.

Berríos was buried in Chile last October 9, but his known and yet-to-be-known history will continue to give people something to talk about for a long time. The Army's hand signed its name here.

The suspicions of the Frei family

There have been so many suspicions from the Frei family pointing to the possible assassination of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva that they finally filed a complaint for illicit association and obstruction of justice before the Sixth Criminal Court of Santiago, the same one in which Judge Olga Pérez is investigating the Berríos case.

A nurse, a witness to those days who prefers to keep her name confidential, relates that the Clínica Santa María was frequently visited by uniformed men, who walked around with suspicious attitudes, until one day all the staff on duty were evicted from the floor where the former President was hospitalized, and strange people entered the clinic. After that, Frei Montalva passed away.

Frei had been hospitalized in November 1981 to undergo surgery for an annoying esophagitis caused by a hiatal hernia, a chronic, non-fatal, and not even serious illness. He was 71 years old and was in perfect physical and mental condition; he appeared as one of the best-known opponents of the military regime, after leading the campaign to vote "No" in 1980, when the Constitution that governs to this day was fraudulently approved.

After the attack suffered by his friends Bernardo Leighton and Anita Fresno in Italy, Frei moved definitively to the opposition and entered into confidential conversations with the Communist Party, which from the first minute sought broad alliances against the dictatorship.

After the exhausting campaign, which culminated with him as the central speaker in a packed Teatro Caupolicán, he decided to have surgery. He consulted with Chilean doctors about the convenience of doing it in the country and was guaranteed the existence of technical conditions equivalent to those of the United States.

He was operated on by a team led by Dr. Alejandro Larraín, seconded by a group of high-level doctors. Days later, complications appeared, an intestinal obstruction due to peritoneal adhesions, which forced a new operation on December 6.

Everything still seemed under control, but an infectious process derived from the Proteus Providence virus was triggered, it was said, which motivated another emergency operation. The pathogenic condition was not contained. Another operation on December 17 marked the beginning of the end. He died on January 22, 1982.

In those same days, rumors began. The case of General Augusto Lutz, head of the Military Intelligence Service at the time of the coup, who died after a series of operations and treatments at the Military Hospital, was well known. His family maintains that he was a victim of the DINA for opposing Colonel Manuel Contreras, who had already become Pinochet's trusted man.

Other information, mentioned by Carmen Frei, speaks of anonymous calls warning about a possible poisoning, the movements in the clinic of people strange to the treating medical staff and auxiliary personnel, and the rumor of the disappearance of the autopsy protocol.

One month after the strange death of Frei Montalva, Tucapel Jiménez would be savagely assassinated. The dictatorship was thus left without two of its most dangerous public opponents.

"Hermes," by that time, had developed several forms of Sarin gas, involved in the so-called Project Andrea of research, although Michel Townley's ex-wife, Mariana Callejas, remembers that the loquacious Berríos claimed that "there was no better way to get rid of an undesirable than a drop of Staphylococcus aureus," a bacterium with a violent effect that usually infects hospital operating rooms.

In that line, Berríos must have also considered poisoning through the uncontrolled development of pathogenic bacteria that normally exist in the human organism. In fact, Odlanier Mena himself, successor to Manuel Contreras in the main repressive body of the dictatorship and a bitter enemy of "Mamo," was about to be poisoned with a bacterium that Eugenio Berríos obtained from the Bacteriological Institute.

Those responsible in Chile and Uruguay

The so-called "Berríos Case" had gone years without substantial progress, but after the patient investigation led by Judge Olga Pérez Meza and carried out by the Fifth Department of the civil police, the results are beginning to be seen.

Among those prosecuted, the retired majors Arturo "Mariano" Silva Valdés and Jaime "Salinas" Torres Gacitúa, who was Pinochet's bodyguard when he was detained in London, appear as authors of the crime.

Meanwhile, for obstruction of justice, the judge prosecuted General (R) Hernán Ramírez Rurange, also implicated in the assassination of Tucapel Jiménez; Lieutenant (R) Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez, linked to the crime of Tucapel Jiménez; and Commander (R) Pablo Rodríguez Márquez.

The obstruction of justice refers to the deaths of Orlando Letelier and Carmelo Soria, since Berríos was taken out of the country and finally murdered to avoid his testimony in those investigations.

General (R) Eugenio Covarrubias Valenzuela, who assumed the direction of the DINE while having knowledge of Berríos's "stay" in Uruguay, was indicted as an accessory to the crime of obstruction of justice.

Others who appear linked to the crime are Commander Mario "Alejandro" Cisternas and Captain Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross, implicated in the deaths of Jécar Neghme, José Carrasco, Abraham Muskatblit, Felipe Rivera, Gastón Vidaurrázaga, Operation Albania, and the disappearance of five young rodriguistas in September 1986.

Also on the list is the name of General (R) Emilio Timmerman, who held the position of military attaché at the Chilean embassy in Uruguay and acknowledged to another delegate that Berríos was in Montevideo.

Although it is not possible to investigate from Chile the responsibilities of high-ranking Uruguayan officers in this assassination, the process identifies as participants the current Lieutenant Colonel Eduardo Radaelli, at that time a captain; Lieutenant Colonel Tomas Casella, who appears during those same days walking alongside Pinochet through the streets of Montevideo; and also Lieutenant Colonel Wellington Sarli Pose.

All of them, at the very least, participated in the handover of Berríos, who had taken refuge in a Uruguayan police station, to the Chilean military men who would finish him off. The autopsy protocol carried out by specialist Patricia Hernández ensures that Eugenio Berríos was murdered with two different weapons, one Chilean and one Uruguayan, as a way to seal a pact of silence between agents of security agencies of both countries.

Plan Cóndor was functioning again.

Source: El Siglo, October 28, 2002

Judge Alejandro Madrid will hand down a sentence in the coming days in the case of the assassination of the former agent of the DINA, Pinochet's secret service. A team of three police officers, who became the minister's right arm in the process, penetrated the walls that hid his victimizers and unraveled the crime. [Jorge Escalante] Santiago, Chile.

It was the first months of 1978, and the chemist Eugenio Berríos felt abandoned and without protection.

The reign of the DINA had ended not long before. In the internal struggle for military power, its main godfathers lay defeated, and Augusto Pinochet had been forced to put an end to the criminal organization. The United States government of Democrat Jimmy Carter was pressuring Chile for the crime of Orlando Letelier.

One morning, Berríos arrived to talk with two agents of the brand-new National Intelligence Center (CNI), successor to the DINA: David Morales Lazo and Jaime Cortínez Méndez. As credentials, he presented his work in chemical weapons experiments alongside Manuel Contreras and Michael Townley.

The CNI agents took him to the Army Engineers Command and put him in the hands of Colonel Víctor Barría, now ex-DINA, who contacted him with General Héctor Orozco. Berríos asked to be connected with the Army's Chemical Industrial Complex in the Talagante commune. They promised him work.

Shortly after, the agent Ítalo Secattore looked for Berríos at the San Pancracio bakery at Calle Carmen 1167 in Santiago. The chemist had transformed his aunt Berta's premises into another bunker: he was staying there and had built a second artisanal laboratory. He had the other one at his parents' house on Calle Antonio Bellet, but he fought with them often.

After the visit from Secattore, whom he treated to pastries from Aunt Berta, Berríos felt he was getting his life back. The disastrous end of the DINA was behind him. He was returning in glory and majesty under the protective mantle of the military. The gatherings at Les Assessins, the little bar on Calle Merced, returned, and love blossomed with the attractive Gladys Schmeisser.

Berríos had a fine sense of humor, in tune with his somewhat effeminate voice. He was obedient, orderly in his chores, intelligent, applied in his knowledge, innovative, but somewhat vulgar when it was necessary to be so.

He was also a great consumer of cocaine, which he used to share with his friends. Under the effect of the drug, Berríos sometimes adopted violent behavior. Gladys suffered his beatings.

Years later, the Army got rid of him again. The first protests in the country were beginning. The dictator was losing ground. Berríos felt the storm clouds, the loneliness, the shortage of money, and the lack of protection returning. Now things would be more difficult and dangerous for him. The man of sarin and botulinum knew too much.

Saddened, at the end of the ’80s, he took refuge again with his aunt Berta and took charge of the bakery, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. The moneylenders appeared with their usurious interest rates.

