On Thursday, November 12, at 11 in the morning, Alfredo Ovalle, then president of the Sonami, received CIPER at the headquarters of the trade association. We asked for his version regarding this investigation into the DINA’s secret funds, which links him as a partner in domestic and foreign companies to the financial chief of the repressive agency: the former Navy officer, Humberto Olavarría Aranguren.

Ovalle also appears associated with Guillermo Endara, former president of Panama (1990-1994), who established multiple DINA companies in his country to finance Operation Condor. Ovalle listened and refused to speak on the subject.

He gave his response seven days later when he unexpectedly resigned from the presidency of the Sonami, nine months before finishing his term, citing personal reasons. This is the investigation that unveils an unpublished chapter about the men and companies that financed the repression in Chile.

May 14, 1992. Once again, General (ret.) Manuel Contreras and the visiting minister Adolfo Bañados are face to face. The former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) had come prepared to continue denying any participation by himself and the security agency in the assassination of Orlando Letelier.

He was unaware that the judge had a surprise for him: a thick file of DINA company deeds, notarized, which the author of this investigation had delivered to the judge before publishing them (*1). It was then that Contreras was forced to put away his script.

“At the beginning, the DINA did not maintain checking accounts in dollars. Later on, yes, perhaps some months after its constitution… I do not remember the bank in the United States, but I have personally maintained an account at the Riggs Bank in Washington from which I withdrew 25 thousand dollars, a contribution from my North American friends for my defense in the extradition case,” he declared.

“Regarding the deeds that are being shown to me, I acknowledge that Hubert Fuchs and Marco Acuña Ramos were related to the DINA; the former was the manager of the fishing company for which I was the coordinator and in which Humberto Olavarría provided me with advice from the moment he was also the head of economic intelligence for the DINA,” Contreras acknowledged.

The head of the DINA’s financial apparatus, Humberto Olavarría Aranguren, a former Navy officer and friend of Contreras, has never been questioned. He has continued doing business in his hometown, Valparaíso, where his office is located very close to the courts.

Olavarría did not have a significant business history when, in 1976, he partnered with lawyers Alfredo Ovalle Rodríguez and Raimundo Langlois Vicuña, with whom he participated in a network of numerous companies (See chronology), most of them created while he controlled the entire financial apparatus of the DINA.

The lawyers Ovalle and Langlois have had only one setback in their business career. The former was imprisoned for 42 days in 1982, due to the intervention of the Banco de Fomento del Bío Bío, of which he was president and of which the brothers Humberto and Mario Olavarría were also partners.

After being dismissed, Ovalle continued doing business with his former classmate from the Law School of the Universidad Católica, Raimundo Langlois, until they became a successful duo in mining investment in the 90s.

In April 1978, together with Gustavo Valenzuela Carey and the Constructora Foram y Compañía Limitada, they formed their first company in the sector: Inversiones Mineras Foram Limitada. Through this company, they would later partner with Humberto Olavarría for an ambitious real estate project in Concepción.

This would be followed in a first stage by the Sociedad Inmobiliaria Cabildo Limitada (1978), the Sociedad Legal Minera Las Cenizas Uno de Cabildo, Inversiones Mineras Norte Limitada (June 1981), the Compañía Minera Las Luces Limitada, and Minera Oro Andino Limitada, in partnership with María Teresa Cañas Pinochet, Pinochet’s favorite niece.

Both have recounted that it all began when they acquired the Las Cenizas mine in an Enami tender along with other partners. Whatever the chronological itinerary may be, the truth is that in 2005, Alfredo Ovalle seemed to have reached the pinnacle when he was elected president of the Sociedad Nacional de Minería (Sonami).

But he still had one step left. A year later, he assumed the position of the top leader of Chilean business, at the head of the Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio (CPC). His first activity as president of the business owners was to attend the funeral of Augusto Pinochet, on the same day of his election.

In the multiple profiles and interviews published about Ovalle, his relationship with the head of the DINA’s financial apparatus, Humberto Olavarría, was never mentioned. That is why his surprise when he received CIPER in his Sonami office last November 12.

Ovalle listened and refused to speak for this investigation about the DINA’s secret funds. Seven days later, he unexpectedly announced his resignation from the presidency of the mining trade association. “I have reached the conviction that I have an important debt to my family, who has accompanied and supported me in this trade union work all these years,” was the explanation he gave to the board in a letter.

A fishing holding company of extermination

Humberto Olavarría’s businesses started with a low profile. In the 60s, the frigate captain partnered with his brother Mario—father of the current UDI mayor of Colina, Mario Olavarría—to form Olavarría Hermanos Limitada and later the company Viviendas Económicas Traslaviña Limitada.

In March 1973, he turned toward international trade and, together with the Concepción lawyer Aníbal Bórquez Pincheira, founded Cinemaphon Limitada. He also served during those years as vice president of RCA Víctor and recorded a strange business foray into Brazil during the Allende era.

Once the coup d’état was executed, Humberto Olavarría’s life changed. The DINA, created by his friend Manuel Contreras, would open the door to power for him by becoming the head of its financial apparatus.

There is no public trace of his participation in the first company created by the DINA, but there is in its development. On January 4, 1974—when the DINA did not yet have legal existence but did have the power granted by Pinochet since he created it on November 12, 1973—before notary Andrés Rubio Flores, Servicios Industriales Villar y Reyes Ltda. was born, whose trade name was Dinaservice Ltda.

On February 12, 1974, the constitution of the company with which the DINA paid its agents’ salaries appeared in the Official Gazette. Its capital: 200 thousand escudos; its partners: the Army officer Lautaro Villar Requena (*2) and Leonor Reyes Herrera.

Its purpose: “provision of all kinds of industrial services and, especially, facilitating specialized mechanical services to third parties, providing specialized personnel for any kind of industrial work, and, in general, the provision of all kinds of services that are directly or indirectly related to industrial activity.”

