Homicide was the argument put forward by the visiting judge Alejandro Madrid when, in December 2009—one week before the presidential runoff between Sebastián Piñera and Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle—he indicted six people for the alleged assassination of the former President during the military regime.

This Sunday marks 30 years since his passing, and for this reason, we sought to determine how much progress the magistrate has made since those indictments in his mission to settle whether his death—following several operations for ailments derived from a hiatal hernia—is the first political assassination in our history.

It should be recalled that the investigation is supported by expert reports (questioned at the time), which concluded that Frei was inoculated several times with small amounts of thallium and mustard gas. «La Segunda» gained access to the latest volumes of the case file: therein lie Madrid’s efforts to narrow down the teams that attended to Frei Montalva at the Clínica Santa María ; the creation of the CNI telephone wiretapping office; and the time he dedicated to "judicializing" statements already taken by the police.

The room at República 475 If it is true that Frei’s death was a political objective that the Augusto Pinochet regime wanted to eliminate, Madrid decided to delve into the work that intelligence agencies carried out regarding the former President.

For this reason, an important part of the task over these years has been to unravel the telephone wiretapping system of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and the surveillance of the former President.

One problem he faces is that people related in some way have died by the dozens over the last 30 years (starting with the director of the CNI at the time of Frei’s death, General Humberto Gordon). Nevertheless, part of the history is beginning to come to light: In May 2011, retired Captain Jorge Calvo Portales—who worked at the CTC before 1973 and later in security matters for the government—narrated to the magistrate how the CNI wiretapping office was created, the same one that today stands dismantled in a semi-basement of the mansion at República 475.

There, machines still remain with their wiring pulled out, such as a surprising two-meter-high telephone wiretapping console, still with… 4,025 visible numbers that were "tapped." In 1974, the general manager of CTC, Colonel Sergio Moller Escala, unified all civilian guards under a single command, and the company "installed a private exchange of its own" at the CNI headquarters on Calle República, Calvo narrated.

He recalls that "I was asked for a person to attend to the exchange that had been installed in República, and that it be a person of trust, discreet, and with the knowledge to install, repair, and maintain and replace the respective extensions." The person selected: Luis Vargas Vargas, who came to report to Major Vianel Valdivieso.

They kept them on cassettes How did this unit operate? The former CNI civilian employee Jaime Roberto Bratti Cornejo provided key clues in August: "The telephone wiretapping section had a liaison with the CTC.

The person who carried out the telephone interceptions was Luis Vargas… (the section) was in charge of Lieutenant Jorge de Osso Bravo, and was composed of Vargas, Edison Fernández Sanhueza, Manuel Cataldo Acuña, among others whom I do not remember," he maintained before the magistrate. "Among them, they took turns listening, where they recorded all the intercepted conversations and (…) the cassettes with the recordings were collected… once the tapes were transcribed, they were taken to Commander Vizcaya," added Bratti.

To carry out the telephone interception, he asserted that the division commander would give Jorge Calvo a telephone number… Changing explanations Retired Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Sebastián Vizcaya Donoso testified in the case (he was the former head of the CNI’s Engineering and Telephone Wiretapping department).

He acknowledged that "there was a telephone monitoring office under my dependency, of a secret nature, and that it was not within the organic structure of the CNI," but added that "I do not remember having ordered the monitoring of any telephone belonging to Frei Montalva." And who told him which numbers to listen to? "The requests reached me through the Chief of Staff (of the CNI) in an envelope with the information of the telephone numbers that needed to be monitored… I would hand them over unopened to the person in charge of telephone monitoring, who was Luis Vargas." If it were true that Vizcaya did not read the requests from his superiors—as he claims—and forwarded them in a sealed envelope to Vargas, this latter character, who is mentioned time and again, could have clarified whether Frei Montalva was on the lists of those intercepted… But he died in 2004. With his passing, the investigation had to consider the superiors of the former head of the Engineering and Wiretapping department. Retired Brigadier General Sergio Mario Urrutia Francke, after Christmas 2009, told the police that he was Chief of Staff of the CNI in 1981 (until 1983). He ratified that Telecommunications depended on Vizcaya, who allegedly ordered the monitoring to be carried out to deliver them to the deputy director of the CNI, Colonel Guillermo Rivera Toro. Urrutia Francke would testify again this year: "In the CNI, there was also a Communications department in charge of Colonel Vizcaya. To the General Staff, which was under my charge, transcripts of telephone monitoring that had been carried out by that department would arrive (…) The General Staff only received the information and analyzed it… and made a report that was sent directly to the deputy director (of the CNI) and then by him to the director." What happened to the transcripts or the playback of the wiretaps? "When a specific job had to be done, for which it was necessary to use monitoring transcripts, this material was handed to me by General Rivera, who was the deputy director, to produce political intelligence," he concluded. Meanwhile, Vizcaya testified again, taking a turn: He denied ordering wiretaps; he stated that his task was "listening to most of the news radio stations and TV and Radio Moscow, and transcripts of national and foreign news were made. We did not carry out interception of communications on the internal level, for example, of opposition politicians." And he added that "Luis Vargas was attached to the CNI, he was from the CTC, he did not depend on the engineering directorate, he was not my subordinate." Agent: "Wiretaps were carried out on Frei" Contradictions aside, the police reached the conclusion that the former President was being listened to. One of the agents spoke: "When I was second-in-command to Vásquez Chahuán, I had knowledge that telephone wiretaps were being carried out on members of the PDC, including Frei Montalva," revealed retired Major Patricio Padilla Villena last June, who belonged to the Purén Brigade of the DINA starting in 1977, a unit in charge of Captain Manuel Vásquez Chahuán. That was the group that dedicated special attention to the DC, for example, through "an infiltrator, a leader with the surname Galleguillos, belonging to the CUT, who always met with Vásquez Chahuán, who would pay him money for his information."

Source: La Segunda, January 16, 2012

The complete list of DINA agents

The complete list of DINA agents (Document delivered by the Army to the Courts of Justice)

The following is the complete list of DINA agents, which was delivered a few years ago by the Army to the Courts of Justice. The text was kept under lock and key for a long period, but time leaked it to human rights lawyers and a journalist specialized in this matter.

This document, which has never been published in a print medium, has reached Clarín from the desk of a journalist who has followed multiple cases of human rights violations during the dictatorship. The document, therefore, is completely authentic. It concerns more than a thousand agents, some prosecuted, others convicted, and not a few already deceased. [List of names omitted for brevity]

Source: elclarin.cl, July 8, 2013