Since he did not trust them, he filmed every transaction with a hidden camera, while pretending to be friendly by giving away pastries. The meetings with the dark owners of the money, who came to collect and continue lending to save the small business, took place around a round table covered by a flowered oilcloth tablecloth.

Aunt Berta played solitaire, and Berríos did the math with pencil and paper. In the distance, a parrot adorned the scene with its chatter.

At that time, Berríos was imprisoned for issuing bad checks and remained for a time in the Valparaíso jail and later in the Capuchinos jail annex in Santiago.

"I am alive"

At the beginning of 1991, Berríos strengthened his ties with the Peruvians Juan Cornejo Hualpa, alias Jorge Acosta Vargas, and Jorge Sáez Rivero, alias Jorge Saer Becerra. Both financed two laboratories to produce cocaine, one in an isolated border area of Iquique and the other at Avenida Los Molles 841 in Conchalí, under the shield of the company Inversiones Río Cipreses S.A.

Berríos collaborated in the production and trafficking alongside the Peruvian Máximo Bocanegra Guevara, a kind of administrator of the white powder.

The world was collapsing on him. That same year, Judge Adolfo Bañados initiated the investigation into the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington. Berríos was on the list of those who had to testify.

He knew quite a bit about that and other crimes. The moneylenders were pressing and threatening. Aunt Berta was sinking, and he with her. His marriage was in tatters. And in the cocaine business, he was scammed out of 36,000 dollars, as recorded by his own voice in a telephone recording found in his house raided after his death.

The scenario was different from that of June 1978, when, upon being interrogated for the first time judicially about his work in the DINA in a case for crimes against humanity, Berríos skillfully sidestepped the matter by disavowing the DINA and everything that linked him to the crime.

At the beginning of the ’90s, the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE) served as a refuge for hundreds of CNI officials. The organization placed agent José Ríos San Martín on Berríos's heels to control any madness. Ríos, ex-DINA and member of the Mulchén Brigade, knew how to watch the enemy. The DINE was preparing his kidnapping and clandestine departure from the country.

"I am in the seven seas of Sinbad the Sailor. I don't know what saves me, whether it's naivety or stupidity, but the fact is that I am alive, Tata," Berríos said one day to his friend, Colonel Manuel Pérez Santillán, a dialogue recorded in the recording.

His disastrous financial situation had him, by 1991, with his phone cut off for calling and without money to do so from a public booth, as he confessed to Colonel Pérez. Nor was he saved by the failed sale of amphetamine capsules that he produced in the Antonio Bellet laboratory.

DEA and FBI

In his desperation, the chemist decided to inform at the United States embassy in Santiago, before anti-drug agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), about a large concealment of cocaine in northern Chile. It was never known if those he denounced were his Peruvian partners.

In exchange, he wanted money and to be taken out of the country. The DINE increased the control of his movements, and Judge Bañados's investigation grew in information. To reach the DEA, the chemist contacted Jaime Melgoza Garay, an informant for the American agency.

He had known Melgoza since his youth, when the latter was a bodyguard for General Roberto Viaux, who led the Tacna Regiment uprising in 1969. A year later, Melgoza shot the Army Commander-in-Chief René Schneider, along with Juan Luis Bulnes Cerda and Julio Izquierdo Menéndez.

According to the intelligence files of the Investigations Police of the time, Berríos was then a young member of the political commission of the far-right movement Patria y Libertad, commanded by lawyer Pablo Rodríguez Grez.

Berríos and Melgoza arrived together at the North American embassy, then located on Calle Agustinas. They met with the DEA agent, the Chilean Jorge Alarcón Dubois, and his boss, "a certain Jeff," according to Melgoza.

But nothing worked with the DEA. Their agents in Santiago knew that Berríos's Peruvian partners were preparing a major shipment of cocaine to the United States, which would be received there by the drug trafficker Jesús Ochoa Gálvez, a relative of the Ochoa Vásquez of the Medellín cartel, who had installed his operation in Chile.

The DEA was not interested in the report because they wanted the shipment to reach its destination and thus be discovered in the United States.

That explains why the DEA and the FBI did not inform the Investigations Police (PDI) or the Supreme Court about the whereabouts of Eugenio Berríos, who had already hidden with the help of friends, without suspecting that military intelligence was aware of his movements.

During those days in 1991, the figure of the then-sub-commissioner of the Investigations Police (PDI) Nelson Jofré Cabello emerged, who, together with Commissioner Rafael Castillo, became crucial support for Judge Adolfo Bañados and other magistrates who were beginning to investigate more seriously the crimes committed under military oppression.

Over time, Jofré remained more closely linked to the main cases.

His friend Duque

By order of Augusto Pinochet, at the beginning of August 1991, the DINE locked Berríos in a basement of the Army Intelligence Battalion (BIE) at Calle García Reyes 12. Judge Bañados had summoned him to testify several times without him appearing.

The police officers Jofré and Castillo could not find his whereabouts. The DEA and the FBI remained silent. The moneylenders were falling on top of Aunt Berta, and for them, there were no more gift pastries.

His friend, the lawyer and former military prosecutor Aldo Duque—the man with the wide-brimmed hat and classmate of "Mamito" Contreras and lawyer Cristián Espejo at the Gabriela Mistral University—could not save him from the protests or the usury of the lenders. His wife was in ruins. The chemist's fate was sealed.

On October 26 of that year, the DINE Special Operations Unit, commanded by Major Arturo Silva Valdés, took him out of Chile to Uruguay via Argentina under the alias Manuel Antonio Morales Jara. Hours earlier, a group of friends gave the chemist a curious farewell while he remained locked in the BIE basement. Aldo Duque toasted to him.

Eugenio Berríos disappeared from the map. The Uruguayan military, still steeped in its own crimes under military command, helped its Chilean friends with valuable infrastructure to keep the chemist hidden.

After a year, Berríos wanted to return to Chile to tell the justice system his secrets. That is why they killed him in November 1992, when he tried to escape from a house in the Parque del Plata resort, near Montevideo.

A team of three police officers began the search for clues to the crime: sub-commissioners Palmira Mella San Martin and José Araneda Isamit, under the leadership of the current prefect Nelson Jofré Cabello.

They started from scratch because, in Chile, the Army jealously guarded access to any information. They began to investigate from Uruguay and Argentina to reach Chile. In Uruguay, they had to overcome multiple obstacles because no one was interested in clues surfacing. The three high-ranking Uruguayan officers involved in the homicide maintained powerful networks of protection.

In Montevideo, they turned to the local DEA and FBI, and there they did obtain clues. They managed to interrogate dozens of witnesses and reviewed thousands of immigration cards to identify Chilean military personnel who traveled to that country.

They also located the three Uruguayans who served as support for the Chilean agents. They did the same in Buenos Aires, where they even penetrated the structure of the Chilean Army's foreign intelligence secret service.

Back in Santiago, they cross-referenced all the information with the structures of the DINA, CNI, and DINE that they managed, and thus the Chilean core that had kept Berríos kidnapped abroad was exposed.

Despite the continuous attempts by the agents to erase their tracks in Argentina and Uruguay, they committed a great oversight: they always arrived in Montevideo with their real names. It was the great mistake of Pinochet's Army intelligence in this case.

In the last days of November 1992, kneeling and tied by his arms, the chemist was forced to lower his head. Arturo Silva fired the first shot. The other was fired by one of the three Uruguayan military men under house arrest in Chile.

It was a pact of honor and silence. One bullet for each country. In the process instructed by Judge Alejandro Madrid, whose sentence is about to be handed down, the only former Chilean agent who told how Berríos died and who killed him was Colonel (R) Mario Cisternas Orellana. The rest deny the assassination to this day.

Source: lanacion.cl, November 2, 2009

In a historic decision that aims to clarify the assassination of DINA chemist Eugenio Berríos, which occurred in Uruguay in 1993, the head of the Sixth Criminal Court of Santiago, Olga Pérez Meza, subjected six active and retired military personnel to prosecution.

The magistrate indicted Major (R) Arturo Silva Valdés and Major (R) Jaime Torres Gacitúa as authors. Both had been in preventive detention since last Monday. For obstruction of justice, Judge Pérez prosecuted General (R) Hernán Ramírez Rurange, Lieutenant (R) Raúl Lillo, and Commander (R) Pablo Rodríguez Márquez. General (R) Eugenio Covarrubias Valenzuela was indicted as an accessory.