There was some truth in those purposes. The DINA, in Contreras’s plan, sought to become a great industry. But not of services. And in the rush, the lawyers made a mistake that they had to rectify in the Official Gazette of February 14. Leonor, one of the partners of Dinaservices, was actually Leonardo Reyes Herrera, an Air Force officer (*3).

Financing the repression inside and outside the borders of Chile was the task assumed by Olavarría. But his power would be consolidated with the creation of the Lincoyán Brigade (Economic Investigations), which in practice would become an espionage detachment for the private miseries of the regime’s businessmen and civilians, data that were thickening the files that Contreras managed to exert pressure at moments of urgency.

On January 25, 1974, before the same notary mentioned above, Andrés Rubio Flores, the first operation was carried out so that the main fishing companies of San Antonio, a fiefdom of Manuel Contreras (he was director of the School of Military Engineers of Tejas Verdes in San Antonio), would legally pass into the hands of the DINA, which already had them under its control.

The deed signed that day left the Compañía Pesquera Arauco, represented by Hubert Fuchs, and Productos Congelados del Mar, represented by Ramón Gutiérrez Burgos, as the only partners of the Compañía Atunera de Chile Limitada, whose new capital was 500 thousand escudos, of which 495 thousand were contributed by Pesquera Arauco.

It was not a coincidence that on the same day the DINA had legal existence, by a decree signed by Pinochet (June 18, 1974), the new board of directors of the Empresa Pesquera de Chile (EPECH) was constituted in the port of San Antonio, headed by Manuel Contreras, and of which Hubert Fuchs was already manager.

The trust placed in Fuchs was not strange. A retired Navy man, he was manager of Savory and served as a link for the relationship between the DINA and the Standard Electric company.

In 1975, Contreras would initiate the first actions for the coordination of the secret agencies of the Southern Cone dictatorships. His need for funds increased. In March of that year, the DINA’s financial network was installed in an office in the heart of Providencia—Doctor Charlin No. 1475—acquiring a new impulse under the leadership of Olavarría, who already had checking accounts in dollars, such as the one at the Manufacturer Hannover Trust.

The grand premiere of Operation Condor was in Santiago. On November 26, 1975, Contreras gathered the heads of security agencies from Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil. All expenses were paid by the DINA.

To set the international anti-subversive network in motion, millions of dollars and a screen activity were required, in which the financial apparatus and the DINA’s Foreign Department would have a key role (*4).

The Empresa Pesquera Chile (EPECH) would provide a part of the new needs. Shortly before the Condor meeting in Chile, on November 14, 1975, and as always before notary Andrés Rubio Flores, the total transfer of EPECH into the hands of the State was finalized, that is, under the control of the DINA.

Productos Congelados del Mar Ltda. ceded and transferred all of its rights in EPECH to the Sociedad Agrícola Corfo Ltda., upon the condonation of the debt that its owners had with the state entity.

But the design was missing a piece. This was executed on February 28, 1976, when Hubert Fuchs, representing Pesquera Arauco, transferred all of its assets in the Compañía Atunera de Chile (99%) to EPECH, of which he was manager. The three fishing companies with all their ships and millions of dollars in assets remained under the guardianship of Manuel Contreras.

It was exactly what Contreras required in those days of close ties with the far-right terrorist groups of Italy (Stefano Delle Chiaie and Pierluigi Concutelli, of the Italian neo-fascist movement Avanguardia Nazionale); with the Novo brothers and Virgilio Paz of the Cuban Nationalist Movement (MNC); the Milicia of Argentina and Vlado Seran, a former Croatian officer and one of the main leaders of the Ustascia movement.

Almost all of them had problems with the justice systems of their countries and had to be provided with money and refuge in Chile in exchange for the new armed wing that the DINA deployed abroad.

Money was also what he needed for his newly created Mulchén Brigade, under the command of Captain Guillermo Salinas, destined to carry out missions of eliminating troublesome individuals, as proven by judges Montiglio, Solís, and Madrid. For this, work was done day and night in the DINA’s laboratory.

“Towards the end of 1975, I dedicated myself almost exclusively to the development of Sarin, the completion of the laboratory here in my house, and the planning of similar products like Soman and Tabun, in addition to products of extreme toxicity such as Clostridium botulinum, Saxitoxin, and tetrodotoxin,” Michael Townley would confess.

Ovalle’s constructions

Before becoming a businessman, the lawyer Alfredo Ovalle was a substitute for the well-known Santiago notary Enrique Morgan Torres. Until December 1967, when he abandoned deeds for business and joined the construction company Foram.

Four years later, on August 19, 1971, he acquired 10% of Foram Chilena Empresa constructora de Viviendas Económicas, assuming the role of one of its three administrators. Notary Enrique Morgan, the same one for whom he had been a substitute, was chosen by Ovalle to modify the company on May 31, 1974.

Representing G. Valenzuela y Compañía Foram Chilena Limitada, Ovalle signed the capital increase and the designation of its new administrators: Gustavo Valenzuela Rodríguez, Alfredo Ovalle, Raimundo Langlois, and Alberto Miranda.

Five months later, on October 4, before the same notary Morgan, who would certify almost all of the multiple movements of Ovalle and his partner Langlois, the new company Ingeniería Foram Proinco Limitada was constituted.

Ovalle appeared representing G. Valenzuela y Compañía Foram Chilena Limitada and his new partners were the engineers Patricio Ruiz Tirado, Antonio Delpiano Puelma, and Daniel Lowener Maron, of the company Proyectos de Ingeniería de Consulta Limitada, whose headquarters were located at Calle Belgrado No. 9, a few meters from the DINA’s general headquarters (Belgrado No. 11).

Shortly after, on January 15, 1975, Humberto Olavarría gave shape—together with his brother and the Concepción lawyer Aníbal Bórquez Pincheira—to a company that would multiply: Sociedad Inmobiliaria Regional Limitada. Having started with a capital of 15 thousand escudos, seven months later, a new partner entered the scene, Lionel Raby Laemmermann, and it increased its assets to $77,200.

The years 75 and 76 were of intense activity for the DINA and also for Olavarría. But for the purposes of this story, the next business milestone takes place on August 18, 1976, in the midst of the heyday of the agency headed by Contreras.

That day, notary Morgan was a witness to the first public partnership between Humberto Olavarría, Alfredo Ovalle, and Raimundo Langlois. The three contributed 75%—in equal parts—of the $50,000 with which Comercio Exterior Bío Bío Limitada began its activities.

The rest was contributed by Agustín Benavente Ariztía (a former Navy man and later manager of the Lo Valledor Slaughterhouse) and G. Valenzuela y Compañía Foram Chilena Limitada. Its administrators: Olavarría, Ovalle, and Langlois.

Twelve days later, Morgan had to assist them for the constitution of a new company. On September 4, 1976, Inversiones y Comercial Sur Limitada (Incosur) was created with an initial capital of $150,000 contributed by Humberto and Mario Olavarría Aranguren (11.11% each); Alfredo Ovalle Rodríguez (12.49%), Raimundo Langlois Vicuña (12.48%), the also lawyer Máximo Montero Labbé (12.48%); Ovalle’s partner, Patricio Ruiz Tirado (15.94%); Alejandro Bustos Josseau (13.28%), and the partner of Olavarría and of several DINA businesses, Lionel Raby Laemmermann (11.11%).

The partners already had a plan in mind to multiply the funds.

It would be the same notary Morgan who would certify the new business foray of Incosur. On October 13, 1976, the company Comercial y Agroindustrial Octava Región Limitada (Agroctava Ltda.) was constituted.

Partners: Fernando and José Luis Giner Izquierdo, María Teresa Ossa Madrid, Patricio Ossa Pretot, Patricia Ossa Madrid, in addition to Mario Olavarría Aranguren and Alejandro Bustos Josseau, both representing Incosur.

Guillermo Endara enters the scene

When the partnership of Humberto Olavarría and Alfredo Ovalle was made official in August 1976, a maelstrom prevailed in the DINA’s foreign financial apparatus. The key man in its secret structuring was the Panamanian lawyer Guillermo Endara Gallimany.

On April 22, 1976, Endara gave the go-ahead to the first company of Contreras’s Operation Condor. It was in the same days that, as justice in the United States and Chile accredited, sarin gas, manufactured by the chemist Eugenio Berríos in the Lo Curro laboratory, was tested successfully, eliminating a person whose identity is still unknown (*5).

Edice Investment Inc was the name chosen by Endara Gallimany himself for the company that he himself headed, to later give full power of representation to the DINA lawyer, Marcos Acuña, an Army officer on active duty.

Four days later, two new Panamanian companies entered the network: South Fishing Corporation and Entrecostera Panatlántica, both presided over by Endara and with identical powers of representation for the lawyer Acuña.

Three other Panamanian lawyers participated in their constitution: Hernán Delgado Quintero, José Menalco Solís (former Minister of Finance and Treasury and former president of that country’s National Security Council), and Ceferino A.

Espino. Endara’s firm had specialized in the constitution of companies of dubious origin. The strange thing is that, in these cases, their role as resident lawyers had drifted into that of shareholders of a company that conferred power to a foreigner.

None of the complaints that circulated at the time about the trio prevented Endara from becoming president of his country in 1990 and Delgado from participating since 1982 and for many years in the appointments of Panama’s main judicial body (Public Ministry), becoming an unassailable power.

The business fever that in 1976 shook the DINA’s financial apparatus in Panama was also growing in Chile. On May 12, Hubert Fuchs, manager and legal representative of Pesquera Chile and Pesquera Arauco; together with Marcos Acuña, the “representative” of Guillermo Endara, created the Compañía de Inversiones Navarino Limitada.

This time Humberto Olavarría did not hide his imprint. In the deed, he appears as an arbitrator.

Andrés Rubio’s notary office had to enable a special private room because the next day, May 13, the same Fuchs, Acuña, and Olavarría formed Compañía de Inversiones Navarino Limitada y Cia C.P.A (a limited partnership, which is divided into shares).

Something serious happened in those days of May 1976 between the men who kept the secret of the DINA’s finances. Because until today it is not known how the lawyer Marcos Acuña, Endara’s representative, died in a strange accident.

He died on May 23 after being transferred to the Clínica Santa Lucía, for the exclusive use of the DINA. The same one where months later Corporal Manuel Leyton would be murdered with sarin, whose perpetrators are already convicted in the first instance. But Acuña’s death has not been investigated.

Apparently, Contreras was not willing for anyone to hinder his plans. The abrupt death of Acuña caused the head of the DINA, with the help of Olavarría, to restructure his financial network by adding three new companies in just five days, all constituted in Andrés Rubio’s notary office and with the same partners: Hubert Fuchs Asenjo and Salvador Lisboa Escobar.

On June 24, it was the turn of the modification of the Compañía de Inversiones Navarino Limitada. Two days later, they stamped their signature on the deed of the Importadora y Exportadora E.I.D. Limitada (E.I.D.

Ltda.), to give way on June 29 to the creation of the Sociedad Servicios Electrónicos Limitada (Selectronic Ltda.) and Industrial y Comercial de Refrigeración Limitada (Infricom Ltda.), whose address was established in Concepción. The arbitrator: Humberto Olavarría.

The last company created by Contreras and Olavarría in those days of 1976 was in an unexplored sector: agriculture. On June 30, Salvador Lisboa Escobar and Federico Guerra signed the deed—certainly in Andrés Rubio’s notary office—of Agrícola Agro Claro.