Advances in the investigation

The investigation has advanced to the point of establishing that against retired Major Arturo Silva Valdés and retired Major Torres Gacitúa, there are well-founded presumptions of their participation in the death of Berríos, which occurred in Uruguay between January and March 1993.

According to the journalistic investigation into the case contained in the book Crimen Imperfecto (Imperfect Crime), by journalist Jorge Molina, Torres Gacitúa was part of the "special unit" of the DINE that intervened in the death of the chemist, while Silva Valdés acted as an advance man for the former Army Commander-in-Chief, Augusto Pinochet, on his trips abroad.

Silva Valdés had a direct operational relationship with the former head of the DINE, Hernán Ramírez Rurange. In addition to fulfilling the tasks indicated for Pinochet, he was in charge of paying the salaries of the agents who remained hidden outside the country to protect them from facing judicial processes or, alternatively, so that they would not testify in investigations being carried out in Chile, as was the case with Berríos.

Silva, additionally, had some parallel businesses linked to the customs transfer of clothing, perfumes, and other items. To bring Berríos his salary, which would have amounted to three thousand dollars per month, both Arturo Silva and Jaime Torres Gacitúa arrived in Uruguay, accompanied by Lieutenant (R) Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez, who also made up the DINE "special unit."

The steps of the "special unit"

Lillo had been detained by Judge Olga Pérez at the end of August of this year and was later released. Together with him, Commander (R) Pablo Rodríguez Márquez, a former DINE agent, was apprehended on that date, who was also released from preventive detention.

In addition to those mentioned, the "special unit"—which at the time of Berríos's death had a new head, the director of the DINE, now retired General Eugenio Covarrubias—was also composed of active Commander Mario Cisternas.

It was in June 1993 that the scandal of the anonymous letter that denounced the Berríos operation broke out. The former chemist, known for perfecting Sarin gas in Chile and for his links to drug trafficking, had been taken out by the DINE in October 1991 to Uruguay to prevent what he knew about the Letelier case from generating a debacle among former DINA members.

At the end of 1992, Berríos arrived at a Uruguayan police station asking for help and maintaining that he was being kidnapped by Uruguayan and Chilean military personnel. The police allegedly handed him over to his captors, among whom, as is now clear, were Silva and Torres Gacitúa.

The chemist was shot to death between January and March 1993, a date that coincided with Augusto Pinochet's visit to Montevideo in February of that year. The aide-de-camp during that visit was counter-espionage Colonel Thomas Casella, also head of the operation to hide him in Uruguay.

The body was finally found in April 1995 on El Pinar beach, buried face down, as was done with traitors in the Middle Ages.

Source: El Mostrador, October 18, 2002

Pinochet involved in drug trafficking

Former police chief asserts that Augusto Pinochet and his family obtained benefits from drug and arms trafficking. The former head of intelligence of the Chilean military dictatorship, retired General Manuel Contreras, asserted that Augusto Pinochet and his family obtained their millionaire fortune thanks to drug and arms trafficking.

The digital edition of the Chilean newspaper La Nación specified this Sunday that "the fortune amassed by the former dictator is due to drug trafficking carried out by his son Marco Antonio together with the Chilean businessman of Syrian origin Edgardo Bathich." According to what the retired officer reported to the Chilean justice system, the chemist Eugenio Berríos, who worked for the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship (1973-1990) directed by Contreras, also participated in those operations.

Contreras delivered a report a few days ago to Judge Claudio Pavez, who is investigating the 1992 crime of former intelligence agent Colonel Gerardo Huber, where he links the Pinochet family to that crime and to illicit activities, La Nación indicated.

The newspaper indicated that Judge Pavez interrogated Contreras about the crime of Huber because he had belonged to the DINA while the former served as head of that intelligence organ, dismantled in the 70s.

Contreras, who spent 11 years in prison for the crime of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, is currently serving a sentence in a military prison for the disappearance of a militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) in 1975.

According to the newspaper, the magistrate asked Contreras for a report on the death of Huber, who disappeared mysteriously in January 1992 and whose body was found weeks later, regarding issues linked to Pinochet and his fortune of some 27 million dollars.

La Nación noted that Contreras "asserts in his report that when Huber took charge of the Army's Chemical Complex, in the mid-80s, the DINA chemist Eugenio Berríos, together with another 'cook,' were in charge of producing 'black' or 'Russian' cocaine." "The formula to manufacture it was to mix the alkaloid with ferrous sulfate and other mineral salts to help it become impregnated with the pigment, so that it would adhere to different surfaces and lack the traditional smell that allows it to be detected," he noted.

Contreras said, according to the source, that "the production of cocaine in the Army facility was authorized by the highest authority, Pinochet himself, where Berríos worked. Marco Antonio Pinochet and Edgardo Bathich allegedly participated in this activity." Berríos was murdered by DINA agents in Uruguay in 1993, where he was hidden, helped by military personnel from that country, to avoid testifying before the Chilean justice system about the intelligence operations of the repressive apparatus.

He added that the production "was sent to the United States and Europe, where Bathich's relative by marriage, the famous international arms and drug trafficker Monser Al Kassar, distributed it to subsequently send remittances to different accounts." A United States Senate report released in 2004 specified that Pinochet and his family had millionaire secret accounts in the United States, Europe, and tax havens, resources of at least 27 million dollars whose origin is being investigated by the justice system.

Pinochet's former collaborator also said in his report that he "used a second way to enrich himself: the use of the Army's reserved funds, which were deposited in several accounts and whose interest went to his personal treasury." The former senator-for-life is being prosecuted in Chile for tax fraud, as in his income declarations he avoided including the millionaire deposits he maintained in several foreign bank accounts under other identities.

Contreras, according to the Chilean newspaper, pointed out that Huber communicated before his death with a judge and "in an extensive informal statement told him the details of what was happening in the Army's Chemical Complex and the way in which the cocaine was exported." The deceased Army colonel also allegedly detailed in his judicial statement "the financial dealings of the Pinochet clan regarding drug and arms trafficking."

Source: NOTIMEX.com, July 9, 2006

The trial for the assassination of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva is directly linked to five other crimes that have Eugenio Berríos

The six proceedings are concentrated in the hands of Judge Alejandro Madrid, in an investigation that has already spanned ten years.

The DINA chemist, whose body was found in April 1995 on a beach in Uruguay with bullet wounds to the head, had been clandestinely removed from the country four years earlier. His escape was executed by a team from the most secret group of the Army Intelligence Brigade (BIE), led by Pinochet’s bodyguards, who killed him alongside the Uruguayan military officers who had him in their custody when he attempted to escape.

There is certainty regarding how Eugenio Berríos’s departure to Uruguay was executed. It was an operation intended to prevent Judge Bañados from interrogating the man who “knew too much.” His escape was finalized on October 26, 1991, shortly after the lawyer Fabiola Letelier asked Judge Adolfo Bañados to interrogate the DINA chemist in the investigation into the assassination of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier.

He was a star witness.

Michael Townley had confessed that, initially, there was a plan to kill Letelier (in Washington, September 1976) with sarin gas, a lethal chemical agent invented by the Nazis in World War II and perfected by Berríos in a DINA laboratory.

The initial plan was so advanced that Townley recalled boarding a LAN flight in 1976 carrying “a small bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume that my wife had given me and that I had filled with sarin.”

When Judge Bañados issued the arrest warrant for the DINA chemist on November 8, 1991, it was already too late: Berríos was in hiding in Uruguay, a country he had reached via Argentina on October 29. Judge Bañados was unaware that in his own office, the BIE had a mole who informed them of the order even before it was signed.

Only now is the reason understood for the millions of dollars spent on the operation to remove Eugenio Berríos from the country. It was not the perpetrators of Orlando Letelier’s crime that Pinochet and his BIE guards feared the chemist would reveal.

Bañados already had that picture clear. It was other deaths that, at that moment—just as the recovery of democracy had begun—remained hidden and could trigger major problems. This included issues of national defense regarding the destination and potential use of the chemical weapons manufactured in Army laboratories.

Since 1999, the date the trial for the kidnapping and homicide of Berríos began, first Judge Olga Pérez and later Judge Alejandro Madrid—along with the same police team composed of Prefect Nelson Jofré and Inspector Palmira Mella—have been assembling a macabre puzzle piece by piece.