A major problem remained to be solved. With the death of Marcos Acuña, several Panamanian companies were rendered useless. Contreras this time did not resort to an intermediary. On July 1, 1976, Endara revoked the powers conferred to Marcos Acuña to grant them to the head of the DINA.

On that trip, he was accompanied. One of the versions collected for this investigation indicates that he traveled with Olavarría. Another, that it was with a lawyer who knew Endara well. The mystery remains.

Guillermo Endara’s secret Chilean link

In several interrogations, Manuel Contreras denied again and again knowing both those companies and the origin of their money. When Adolfo Bañados showed him the deeds one by one, there was a great silence.

Then his answers were heard: “Yes, the Empresa Pesquera Chile absorbed Pesquera Arauco… The government entrusted me to arrange what was necessary for me to take control… The directors were appointed by the government… On some occasions, I remember having granted money that was needed for intelligence operations in Argentina… Some—like Servicios Electrónicos—could have served to develop an electronic warfare project… Edice Investment Inc Corporation is a company that was formed in Panama by order of the government in order to use it abroad…”

What was never known, neither at that time nor later, is who had made the complicit and trusted link between Guillermo Endara and Humberto Olavarría and Manuel Contreras. Much was said about the CIA, but in the end, silence prevailed.

It was Guillermo Endara himself who gave a clue almost 20 years ago. In an interview he granted to the newspaper La Tercera on January 30, 1990, he said that “during post-graduate studies in New York in the 60s, he explained the Panamanian corporation system to a group of three Chilean lawyers (whom he did not identify due to professional secrecy), who used this means to take capital out of Chile during the Allende government and also during the military regime.”

One of those Chilean lawyers was Alfredo Ovalle, who took specialization courses in comparative law in the United States in the early 60s, where he coincided with Guillermo Endara. Subsequently, both would strengthen the relationship until they became partners.

It was the mining businessman who made the link between Endara and Humberto Olavarría for the purposes that the former president of Panama himself explained to La Tercera.

Endara’s services would not only serve to hide DINA funds. They would also use them for other purposes of Manuel Contreras, Humberto Olavarría, and Ovalle himself and his partners.

Under the Endara umbrella and model, the DINA under the leadership of Olavarría would form new companies in 1976, the year of greatest international terrorist and also financial activity. And of much disorder.

Inversiones Navarino would have three different versions; in one of them, all the partners, except Fuchs and Salvador Lisboa, sign with false identities (Rolando Gálvez appears, for example, a name under which the officer Vianel Valdivieso hides).

In another, the Compañía de Inversiones Navarino Limitada y Compañía CPA, represented by Hubert Fuchs, buys all the rights of José Germain Jara in Germain y Lisboa Limitada. To these are added Comercial Caronte, Complejo Terranova, Dynamic Tour… Of all of them, the author of this report obtained copies of their duly legalized deeds.

Alfredo Ovalle also formed Panamanian companies, and several of them, which he has maintained with the same reserve as his relationship with Endara, the lawyer who, upon assuming the presidency of Panama, declared a personal fortune of 17 million dollars.

It is not strange then that in June 1991, the powerful American columnist Jack Anderson decided to delve into Endara’s covert activities. And he recalled that in April 1991, the Panamanian press obtained a copy of a 1990 report from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA, the U.S. agency that directs the fight against drug trafficking) that associated several businesses created by Endara with a drug smuggling operation in the south of the State of Florida.

Endara denied any knowledge about the “extracurricular activities” of those companies, noting that he had resigned from them in 1987 “on the advice of a friend.”

It would not be the first time that his name would appear in a DEA dossier. Another similar one carried out after the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 was made public in 1990, involving the Interbanco de Panamá, of which Endara was one of the owners and vice president, in the laundering of money from a Colombian cartel.

A deposit for US$12 million from a former head of the Medellín Cartel and another for US$6.2 million in loans to a Spaniard related to two cartel ringleaders were the evidence exhibited. The bank had to close its doors. Endara continued his path.

Ovalle knew Interbanco de Panamá well. On January 3, 1979, the company Inversiones y Comercial Arauca Limitada was constituted. The partners: Humberto Olavarría and Raimundo Langlois, both representing Inversiones y Comercial Sur Limitada (Incosur) with 50% of the capital; and Máximo Montero Labbé, for Interoceanic Investment Corporation, a Panamanian company, domiciled at Ricardo Arias No. 9, Panama, with the other 50%.

Purpose: all kinds of investments in real estate, furniture, securities, and other companies. On its board of directors, Interoceanic Investment Corp. designated Guillermo Ronderos, president of Interbanco de Panamá, of which Endara was vice president, a management for which he was accused by the DEA of money laundering.

Inversiones y Comercial Sur Limitada appointed Langlois and Olavarría.

By then, Ovalle—who was simultaneously vice president of the Chilean Chamber of Construction (1976-1979)—had accumulated a long history of companies in Chile and abroad with Humberto Olavarría. In parallel to the increase in DINA companies, in December 1976, the capital of Inversiones y Comercial Fontanebleau Limitada was increased, created that same year and whose partners were Ovalle, Gustavo Valenzuela Carey, and Raimundo Langlois.

Fontanebleau would be one of the companies from which Ovalle and his partners would multiply their businesses with Humberto Olavarría and his friends in the following years. This happened on January 28, 1977, when both groups partnered through Fontanebleau and Inversiones y Comercial Sur Limitada (represented by Olavarría and Patricio Ruiz Tirado) to buy Perelló Hermanos y Compañía Limitada de Los Ángeles, for $1,700,000.00.

The company would be renamed Conservera Osiris.

Those that also multiplied were the Panamanian companies. On August 22, 1978, before the same notary Morgan, Langlois and Montero Labbé, representing Prime Investments Conglomerate Inc. and Mining Ventures Inc., both Panamanian investment companies; and Alfredo Ovalle, for Constructora Foram y cía.

Ltda., m they modified and increased the capital of the company Inversiones Mineras Foram Limitada, created on April 12 of that same year. Its administrators: Ovalle and Langlois.

But Olavarría was not left out of the business. One of his companies, the Sociedad Inmobiliaria Regional Limitada, remained in the network, multiplying investments with Ovalle and Langlois in Inmobiliaria LVM Limitada and also in Inmobiliaria Shopping Center Limitada, to build on a company-owned plot at the corner of Calle Rengo and Freire in Concepción a building subject to the Condominium Law, intended as a high-end shopping center; the exploitation and commercialization of the building, sale by floors or lots, and all operations and businesses related to the construction, reception, enabling, and operation of the property and the businesses installed within it (October 1978).

Aníbal Bórquez Pincheira, a lawyer from Concepción and former partner of Olavarría, would also participate in said company when it was transformed into Constructora e Inmobiliaria Shopping Center Limitada.

Later would come Comercial Foram Limitada (1979), a partnership between Ovalle and Olavarría, in which Langlois acted as administrator; Constructora de Viviendas Económicas Reloncaví Limitada, in which a new Panamanian company of Olavarría appears, Inversiones y Comercial Transegeo; Inmobiliaria y Constructora de Viviendas Económicas Río Baker Limitada and new cross-investments through Inversiones Arauca Panamá S.A. and Inversiones y Comercial Arauca Limitada (October 20, 1979).

In said operations, Máximo Montero Labbé was associated through the Panamanian company Interoceanic Investment Corporation; Humberto Olavarría and Raimundo Langlois representing Inversiones Arauca Panamá; and Olavarría himself, along with Ovalle, signing for Inversiones y Comercial Sur Limitada. The only thing that remained constant was the trio of administrators: Olavarría, Ovalle, and Langlois.

In 1980, Ovalle, Langlois, and Olavarría decided to invest in the fishing sector. One that the DINA's finance chief knew well. By then, EPECH was in liquidation, just like the DINA, but its assets were exploited until the last minute by Olavarría and his partners.

In 1981, Langlois and Olavarría signed on behalf of Inversiones y Comercial Sur Limitada, together with the Spanish businessman Julio Rasilla Buhigas, representative in Chile of S A Pesquera Industrial Gallega S.A.P.I.G., the constitution of the new company Pesquera AROSA Ltda., with its registered office in Punta Arenas.

Even one of the EPECH offices in Santiago—Moneda 856—was used by the new company thanks to Olavarría.

Months later, the trio would form a new company in the sector: Pesquera Chonos, to which two new ones would soon be added: Sociedad Pesquera Tagle y Stranger Limitada (TAGLEX) and Pesquera del Pacífico Limitada.

AROSA was already known to Olavarría due to the business it conducted with EPECH during the Contreras era and, above all, due to his role as an interventor and liquidator with full powers over the company, for which he was appointed by Contreras himself, while he was still its president, on the board of directors on July 15, 1977.

Ovalle also knew the Spanish fishing company. Among his partners, he had René Muñoz Valenzuela, the accountant for the DINA and Pesquera Chile. Because both AROSA and Chonos took advantage of assets and even mortgaged ships following the liquidation of the Empresa Pesquera Chile, which left millions in losses for the State.

But in 1981, none of that mattered. The DINA had been replaced by the CNI, but everything remained the same. The businesses between Olavarría and Ovalle and their partners multiplied, as did the Panamanian companies, with Compañía de Inversiones Golfo Pérsico S.A., Comercial Fe Limitada, Inversiones Reina Victoria S.A., Trans Egeo S.A., Casinos Internacionales, a hotel network in Colombia, and many more.

Olavarría also explored other businesses: in the communications sector (a radio station in Puerto Montt and another in Valparaíso), he held the concession for the Casino de Puerto Varas (until the 90s) and also had investments in the hotel industry and others, developed hand-in-hand with Endara in Guatemala and also in Panama.

Endara had been of great help. On September 28th, the man who will be remembered for assuming the presidency of Panama after the United States invasion of December 20, 1989, passed away from cardiac arrest at age 73.

In Chile, he also left traces, and very powerful ones, but they are not spoken of. Because even though the intervention of the Banco de Fomento del Bio Bío in 1982 caused a shake-up in the finances of this group, everyone recovered very quickly.

The mining business of Ovalle and Langlois, which began with an insignificant investment (Minera Las Cenizas Uno de Cabildo), was producing 20 thousand tons of fine copper per year by 2006. They are also owners of other mines, among them, the Compañía Minera Minas Carrizal Alto.

And until that same year, 2006, they were owners of Minera Florida, a gold mine that in 2005 had a turnover of US$ 43 million. Its sale to the Canadian mining company Meridian Gold brought them US$ 100 million.

"Even if it is false modesty, my business is very solid; we are making quite substantial investments for our level as a medium-sized company," said Ovalle this Friday the 20th to the evening newspaper La Segunda.

During the interview, he was asked about the reasons for his surprise resignation from Sonami and he again invoked family reasons. He had to rule out that he had cancer, deny that there were money problems in the trade association, and even that there was a rift with his partner Raimundo Langlois. "On the contrary, we are almost brothers," stated Alfredo Ovalle, faced with the journalist's insistence on ruling out reasons for his strange departure from Sonami.

*Journalists Sebastián Minay and Juan Pablo Figueroa collaborated on this investigation.

Note 1 The deeds and the first part of the story regarding the secret financing of the DINA were published in a series in the newspaper La Nación in November 1992.