First, the crime of Renato León Zenteno, the Real Estate Registrar of Santiago, who was murdered by a DINA team, was clarified. The crime was perpetrated on November 30, 1976, two months after Letelier was assassinated, in León Zenteno’s own apartment. The autopsy protocol states that he died as a victim of “acute nonspecific toxemia.”

One of the agents who participated in the murder confessed that upon leaving the crime scene, Berríos realized that the perfume bottle with sarin gas had been left behind on León Zenteno’s nightstand. It was too late.

They could not return. Many years later, when the old archived file was reviewed, the surprise of Madrid’s investigators was immense: in the photos taken by the experts, the same bottle described by the DINA agent in his confession is clearly visible.

Why kill León Zenteno? For a simple reason. He opposed the illegal transfer to DINA front companies of land in La Reina Alta that had been seized from opponents of the regime. In any case, the former Real Estate Registrar of Santiago was no obstacle to the DINA’s purposes. Today, solid and beautiful residential complexes for military personnel stand on those same grounds.

It has been judicially established that Berríos was part of the DINA’s Quetropillán Brigade, a laboratory that operated in the house that Michael Townley and his wife Mariana Callejas shared in Lo Curro.

In that laboratory, the “Andrea” project was developed, intended to produce chemical weapons for the elimination of opponents and, eventually, for use in a conflict with neighboring countries. Sarin, Soman, and Tabun were some of the chemical toxins developed by Berríos and the scientist Francisco Oyarzún Sjoberg, who worked under the direct orders of Manuel Contreras.

The sarin gas obtained in the Lo Curro house was tested for the first time in April 1976, using dogs and even a donkey. Experiments were also conducted on mice and rabbits.

One of the first human victims was the poet Luis Waldo Silva Caunic. Later, it was the turn of the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria, who was kidnapped in July 1976 and taken to the Lo Curro house. Four months later, the murder of the Real Estate Registrar of Santiago occurred. And in March 1977, the victim came from the very ranks of the organization led by Manuel Contreras.

Manuel Jesús Leyton Robles, an Army corporal assigned to the DINA, had been arrested in 1977 for car theft, and one of the vehicles belonged to a forcibly disappeared person. In his statement to the Carabineros, he said he did it on behalf of the DINA.

Shortly before ratifying his statements before a court, he was eliminated with sarin gas, although the Army officially attributed the death to “natural causes.”

Thirty years later, Alejandro Madrid established the truth and, in the process, demonstrated for the first time that the DINA used sarin gas for the elimination of people. There are 13 former agents prosecuted in this trial, including doctors Hernán Taricco Lavín, Pedro Valdivia Soto, and Osvaldo Leyton.

The nurse Eliana Carlotta Bolumburu Taboada, who played a key role at the DINA’s London Clinic and later the CNI, was also linked to the case.

Following the assassination of Letelier in September 1976, a fierce struggle broke out between the head of the DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras, and the head of what was then the Army’s National Intelligence Directorate, General Odlanier Mena. The latter objected to Contreras’s brutal and sloppy procedures.

Then, according to Michael Townley’s testimony, Contreras decided to kill General Mena “by incorporating a deadly bacterium into his coffee” that had been provided by Berríos. The plan was thwarted because, on that occasion, Mena preferred herbal tea.

In 1978, once Townley’s participation in the Letelier crime was uncovered and he was claimed by the United States and expelled to that country under pressure from its government, Berríos and his Lo Curro laboratory moved to the Army’s Chemical and Industrial Complex in Talagante.

The man in charge: Colonel Gerardo Huber, one of the DINA’s operational commanders, who was murdered after the scandal caused by the discovery of a shipment of weapons labeled as medical supplies whose final destination was Croatia.

The chemical weapons manufactured by Berríos would claim new victims on December 8, 1981, the same day that Frei Montalva’s condition worsened, never to recover, and he was operated on for the third time by Dr. Patricio Silva Garín.

While the former president was beginning to show signs of death at the Santa María Clinic, a group of four political prisoners from the MIR and two other common criminals in the Public Prison were experiencing the same symptoms as a result of poisoning.

Adalberto Muñoz Jara, Guillermo Rodríguez Morales, and Ricardo and Elizardo Aguilera managed to survive the attack, albeit with serious aftereffects. However, two common prisoners—Víctor Corvalán Castillo and Héctor Pacheco Díaz—who shared lunch with the MIR members, died of “acute nonspecific intoxication.” Their deaths were never investigated.

Judge Madrid and his team did investigate, managing to establish the identity of the Gendarmerie officials who had links to the repressive agencies, in addition to proving that the intoxication was caused by botulinum toxins manufactured at the Army’s Bacteriological Institute. The episode bears Berríos’s trademark.

As the true circumstances of Frei Montalva’s death begin to clear, it is the turn of the Public Prison poisoning. But first, the first-instance sentence for the kidnapping and homicide of Eugenio Berríos is expected. Twenty-one people will be convicted, including four Army generals and three high-ranking officers of the Uruguayan Army.

The secret regarding the fate of the chemical weapons remains. And Berríos took to the grave the names of the other troublesome individuals who were eliminated with his lethal creations.

The “Operation Condor” of the 90s

HOW THE NETWORK THAT KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED EUGENIO BERRIOS ACTED

“I saw that man with Berríos,” whispered the Uruguayan doctor Juan Ferrari Grillo, standing next to Judge Olga Pérez at the identification window for prisoners in a Santiago courthouse. It was the morning of Monday, October 14, and Ferrari pointed to the handsome and elegant Lieutenant Colonel Arturo Silva Valdés.

From his uncomfortable position, without seeing the witness observing him, the man who for ten years was the master of General Augusto Pinochet’s rearguard and movements never imagined that at that precise moment, a doctor was handing over one of the final pieces that have allowed Judge Olga Pérez to assemble the cumbersome puzzle of the murder of the chemist and former DINA agent Eugenio Berríos.

And that it incriminates him.

Olga Pérez will not forget what she experienced on October 14 and 15. She prepared everything in complete secrecy. In a special room, two witnesses awaited whom she had brought from Uruguay in a mission surrounded by the utmost secrecy, to the point that the two only met at the airport.

Neither the doctor Juan Ferrari (44 years old) nor the concierge of an elegant building in the picturesque Pocitos neighborhood in Montevideo, Luis Minguez (53), knew that from that moment on, their lives would be linked.

And this happened when, in the lineup of suspects, each one was able to identify with total certainty the men who guarded Berríos during his stay in Uruguay, and most importantly, the two men who took him away on the last day he was seen alive in front of the Polyclinic of the Balneario Parque del Plata, 50 kilometers from Montevideo.

Later, the judge sketched the first smile of the day when she unexpectedly entered a room accompanied by the concierge Luis Minguez, and NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICER SALGADO—after taking a slight step backward—extended his hand to Minguez, to the astonishment of the other accused military officers.

A greeting that had more value than a hundred testimonies.

“I was impressed to meet one of the men I knew with Berríos. This gentleman is thinner, more aged… I recognized him immediately, and we shook hands gladly. He even brought me a gift from Chile: a bottle of pisco,” says Minguez hours before returning to his country.

Ferrari and Minguez thus fulfilled a procedure that should have been carried out in Montevideo. But in Uruguay, the military power still keeps democracy under tutelage. It was done in Chile. Olga Pérez, accompanied by a select group of police officers and in only two years, managed to assemble a difficult puzzle that unveils a secret chapter of the vestiges of Operation Condor, the collaboration between the secret police of the Southern Cone dictatorships, which perhaps contains the most sordid box: that of the manufacture of chemical weapons and the use of bacteria to eliminate opponents and increase military war potential. A chapter whose beginning dates back to 1991, months after the recovery of democracy in Chile.

Adolfo Bañados, the implacable judge.

It is difficult to describe the disappointment that invaded the team assisting Judge Adolfo Bañados in the investigation of the crime of Orlando Letelier, former Foreign Minister under Salvador Allende (perpetrated in Washington in September 1976), when they learned that one of their witnesses had escaped.

It was the first test of fire for the fragile new Chilean democracy, and Bañados, intelligent and a staunch enemy of self-promotion, was unraveling the threads of the largest judicial investigation into the actions of the DINA ever conducted in Chile.

And in that plot, the figure of the chemist Eugenio Berríos was gradually becoming very important. On November 8, 1991, the judge issued an arrest warrant against him. Shortly thereafter, he learned that Berríos had escaped.