Note 2 Lautaro Villar Requena, while an Army captain, was a student at the School of the Americas in 1963, which he attended for a second time in 1969 as a major. He belonged to the DINA and committed suicide in April 1990, at age 59, when he was a colonel (ret.).

Note 3 -. Leonardo Reyes Herrera, of "Villar y Reyes," group commander and chief of the FACH Manquehue Base, was sentenced on June 10, 2008, to 8 years in prison along with squadron commander Fernando Carreño Ortega and 5 other officers and non-commissioned officers of the same institution as co-perpetrators of two qualified kidnappings: Jorge Aillon Lara (33 years old), father of three children, employee of the Agricultural Trade Company and PC militant, who after being detained by FACH personnel disappeared without a trace, and the teacher María Arriagada Jerez (40 years old), three children, teachers' union leader, who was last seen at the Manquehue Air Base. The first-instance conviction, issued by judge Fernando Carreño, ordered the immediate arrest of the accused, who at the time were serving at the FACH Manquehue Air Base in the city of Temuco. It also convicted officer Heriberto Pereira Rojas and non-commissioned officers Jorge Soto Herrera, Luis Yáñez Silva, Jorge Valdebenito Isler, and Enrique Rebolledo Sotelo.

Note 4 The head of the DINA's Foreign Department was the then-colonel Raúl Iturriaga, who in these days should be sentenced by the Supreme Court for his participation in the crime of General Carlos Prats and his wife (Buenos Aires, September 1974) and is already prosecuted for the attack against Bernardo Leighton and his wife, in Rome, in 1975.

Note 5 Even in one of the letters that former DINA agent Michael Townley sent to his friend and fellow DINA agent Gustavo Etchepare, he says: "the Sarín (Andrea) project yielded optimal results during Holy Week of 1976."

Source: ciper.cl, November 20, 2009

Pesquera Arauco, the company used by the DINA to detain and transport prisoners during the dictatorship

Londres 38 filed a complaint today against a series of executives of the fishing company, which was directed after the coup by Manuel Contreras himself and which allegedly played a fundamental role in the disappearance of people during the dictatorship.

At 11:00 a.m. this Tuesday, the human rights group Londres 38 – Espacio de Memoria filed a complaint for the crimes of qualified kidnapping, illicit association, and illegal inhumation against the executives of Pesquera Arauco.

The action is part of the #TodaLaVerdadTodaLaJusticia campaign, an initiative that seeks to clarify crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship and which promotes a line of investigation to find the civilian and business-world figures responsible who participated in these events.

Erika Hennings, a member of the board of directors of Londres 38 Espacio de Memoria, pointed out that it is time for "work to begin on the line of responsibility of companies and other actors, third-party actors in the disappearances and detentions. We believe that this complaint can be the beginning for others that are necessary."

Regarding the fishing company and its link to the repression, she stated: "regarding those who passed through Londres 38, which are 85 people, they were taken out and transferred to different centers, notably Tejas Verdes and Santo Domingo, located in San Antonio.

We have investigations that show that they transported people in sacks already dead. That is to say, the responsibility of the fishing company is very important in relation to these disappeared persons."

The action, filed before Minister Mario Carroza, is directed against former agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA): Pedro Espinoza Bravo, Army officer and director of operations of the repressive agency; Alejandro Burgos De Beer, Army major; Humberto Olavarría Aranguren, Navy officer, head of economic intelligence for the DINA; Orlando Jorquera Bravo, retired Army colonel, second vice president of Empresa Pesquera Arauco S.A.; and Gerardo Godoy García.

Furthermore, the complaint points to the entire executive and management team of the company: Hubert Fuchs, administrator and legal manager of the fishing company. Fuchs, a retired marine and former manager of Savory, was the link between the DINA and the company Standard Electric, according to a CIPER report published in 2009.

A key man in the financial framework that sustained the repressive apparatus of the first years of the dictatorship.

Other executives named in the complaint are Luis Verdevereu, alternate director Carlos Paniaglia, Luis Arrieta Echegaray, and Salvador Lisboa Escobar.

To these are added the representing lawyers Luis Díaz Andrades, Luis Valdebenito Muñoz, and Humberto Calderón Luna.

Lawyer Magdalena Garcés explained that the complaint "is directed at establishing the criminal responsibility of the directors of Pesquera Arauco and Pesquera Chile, without prejudice to the fact that there existed, throughout the entire dictatorship, other companies that collaborated in the commission of crimes, as in this case through the provision of vehicles or infrastructure."

"What we want is to determine the final destination of the forcibly disappeared and to narrow the gaps of impunity that exist in Chile, where a few have been held responsible, when there are greater responsibilities and many complicit silences that have allowed us to not know where they are to this day," she added.

The criminal pattern under investigation

According to an investigation carried out by the Londres 38 group, the company Pesquera Arauco provided significant logistical support for the criminal actions of the DINA.

Prisoners were transported from the center of the capital to San Antonio aboard refrigerated fish trucks, adapted for that purpose. These vehicles, the document notes, left from Rinconada de Maipú or from the company's facility located in Lo Valledor, in Santiago.

Once they arrived at the Cuartel Yucatán (Londres 38), the list of detainees carried by the drivers was read, and then they were loaded into the back of the truck, completely blindfolded. The body of the truck was equipped with two benches on the sides and a separation by means of a grate, a space used by one or two DINA agents who, armed, guarded the political prisoners.

The route was escorted by Chevrolet C-10 and C-30 pickup trucks with agents who formed emergency teams.

The transfers took place at least twice a week, with evidence existing from January 1974 until the closure of Londres 38 in August or September of the same year. The number of victims displaced by the fishing company fluctuated from one to dozens, as the number of detentions increased.

According to various testimonies, the majority of the people held in Yucatán were taken clandestinely to the Tejas Verdes regiment, both to the School of Engineers and to the prisoner camp. It was a systematic and repeated practice in which at least four of the company's trucks intervened.