He did not suspect that in the anteroom of his office, a clerk, fully identified, was photocopying and recording every testimony, piece of evidence, and movement of the investigators to inform a center commanded by General Fernando Torres Silva immediately. The Army auditor was conducting a parallel investigation whose goal was to impede the action of justice.

This was how the testimonies of Alejandra Damiani (the secretary the DINA assigned to Michael Townley, the agent who installed the laboratory where chemical weapons were manufactured) and Mariana Callejas (Townley’s wife and also a DINA agent) put Eugenio Berríos in Bañados’s sights. But they also set off the red alert in Torres Silva’s offices.

Years later, the same police officers who assisted Bañados would pick up the threads to unravel the mystery of Berríos’s disappearance and death. And they would discover the group for the most secret operations that was installed in the Army Intelligence Directorate—DINE—and whose mission had two objectives: intelligence for national security and the security of Pinochet and his family.

Chain escape operation.

The first clue was provided by the clandestine departure from Chile of Captain (Ret.) Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross, alias “El Huiro” or Ramiro Droguett Aranguiz, linked to the Operation Albania murders and the assassination of MIR leader Jecar Neghme.

It was determined that his escape took place in April 1991. The second operation was the flight of Major (Ret.) Carlos Herrera Jiménez (author of the assassination of union leader Tucapel Jiménez in 1982), on September 19, 1991.

“Together with the Director of Army Intelligence, we have decided that your only path is to leave Chile. You will be there with your family for about four years, until this whole story blows over,” Torres Silva told Herrera one day in September 1991 in his office at the corner of Alameda and Zenteno.

On September 10, Lieutenant Colonel Pablo Rodríguez Márquez, a member of the DINE’s secret team (retired a few months earlier), left for Argentina. His mission: to obtain a fake passport for Herrera from his Argentine associates. On September 12, Rodríguez returned, and seven days later, Herrera escaped under the false identity of “Mauricio Gómez.”

A week later, the operation for Eugenio Berríos was given the green light. The order was given by Torres Silva to Arturo Silva Valdés. For some reason, this time more precautions were taken. The first thing Valdés did was send Captain Pablo Rodríguez to Punta Arenas.

Then, on October 24, he instructed Raúl Lillo Gutiérrez (a CNI civilian assigned to the DINE secret team between 1990 and 1993, classified in the Army in February 1990, days before Pinochet handed over power) to travel by air to Punta Arenas carrying the “package,” Berríos.

Rodríguez was waiting for them there, having already prepared everything. Taking advantage of the fact that one of his brothers, a former Carabineros lieutenant, lived in Punta Arenas, he convinced him to leave for Argentina by car with a group of friends.

The safe-conduct for the vehicle was obtained in record time, and on October 26, Rodríguez, his brother, Lillo, and Berríos left Chilean territory and crossed into Río Gallegos. It was the moment for the chemist to debut a new identity: Manuel Antonio Morales Jara.

On that same October 26, Arturo Silva Valdés traveled by air to Buenos Aires and waited there for Berríos and Raúl Lillo.

What happened in Argentina is clear, but it is a chapter that still complicates the members of the secret team more than others. It was only three days, because on October 29, the trio set off on their journey, this time by river.

They crossed from Buenos Aires to Colonia and from there continued their journey to Montevideo, where Carlos Herrera and Uruguayan Army Lieutenant Colonel Tomás Casella were already waiting for them.

On November 8, 1991, the same day that Bañados issued the arrest warrant for Berríos, Colonel Francisco Maximiliano Ferrer Lima, the feared “Captain Max” of the DINA and then one of the heads of the secret team, left for Montevideo via Pluna to check that the “package” was well guarded.

Berríos’s first residence in Uruguay was an apartment at Rambla República del Perú No. 815, which he shared with Herrera. Its landlady, Elena Della Crosse, would later say that at a time when she complained about the exorbitant phone bills, it was Tomás Casella himself who handed her a check for 1,500 dollars.

The secret team had no financial problems. Silva Valdés handled large sums of money to buy passports, pay for surprise and rapid travel, pay for hotels, finance troublesome witnesses and those in hiding and their families, as well as foreign collaborators or associates. And all of that came from a black box of the Army—that is, from the money of all Chileans.

Nothing worked between Berríos and Herrera. They did not share habits or fears. Not to mention their dreams. There were red alerts that the Uruguayan officers took it upon themselves to extinguish until the fire broke out on January 18, 1992, when Casella was informed of the arrest of Carlos Herrera in Buenos Aires.

It was the moment to restructure the entire security system that protected Berríos’s clandestine status. Many pieces were moved for the shielding. Why was Berríos so important?

Judge Bañados had an answer (see box). For this reason, on January 21, three days after Herrera’s arrest, he reiterated the arrest warrant for the chemist.

Pocitos, the new residence.

February 1992 marked the beginning of a new life for Berríos. An apartment in Pocitos, a few meters from the coast, was his new residence. Eugenio Berríos and a companion arrived at Buxereo Street No. 117, in the Rambla del Perú sector: Lieutenant Colonel Mario Enrique Cisternas Orellana.

Luis Ángel Minguez, a man whose build reveals his status as a retired non-commissioned officer of the Uruguayan Navy, has been the concierge of the building since 1985. He returned from his vacation in March and found new tenants in apartment 401. He remembers the first time he ran into them well:

“Only one of them spoke, the one who even showed me a photocopy of a Chilean identity document on which the name was stamped: Hernán Tulio Paredes Orellana. He told me they did business between Chile and Uruguay. Later I found out it was Eugenio Berríos. I knew him as a chatty, friendly man. He seemed so pleasant and jovial that I never thought he would be linked to other things…”

Minguez shared time with him and his companions for multiple tasks due to his duties. “And how could I not remember him if even the electricity bill came in the name of Hernán Tulio Paredes… As the days went by, I realized that three people always lived there. Paredes (Berríos) was the permanent one, and the other two changed approximately every fifteen days…,” says Minguez.

They were ten months of coexistence. That is why, when the judge showed him the set of photographs, without hesitation, he recognized among Berríos’s “companions” the officers Pablo Marcelo Rodríguez, Jaime Torres Gacitúa, and Arturo Silva Valdés.

Minguez also kept a good memory of a “tall gentleman with a very good appearance who wore a mustache. He would arrive in a blue Chevrolet Chevette car with Uruguayan license plates to pick up Mr. Paredes (Berríos), and the driver never got out of the car.” It was Raúl Lillo.

Something happened in June ’92 because on the 24th, Tomás Casella traveled to Chile. Three days later, Uruguayan Army Lieutenant Colonels Eduardo Radaelli and Wellington Sarli Pose undertook the same trip.

Who invited them? What was their mission? What was happening with Berríos? These are knots that have clues but still remain to be elucidated. The truth is that on July 4, the three Uruguayan officers returned to their country and to the control of Berríos’s steps.

A certain fact is that Berríos was not well. He began to show weariness and to insist that the best thing was to return to Chile and surrender to justice. A step that the team led by Torres Silva and the Director of Army Intelligence of Chile were not willing to allow.

It was then that they decided to send his wife to mitigate the problem. On October 24, Gladys Schmeisser traveled to Montevideo to meet with Berríos.

The reunion took place at the Hotel Hispanoamericano at Melitón González Street No. 1225, room 202.

On November 9, an episode occurred that to this day clouds officials of the Chilean Foreign Ministry like a bothersome ghost. Emilio Rojas, cultural attaché of the Chilean embassy in Montevideo, received a strange call at his home from Berríos, whom he was friends with.

He testified as follows in the summary instructed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “At first I thought it was a joke. Then I got scared. I replied, ‘What do you want?’ ‘To tell you that I am here, protected by the Tata,’ he replied.

In my anguish, I asked him: ‘What Tata?’ ‘Pinochet,’ was his response. And he added: ‘I am protected by the Army.’ Scared, I hung up on him, but Eugenio called back. I told him: ‘Look, you son of a bitch, you are not going to involve me in your affairs. Don’t call me again and forget I exist…’”

There was a third call. Terrified, Rojas did not inform his civilian superiors but did report the episode to Colonel Emilio Timmermann, the military attaché in Uruguay.

“I entered his office and protested because they were involving me with Berríos. And what surprised me was Timmermann’s response: ‘That’s right, Berríos is here. We brought him, and you have to keep silent, and you know why.

Because we don’t play games. Look at how expensive this operation is costing us. You have never received a call from Berríos. Is that clear?’ To which I replied, ‘Crystal clear!’” he said in the Foreign Ministry’s summary.

At 1:00 PM on November 11, the consul of the Chilean embassy, Federico Marull, received a peculiar phone call. On the other end of the line was a man who said his name was Eugenio Berríos. His voice denoted excitement.

He explained that he was being held against his will and asked for help to return to Chile. And the incredible, absolutely pathetic thing is that Marull told him to present himself in person, hung up, and immediately sent a fax to Santiago.

One never knows… Forty-eight hours later, his boss from Santiago replied: if the subject does not prove his identity with some document, there is nothing to be done…

Neither of the two officials had read the newspapers and had never been informed that Eugenio Berríos was a man wanted by justice because his testimony was key in one of the most emblematic trials of the new democracy.

Thus, Berríos was left to his guards.

Kidnapping in Parque del Plata. Was it Colonel Timmermann, from Intelligence, who gave the warning that Berríos was trying to surrender at the embassy? To this day, he denies it. But the chemist was taken out of Montevideo and taken 50 kilometers from the capital, to the Balneario Parque del Plata, a lonely and peaceful place where the houses are very far from each other and with lush forests everywhere.

In that setting, the chemist, a lover of nightlife and urban life and in a state of acute anxiety, felt harassed to the extreme.

On November 15, the “package,” as his guards called him, managed to flee from his captors and requested protection at a neighboring house inhabited by a retired Navy officer. The latter, accompanied by his wife, decided to take him to the nearest police station.

“I am kidnapped by Chilean and Uruguayan military officers. General Pinochet ordered me to be killed,” shouted the man in a state of acute agitation who presented himself before Commissioner Elbio Hernández Marrero, head of the 24th Section of Parque del Plata of the National Police.

The commissioner did not have much time to react. When Berríos finished telling him that he had entered the country with false documentation and that he should be arrested, Lieutenant Colonel Eduardo Radaelli arrived at the station.

After identifying himself, his argument was short and precise: “Hand this man over to me because he is not in his right mind, he is delirious, and he must be subjected to treatment.” The commissioner hesitated.

Radaelli, with increasing urgency, insisted. Hernández remained hesitant. Radaelli made a phone call. Lieutenant Colonel Tomás Casella entered the station. He also identified himself and, with an authoritative voice, demanded the handover. Other men arrived behind Casella. The tension grew minute by minute.

And Hernández found a way out. He said that before handing him over, he must subject the individual to a medical checkup to verify if he was indeed out of his mind. He himself took Berríos by the arm and led him to the Polyclinic of Parque del Plata.

Dr. Juan Ferrari was on duty. Tall, sturdy, his face and gaze conveyed a serenity that cushioned the effect of his stature. Although he was surprised to see the commissioner arrive in person, he did not express it.

Nor did he show surprise when he saw that a group of individuals tried to enter the examination room. He simply closed the door on them. And there, the man took papers out of his sock that he showed him, while insisting that his name was actually Eugenio Berríos and that he should be arrested because he entered the country with forged papers, that he should help him… “I examined him carefully, and he did not present any picture of mental alteration.

Nor had he ingested alcohol. He only showed a lot of anxiety; he spoke and spoke, and his hands were sweating,” says Dr. Juan Ferrari twelve years later.

He certified it as such. It was also inscribed in the daily consultation logbook. And he watched him leave.

Hernández could not continue to doubt. A call from his superiors ordered him to hand him over immediately to officers Casella and Radaelli.

A few minutes passed. Dr. Ferrari was already examining another patient, when

He saw Berríos arrive unexpectedly, accompanied by two men he had already seen during the previous incident. Berríos thanked him for his attention and told him to stay calm, that he was fine. Ferrari did not understand. The scene was watched attentively by the two companions. Juan Ferrari saw him walk away with the two men. And there, the trail of Eugenio Berríos disappeared.

Ten years later, in a Chilean courtroom, Dr. Ferrari was able to identify the two men who took Eugenio Berríos away that afternoon on November 15, 1992, when he had tried in vain to call for help: Chilean Army Majors Arturo Silva Valdés and Jaime Torres Gacitúa.

And even though the scandal was quieted at the time, hysteria spread among the team of Chilean and Uruguayan military personnel who were holding Berríos in clandestine captivity. There is at least one piece of evidence for this.

At noon on that same November 15, 1992, in the same Balneario Parque del Plata and just five blocks from the house where they were holding Berríos, Captain Luis Arturo Sanhueza Ross saw Chilean and Uruguayan officers arrive in a state of agitation, saying "the other one escaped." In great haste, Sanhueza was quickly removed from the secondary residence of Uruguayan officer Wellington Sarli Pose, located at Calle 20 and Ferreira.

Not only was Berríos hidden, but Sanhueza also enjoyed the "protection" of the Uruguayan Army.

Ten years later, on October 16, Judge Olga Pérez confronted Sanhueza with Arturo Valdés and Jaime Torres in a face-to-face hearing. In the presence of his former superiors, Sanhueza recounted everything that happened that day, November 15, and the role each one played.

The faces of the other two no longer maintained their composure, and death threats emerged quickly and wrathfully in the judge's presence.

Without a trace of the "package."

Although it seems incredible, nothing that happened that November 15 in Parque del Plata came to light publicly. The intelligence services that controlled Berríos's custody took care of that and of erasing all traces.

Thus, room 202, which Berríos and Gladys Schmeisser occupied at the Hotel Hispanoamericano, was searched by military personnel. They took a suitcase from there, in addition to seizing the passenger registry.

The same thing happened with the Polyclinic registry: the page where Héctor Tulio Paredes appeared was torn out by the director without further explanation. Meanwhile, at the police station, the book containing the report would disappear.

In the Pocitos apartment, a quick cleanup was also carried out. The concierge, Luis Minguez, saw how two of the Chileans came down one day at approximately 9:00 a.m. with two large suitcases and a bag. Surprised, Minguez observed them loading the luggage into a car located on the corner and another smaller one parked in front of the building. But he never saw Berríos again.

On February 4, 1993, Tomás Cassella traveled to Chile, but went directly to Punta Arenas. Twenty days later, General Pinochet arrived in Uruguay. Casella received him there. What did they talk about during those days of relaxation that included a trip to Punta del Este?

It is difficult to believe that Berríos was not a topic of conversation, given that two of the men closest to Pinochet, who were part of his security team, were with the chemist until the end: Arturo Silva Valdés and Jaime Torres Gacitúa.

The former recorded more than 500 trips abroad as Pinochet's head of security. He left the Army in 1993 and from there moved to security functions at the newspaper El Mercurio, later becoming a manager and shareholder of Vanward, a security company.

The latter was in charge of Pinochet's security for 15 years. It was he who took him by land to Uruguay on that very trip in his armored Mercedes Benz. On October 16, 1998, he had to face the Scotland Yard picket line that arrived to arrest Pinochet at the London Clinic, when he was recovering from spinal surgery, and he accompanied him during the 16 months and 16 days he was in that country under house arrest for the trial against him initiated by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón.

Torres was already almost another son to the family, and in those days he also became the man who tried to cheer him up. He recently recounted intimate details on a TV program. Such as that the General's favorite song during those days of "captivity" was "Ladrillo está en la cárcel" ("Ladrillo is in jail"), a tango he sang to him himself.

His retirement took place in 2001, after Pinochet's last attempt at rebellion: in December 2000, he tried to resist the order issued by Judge Juan Guzmán to undergo medical examinations to verify whether or not he was fit to stand trial.

He barricaded himself in his house in Bucalemu, and it was the intervention of the then Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Ricardo Izurieta, accompanied by General Juan Emilio Cheyre, the current Commander-in-Chief, that convinced him to abandon his stance.

But upon arriving at the coastal residence, both generals found the military escort on high alert, with rounds chambered and ready to confront the representatives of the Judiciary. Torres Gacitúa led the team.

Uruguay under tutelage.

If it were not for the anonymous letter that a group of Uruguayan police officers sent to several parliamentarians in June '93, in which the events that occurred in Parque del Plata involving Eugenio Berríos were recounted, the group of Chilean and Uruguayan military personnel who kidnapped and murdered Berríos would still be in impunity.

That was the beginning of the scandal that tested Uruguayan democracy. And at a time when President Lacalle was beginning an official trip to Great Britain.