Sergio Vásquez Malebrán, a MIR militant detained in Viña del Mar on January 23, 1975, also mentions Pesquera Arauco trucks. His testimony was collected by the newspaper Punto Final in 2015: "Around one in the morning on January 29, 1975, they put us into some three-quarter-ton trucks from a fishing company—it was a refrigerated truck—Mónica Medina, Fabian Ibarra, Sergio Vesely, Erick Zott, Walkiria Jorquera, Julio Torres, Gerardo Hernández, Lilian Jorge, Abel Vilches, Frida Klimplen, María Isabel Gutiérrez, Hernán Brain, Ricardo Villar, Carlos Rioseco, Horacio Carabantes, and others.

In total, we were about 20 detainees. In the early hours of January 29, we arrived at Villa Grimaldi."

Pesquera Arauco S.A. The companies Pesquera Arauco Limitada and Empresa Pesquera Chile Limitada were subsidiaries of CORFO that had been formed by that entity and the Banco del Estado de Chile. After the military coup, the company began to be administered and directed by Manuel Contreras and DINA figures, who assumed positions as members of the board of directors alongside civilians who acted in favor of the dictatorship.

The assets of the fishing company served as key logistical elements in the operations for the disappearance of people, such as vehicles and infrastructure located in San Antonio.

The company's main facility was located at Calle O’Higgins No. 1981 and, according to the investigation carried out by Londres 38, Army officer Mario Jara Seguel coordinated the actions on the ground. "He assigned officials he trusted to the San Antonio and Santiago facilities, and specifically, the San Antonio facility was continuously guarded by military personnel," the document notes. "There are theories related to the use of the fishing company's large ovens for the disappearance of corpses, and it is striking that despite the scale of the machinery with which the San Antonio facility was equipped for such purposes, there is no detailed investigation into the use of this place during the first years of the dictatorship, considering the significance that other means of Pesquera Arauco, such as the pickup trucks and trucks, had in the criminal activities of the DINA," it maintains.

The road to Tejas Verdes

Samuel Houston was detained between March 17, 1974, and September 17, 1975. After the first hours he spent held in a Santiago police station, he was taken to Cuartel Yucatán, where DINA agents subjected him to brutal torture. For those events, he filed a complaint before Minister Carroza in 2015, which is currently under investigation.

He was transported in one of the fishing company's trucks to the Tejas Verdes Regiment, where he remained for 35 days awaiting mistreatment and torture. "We were left as a group of five, six people in the end. After the torture in Tejas Verdes, they left us in some semi-open cabins to recover. Then they took us to Santiago," he recounted.

"I realized how many of us there were upon arriving at Tejas Verdes. They took us down, we were blindfolded, they took them off along with the ties. We were in a line and I calculated, there were like two women and five men.

There, doctors examined us; one of them is in Punta Peuco, Vittorio Orvieto," he pointed out, "inside the truck there were sacks and tires that I noticed when trying to sit down with my eyes covered."

His journey through detention centers continued in FACH barracks and the former Estadio Chile, where he managed to stay for two months until the facility's closure. Subsequently, he was taken in a caravan to Tres y Cuatro Álamos.

"In terms of civilian participation, nothing has been done, which is why this complaint is so important. There are many companies that had something to do with it, especially the first months after the coup.

The companies in the social sector, which the owners immediately arrived to recover, they denounced the union leaders, the disappeared from the industrial belts. The civil society of that time is quite responsible."

Source: eldesconcierto.cl, November 3, 2017

Civic-military dictatorship used fishing company to disappear prisoners transformed into fishmeal

It is striking that, despite the existence of suspicions regarding the use of the large "cookers" (ovens) of the Arauco fishing company to disappear corpses, a detailed investigation was never carried out into the macabre use of this fish processing plant during the dictatorship.

Santiago de Chile, September 15, 2023 (Ecoceanos News).- A report by the German broadcaster WDR revealed unpublished information about the role of the Nazi Walther Rauff in the disappearance of political prisoners in Chile, applying the directive known as "Nacht und Nebel" ("Night and Fog"), issued by Adolf Hitler in 1941, which established the criteria and steps for kidnapping and carrying out mass disappearances.

According to the report, "Pinochet's German Godfathers," the SS-Standartenführer and former SS officer—responsible for the murder of half a million prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp—introduced unprecedented disappearance practices when he was advising the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) of the Chilean civic-military dictatorship between 1973 and 1990.

Rauff arrived in Chile in 1958 after having met Augusto Pinochet in Ecuador, where Pinochet was part of a military mission to reorganize the Ecuadorian War Academy. In our country, he dedicated himself to managing a king crab processing plant starting in the 60s, in Porvenir, Tierra del Fuego province, Magallanes region. In parallel, he served as an agent for the German secret service, the BND.

Pesquera Arauco: The Auschwitz of the Chilean dictatorship

The companies Pesquera Arauco Ltda. and Empresa Pesquera Chile Ltda. were subsidiaries of the Production Development Corporation (CORFO), and had been formed by this entity dependent on the Ministry of Economy and the Banco del Estado.

After the civic-military coup, the company began to be administered and directed by Manuel Contreras and members of the DINA, who assumed positions as members of the board of directors alongside civilians of the dictatorship.

The refrigerated trucks, pickup trucks, and infrastructure of the fishing company located in San Antonio were used as key logistical elements in the criminal actions of the DINA and the disappearance of prisoners.

It is striking that despite the existence of suspicions regarding the use of the large "cookers" (ovens) of the Arauco fishing company to disappear corpses, using large-scale machinery to produce fishmeal through a cooking process at over 90ºC, the content of which was subsequently pressed to eliminate leached liquids and obtain "press cake," a detailed investigation was never carried out into the macabre use of this fish processing plant during the dictatorship.