On the night of Sunday, June 6, a statement signed by two ministers announced "having become aware of a procedure carried out on November 15, 1992, in Parque del Plata," the dismissal of the head of the Canelones Police, Colonel Ramón Rivas, and the initiation of an administrative investigation that was lodged with the Ministry of Defense.

On June 9, thirteen Army generals, led by the Commander-in-Chief, General Juan Rebollo, met to analyze the case and its ramifications. They quickly let a message be known: the case is causing great "unrest" in the ranks, which is aggravated by the possibility that high-ranking officers will be summoned by the opening of a civil trial; there is talk of "aggression" against the institution and rejection of all "revisionism." The latter is the term used by the right and the military to disqualify any attempt at criticism of the military dictatorship that ended in 1985.

The serious matter is that Defense Minister Mariano Brito joined the meeting, before whom the generals expressed their full support for Rebollo and the head of Intelligence, Mario Aguerrondo. And before him, they demanded that the only possibility for an investigation be within the military justice system.

The deliberative meeting lasted six hours. Upon his return, President Lacalle limited himself to transferring Aguerrondo from his duties at the General Directorate of Information and applying a sanction to the two officers involved: Radaelli and Cassella.

On June 14, Lacalle concluded: "We have already adopted the decision that seemed appropriate to us. We believe that this is a circumstance in which internal actions in Chile have repercussions in our country.

It is an issue in which we as a nation have no direct interest, and due to our internal assessment, we ordered the change of destination of a general officer who was in charge of Intelligence operations tasks within the Ministry of Defense."

The "Chilean case," according to Lacalle, had already caused the dismissal of a police chief, a deliberative assembly of generals, the early return of President Lacalle himself, the summoning of two ministers to Parliament, and declarations reaffirming the protection of the democratic system against threats of a coup.

If the four special sessions of the joint commissions of Constitution and Legislation plus that of Defense of the Uruguayan Senate on the Berríos case served any purpose, it was for two ministers—Mariano Brito and Foreign Minister Sergio Abreu—to report two different destinations for Berríos.

The former said that Colonel Tomás Casella had informed him that Mr. Berríos "telephoned him from Porto Alegre on November 17, 1992, and that he would currently be in Mexico."

As for Abreu, he showed documents received by fax from the Uruguayan Consulate in Milan with two letters attributed to Berríos dated June 10, accompanied by a photo in which Berríos appeared reading a newspaper from that date.

On July 26, a conversation between Lacalle and Rebollo put an end to the episode. Berríos was alive in another country, the problem was Chilean, there would be no real trial, and it became evident that the President could not remove the military personnel involved in any illicit act.

This demonstrated the existence of a parallel military power in collusion with a Chilean one, authorized to kidnap and falsify documents without answering to anyone.

In the process being carried out in Chile, there are the testimonies of those who claim to have informed the Minister of the Interior, Juan Andrés Ramírez, of multiple facts surrounding the case, as well as his comments: "Let there be no more talk of this." But Berríos turned out to be more stubborn than his murderers.

His body appeared on April 13, '95, in a town located halfway between Montevideo and Parque del Plata. There, another story began: the obstruction of Chilean justice. Olga Pérez had to overcome all the obstacles imposed by the president of the Supreme Court of Uruguay to obtain evidence and obtain, for example, the definitive identification of the remains.

Not to mention the systematic rejection of all the necessary proceedings requested by the Chilean judge.

Berríos was murdered by two hands: one Uruguayan and one Chilean, to seal the pact and bind complicities. The skull presents two exit-less holes from a 9-millimeter caliber firearm projectile, compatible with a .357 Magnum revolver; the bullets are in the possession of Álvaro Gustavo González, judge of the second shift of Pando, as well as the examination of the clothing the body was wearing.

The cause of death: encephalocranial wound from a projectile impact. The body was tied by the feet and hands, and the analyses indicate that after being executed, he was put into a thick sack and tied with a rope. So that no traces would remain.

The man who claimed to be able to kill all of Buenos Aires with his Sarin gas or his bacteria, just as he proved he could murder several opponents with the same methods, was no longer there to bother anyone with his secrets.

Judge Olga Pérez and the team of Chilean police officers managed to piece together the puzzle and prosecute the main Chilean defendants, all of whom are retired. The Uruguayans are all in active service with the exception of Tomás Casella. Now it will be seen if Uruguay is still under military tutelage.

Source: Ciper, December 8, 2009

Jorge Rojas and the secret tapes of Berríos: "They are fundamental to reconstructing his macabre time with the DINA"

More than 25 tapes jealously guarded, a story with more shadows than lights, and a character who could well be the protagonist of a Netflix series are the ingredients used by Alberto Arellano and Jorge Rojas, journalists from the Center for Journalistic Research and Projects of the Diego Portales University, to bring to life a brilliant podcast about the final days of Eugenio Berríos, the chemist who kept the dictatorship in suspense until they managed to silence him.

Berríos was not just Berríos; he was also Hermes Castro and Tulio Orellana, two names or "aliases" he used during his time with the DINA. The chemist in charge of producing Sarin gas likely died murdered for knowing too much. That clandestine transit that filled him with pride at one point was also his undoing.

After leaving Pinochet's secret police, the chemist began his own path to hell. Willing to rebuild his life, seeking to start a business or dabbling in the sale of narcotics, without success, Berríos ended up succumbing to the bohemian lifestyle of the eighties and its dangerous characters.

Thus, unsure of being alive the next day, he began to record his personal conversations with an unusual gallery of characters, from drug traffickers to moneylenders, looking for who knows what evidence in a state of absolute desperation.

-The first thing that catches one's attention is precisely the discovery. How did you come across this unpublished material?

At the beginning of the year, four former DINA agents were prosecuted for the murder of the Santiago real estate registrar, Renato León Zenteno, whom the DINA killed with Sarin gas. Information emerged that Berríos's wife, Gladys Schmeisser, had handed over several tapes to the justice system in the 90s where her husband recorded himself.

That is when the search for that archival material began, first trying to find the source who had them and then doing the work of building trust to obtain them. For several months at the CIP, we immersed ourselves in the police file of the case (more than ten volumes) until we obtained the tapes.

After listening to them, we made the decision that this material had to become a podcast, because it was the natural space where these tapes should be heard.

-As in every story of villains, there are always pursuers. What was the true contribution of the police officer Nelson Jofré in this story?

Nelson Jofré was part of a team of detectives from the Investigative Police who, at the end of 1991, began looking for Eugenio Berríos to bring him to testify before Judge Adolfo Bañados, who was then investigating the assassination of Orlando Letelier, which occurred in the United States in 1976.

In the course of that search, Jofré interrogated the chemist's inner circle—his parents, his wife, and his friends—and every time he spoke with them, he recorded those conversations to later transfer that information into the statements. Those tapes, plus the ones Berríos recorded, gave us a very broad perspective of what happened before and after his disappearance.

-A lot has been said about Berríos, there are even books about his life. What do you think is the importance of these tapes in the reconstruction of the character?

The first thing is that the tapes allow us to enter the head of a character who gave very few statements. I would say they even function as a diary, because there is a lot of intimacy in those accounts.

This archival material was fundamental to reconstructing the history of the biochemist in all its dimensions, starting, of course, with his macabre time with the DINA and his links to terrorist groups like Patria y Libertad.

The second thing is that Berríos was a person who kept secrets, some of the darkest of the dictatorship, and that is why he had been summoned to testify. These tapes allow us to glimpse what Berríos might have testified, because there are a couple of tapes where he talks with some acquaintances about what he did at the Lo Curro house together with Michael Townley.

That is to say, these tapes are the only record of a part of the secrets that the chemist kept. The rest we will never know.

-Why do you think Berríos recorded his conversations? What is behind that decision?

There is no concrete answer. That question arose for us after listening to the tapes, and we have interpretations about it. The one that convinces us the most is that Berríos recorded himself to keep a record of his actions because he felt persecuted by several people.

Among them, for example, a group of moneylenders, to whom Berríos owed a lot of money and whom he was quite afraid of. One of them, in fact, kidnapped him at the beginning of 1991. The other reason he recorded himself is that he began to link up with a network of Peruvian drug traffickers who were beginning to operate in Chile, whom he wanted to denounce to the DEA in exchange for them taking him out of the country as a protected witness, to avoid his debts.

In the end, what Berríos wanted was that: to leave Chile so as not to pay.

The story of Berríos seems articulated by a descent into hell. A merit of the podcast is precisely to relate that journey of no return. How did you reconstruct the circle of friends and parties that surrounded the former DINA chemist?

Everything is reconstructed based on the tapes, which account for precisely that: that Eugenio Berríos was losing control of his life in a sustained manner, and that not only left him in economic ruin, but in a structural decadence.

That is what the podcast develops in the first three chapters: the dizzying fall. Sometimes one believes that there is no more room for the character to surprise, but there is always more darkness.

"Saving a man for what he knows"

-There is another interesting point, which is the abandonment of the character after working for the DINA and the constant paranoia about a possible revenge against him. Berríos even says he cannot explain how he is still alive. What do you think of this feeling that permeates the last years of his life?

Until he disappeared in October 1991, Eugenio Berríos was not worried about what the DINA, or what remained of the ashes of the dictatorship, could do to him. He had survived the entire decade of the 80s without that being a problem, even though he was a person who did not hesitate to tell any stranger everything he had done for the regime.

The matter got out of control precisely when they called him to testify. It was then that Army intelligence had no doubt that Berríos, who was a civilian who did not respect any pact of silence, would tell everything he knew to a judge. And they made him disappear in a cover-up operation that included other agents who also kept secrets.

-After participating in the DINA, Berríos's life plunges down a complete slide, trying to rebuild his economic life, spending more than he should, inventing businesses, and even ending up living with his parents again. Tell me about that dark period.

After leaving the DINA, Berríos was left without money. He was a person accustomed to "living large": he liked to eat in restaurants, invite friends, go out partying with them, and consume alcohol and cocaine without restraint.

How did he finance that? Mainly with borrowed money, because he failed in every one of the ventures he tried to carry out, among them a boldo extract that he marketed as a tonic for gastric problems or rosehip oil.

His debacle reached such a point that, trying to escape from the usurers, at the end of the 80s he went to live in Viña del Mar, in an apartment that his father paid for, and then returned to Santiago to live with him.

-In that same stage, Berríos gets involved in drug trafficking, begins to manufacture methamphetamines, and ends up contacting the DEA to become an informant. It is these facts that speak of his desperation and his failed strategy of jumping on any "bus."

Yes, the DEA was his last card. In his parents' house, Berríos began to manufacture amphetamines, in a laboratory he installed in the basement. He also dedicated himself to the retail sale of cocaine. In that business, he linked up with a network of Peruvian narcos who were beginning to settle in Chile and whom he tried to denounce to the DEA, on the condition that they take him out of the country as a protected witness.

Of course, it did not work out for him. In the tapes from that period, he is heard fearful and desperate.

-What was the most difficult part of the work, and what value does it have as an experience to work with unpublished material in the framework of the 50 years since the coup?

It was a complex process, due to the timing, but once we had access to the tapes, everything went more or less expeditiously. That happened, in part, because we had to make decisions prior to writing the scripts, which, in a way, were correct.

For example, how far should we tell the story of Berríos? The answer was always in the tapes: tell it as far as the tapes allowed. Why? Because that was the most novel material we had; it is what you want to hear.

-And what would be the most novel part of the material?

I would say that the most relevant thing is that these tapes allow us to tell the story of Eugenio Berríos with nuances, intimacy, and quite a few layers of depth, far from the caricature. The result is a profile of a sinister man, which allows us to explain the macabre practices of the dictatorship, such as killing with Sarin gas, but also that of a person surrounded by a circle of criminals and charlatans with whom he frequented the bohemian Santiago of the eighties, his decadence, at times even with a touch of sinister humor.

And then, in democracy, the tapes allow us to tell how Augusto Pinochet, through the Army Intelligence Battalion, tried to cover up and silence any glimmer of justice that could end with him in jail. In the end, when Berríos is missing and the police officer Nelson Jofré is looking for him, one asks oneself: why save Eugenio Berríos?

And the answer is contradictory: Berríos is a man who kept secrets about the most lethal acts of the dictatorship; it is not saving him just because, it is saving a man for what he knows.

by Claudio Pizarro

Source: eldesconcierto.cl, September 17, 2023

The close friendship of Aldo Duque with Eugenio Berríos, the DINA biochemist

In the 80s, the now candidate for deputy—and formerly a pre-candidate for the Santiago municipality—was very close to the former agent of the dictatorship and, in fact, was one of the last people to see him alive in Chile, at the end of 1991. Berríos's skull was found in 1993 on a beach in Uruguay.

Amidst the questions raised by the candidacy for deputy of lawyer Aldo Duque, a well-known representative of narcos, not a few have recalled that in the past he was very linked to Eugenio Berríos, the biochemist who developed Sarin gas for the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).

It is worth remembering that, after being dismissed from the DINA, Berríos dedicated himself to drug trafficking, trying to develop a new type of cocaine hydrochloride without odor, in order to make it undetectable to drug-sniffing dogs.

In 1991, when the investigation began in Chile into the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt in Washington (a crime perpetrated by the DINA in 1976), the PDI officers in charge of it soon understood that a key witness was Berríos, given that he belonged to the "Quetropillán" Brigade of the DINA.

Although the latter finally opted to assassinate Allende's former chancellor with a car bomb, the first option—as confessed by former agent Mariana Callejas—was to kill him with the Sarin gas that Berríos produced and which they kept inside a Chanel No. 5 perfume bottle.

In that context, at the end of 1991, military intelligence personnel clandestinely took him out of Chile and transferred him to Uruguay, where he ended up being murdered.

In the sentence for his homicide, in fact, Duque's statements about Berríos are reproduced, in which he indicated having met him in 1986, when he worked at the Third Military Prosecutor's Office of Santiago, to which Berríos "arrived with his partner, named Viviana Egaña, to intercede for some pastry chefs from his aunt's business who had been involved in a fight; they were granted their freedom and he was very grateful for it, which was the beginning of a friendship he had with them for several years," the ruling indicates, in reference to the workers of the pastry shop that Berríos's aunt had on Carmen Street, a place where the biochemist resided for a long time.

Viviana Egaña Bonnefoy, better known in the nightlife scene as "La Peyito" and whose original name was Viviana Zurita, subsequently became Duque's partner, but the sentence does not allude to this, nor to the knowledge the lawyer had regarding Berríos's repressive activities, which does appear in the book Crimen imperfecto (Imperfect Crime), by investigative journalist Jorge Molina Sanhueza, in which a testimony from Aldo Duque appears regarding this: "On one occasion, he showed me in his own room two black tubes, one meter fifty long and about 15 centimeters in diameter.

He told me that with these tubes he manufactured Sarin gas. Then he showed me a very small ampoule with a yellowish liquid inside. Then he said that nothing could happen to him. By doing just like this, he continued, he liquidated any person. I asked him then if it wasn't easier to kill someone with a firearm, and he replied that that was for common thugs."

In the podcast "Berríos, los casetes secretos del químico de Pinochet" (Berríos, the secret tapes of Pinochet's chemist), Duque recounted that his friend was an alcoholic and a subject who liked to live large: "He wore camel hair coats.

He liked to dress very elegantly, silk ties, shirts with his name on them, spick and span, always very elegant... shoes that made your eyes hurt from how shiny they were. And whenever he arrived at a restaurant, for example, he always invited everyone to eat—I'm talking about a table of seven, eight, nine people—and 'bring this, bring that, bring that.' And without a cent.

So I knew he had cashed a check 20 minutes ago, half an hour ago, at a brutal interest rate; the usurers had him fried, but he was a big shot."

In the sentence for the biochemist's homicide, handed down in 2010 by visiting minister Alejandro Madrid, it is also recorded that the last time he was seen with Duque, in 1991, at the corner of Huérfanos and Amunátegui, Berríos told him that "they were driving him crazy" and that he was going to leave the country, adding that he had a problem with checks, to which the lawyer recommended that he go to the Sixth Criminal Court to settle his situation.

In a subsequent statement, Aldo Duque—whose candidacy for the Lower House was defended by the Chile Vamos presidential candidate, Evelyn Matthei—specified to Judge Madrid that that last meeting was in September or October 1991, and that on that occasion he invited him to lunch at the market, a moment in which he told him that the DINA, the CNI, and the FBI were looking for him and that he would leave the country using an "alias," that is, a false name, just as it happened, after which his trail was lost, until in 1993 his skull appeared on a beach near Montevideo.

Source: elmostrador.cl, October 21, 2025