Operation Condor and the use of the fishmeal and fish oil producing company

In the WDR report, based on the testimony of Jorgelino Vergara, a member of the DINA who has been key in various judicial processes to reveal the existence of clandestine detention and extermination centers, such as the Simón Bolívar barracks in Peñalolén, he stated: "Everything came from Germany.

From the former Nazis. They brought the technology to torture, kill, and make people disappear." Regarding Rauff, he said: "They called this man 'The Jackal.' He was in charge of making them disappear entirely."

The article "German broadcaster WDR reveals the role of the Nazi Walter Rauff in 'Pinochet's German Godfathers'" by journalist Marco Fajardo of El Mostrador includes a detail not contemplated in the German broadcaster's report, by pointing out the destination of the bodies of several detainees from Calle Londres 38 and Villa Grimaldi after being taken to the port of San Antonio.

A criminal pattern

"Regarding those who passed through Londres 38, which are 85 people, they were taken out and transferred to different centers, notably Tejas Verdes and Santo Domingo, located in San Antonio. We have investigations that show that they transported people in sacks already dead.

That is to say, the responsibility of the fishing company is very important in relation to these disappeared persons," according to the report.

The prisoners were transported from the center of the capital to San Antonio aboard refrigerated trucks adapted for that purpose. These vehicles, the document notes, left from Rinconada de Maipú or from the company's facility located in Lo Valledor, in Santiago.

Once they arrived at the DINA's "Cuartel Yucatán" (Londres 38), the list of detainees carried by the drivers was read, and then they were loaded into the back of the truck, completely blindfolded.

"The itinerary from Santiago to San Antonio was via Melipilla. And from Cucumén the road to Lo Gallardo, a bad road, where there was no one, just peasants. Next to the bridge between Santo Domingo and San Antonio there was a military post, where they changed the driver, to continue toward the fishing company that was inside the port.

This driver, surnamed 'Tolosa,' a military man, was the only one authorized to enter; no one stopped him. The truck took two to three hours to return, empty and cleaned."

In the report, a former detainee in San Antonio tells of Rauff's presence at the site: "And there was a warehouse where the net-makers worked. You could see him around these parts, where the pickup trucks with the detainees in the back were. He is the one who appears in the photo, yes. With a German accent and a bad Nazi."

Citing former DINA agents, the report indicates that the detainees were murdered at the site. Vergara himself affirms what happened to their bodies. "Rauff was given the position as director of the Arauco fishing company, of the dictatorship.

The corpses were thrown into the Arauco fishing company's shredder. The one who did it was The Jackal, although not personally. He was accompanied by agents from the DINA itself," who told Vergara that "we threw them in and they were transformed into fishmeal."

El Mostrador included some of Vergara's testimonies that were not part of the radio report. Among them, Rauff's participation in the creation of Operation Condor—the Latin American system of repression to eliminate political opponents—is mentioned, in a secret meeting that took place in 1975.

"I accompanied the tray where coffee, a piece of cake, and a pastry would be served for everyone who was there; there were more or less between 12 and 15. From here went (Christoph) Willeke, who was director of the ENI, of the National Intelligence School, and this man was there, The Jackal.

He was next to Manuel Contreras, and on the other side was José María Verdeguer from Uruguay, the director of intelligence of Uruguay. That was where they agreed on Operation Condor," Vergara affirms.

When asked if Rauff was present, he responds: "Yes, he was present. He had knowledge of everything that was agreed upon. The person was very involved in the intelligence services."

"The German connection" In the various processes regarding the disappearance of the prisoners' bodies in the sea off San Antonio, there is a marked connection with German businessmen. This is the case of the use of the tugboat "Kiwi," belonging to the maritime consortium Ultramar, owned by brothers Sven and Wolf Von Appen.

Subsequently, this vessel was moved to Peru where they renamed it "El Brujo."

The patriarch of this family, Julio Alberto Von Appen, arrived in Chile in the 40s, serving as the leader of Nazi intelligence operations in Latin America, to later cement a successful path in the shipping business. In 2013, it became known that the Von Appen family appeared as financiers of the Pinochet Foundation.

According to the author of the report, after 1945 about a thousand SS, SA, and Gestapo officers arrived in Chile, being called in the DINA "our German troop."

Pesquera Arauco and Pesquera Chile had Hubert Fuchs, administrator and legal manager of the fishing company. Fuchs, a retired marine, was the link between the DINA and the company Standard Electric, according to a CIPER report published in 2009. Fuchs was a key man in the financial framework that sustained the repressive apparatus in the first years of the dictatorship.

The "final solution" and the dog crematorium of Santiago

In the German report, Vergara also tells of what happened at the stray dog crematorium in the city of Santiago, which today is the "La Perrera" cultural center.

"Look, look, they always spoke to me about the packages, the packages have to be eliminated, but we have a thing in Quinta Normal where it can be done so as not to leave evidence and all that bullshit: Extermination of packages.

Rauff was in charge of making them disappear entirely... It was cruel, very cruel. People were burned, human bodies in La Perrera, yes. In Santiago, there where there were more corpses, they took them to La Perrera." When asked about how many there were, he responds: "Look, to give you a number: more than 300."

This testimony was confirmed by a former worker at the La Perrera stray dog crematorium, who from anonymity pointed out: "During the dictatorship, strange vehicles came to the place. We couldn't stay close. The strangers threw sacks into the ovens. From what I saw from afar, the bodies in the sacks were larger than dogs."

"Simón," who cites another former member of the DINA, indicates: "I worked at the GH (general headquarters) at this time, and I accompanied Willeke and Rauff many times visiting La Perrera in Parque de los Reyes. It was for dogs, but now it had to be for human beings. Rauff was in this section, I don't know, it had a name: section for the 'final solution' (sic)."

Source: ecoceanos.cl, September 2023