Mariana Callejas will not go to prison. After eight long months of waiting, the Supreme Court overturned the 20-year sentence handed down in the first and second instances, benefiting the wife of Michael Townley with a sentence of only 5 years—without jail time—as an accomplice to the crime of General Carlos Prats and his wife, executed in 1974 in Buenos Aires.

Even so, she says she paid a harsh price by becoming a pariah of Chilean letters. She began writing seriously at about the same time she joined the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). Two very different and seemingly opposite occupations that inevitably ended up mixing: one of her first short stories is about a subject who is tasked with installing a bomb under a car.

Her house was both a barracks and the headquarters of a literary workshop through which relevant figures of the New Chilean Narrative would pass. In those reading sessions, she was the one who called the shots. The one in command. She wrote more than anyone else in the group and was considered a promise of national letters. All this while she took an active part in Pinochet's repressive apparatus.

The book that Mariana Callejas had on the dining room table is about psychology. The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, arrived there through a Buddhist friend who believes in books of personal knowledge and self-help: “I don’t know why he thinks I’m going to find myself; I already found myself a long time ago,” she said, smiling from her two-room apartment in Providencia, where at that time of the evening the gothic group Dead Can Dance was playing.

A strange and dark music, disturbingly hypnotic, soft and yet intense, like Callejas herself. Music that would serve to set the scene for the transition of a human being from life to death.

The series of meetings and interviews with Mariana Inés Callejas Honores took place a few weeks before the Supreme Court resolution that annulled the twenty-year prison sentence against her for the assassination of the former Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Carlos Prats, and his wife, which occurred in 1974 in Buenos Aires.

In those days, prior to the final sentence, she claimed to be calm and confident of her acquittal. She said that, and she also looked sincerely calm and confident, despite the fact that the evidence against her seemed solid. Michael Townley himself confessed that his Chilean ex-wife participated directly, just as he did, in the attack on Prats.

The 78-year-old writer and former DINA agent said that if Judge Alejandro Solís’s first-instance sentence were confirmed, she would not be distressed. She had already spent seven months in prison in 1993, and that experience “didn’t mean much, if you know how to live there,” she stated.

She recalled that she wrote love poems so that her fellow prisoners could communicate with their partners and that she used to tell her own stories and others’ aloud, some of them horror stories that she included in two of her books. Except for some comforts that she said she didn’t care about, life in prison would not make much difference from the one she had been leading in recent years.

An austere, lonely, and quiet life. A life of social condemnation and a coming and going between courts. She also highlighted that in prison she can do two of the things she likes most: read and write.

In fact, in prison she read By Night in Chile, the book by Roberto Bolaño that recreates, in fictional code, the literary workshops she used to organize in the house in Lo Curro, which, while being a social and literary headquarters, was also a DINA barracks and a scene of crimes and horrors.

Mariana Callejas did not acknowledge authorship in the assassination of Prats. Nor even having committed or witnessed any illicit act during her years as an agent. What she did express regret for was having participated in the DINA.

But not because of a political or moral judgment of Pinochet’s secret police, but because of the shame and pain that her five children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild have had to suffer.

Because of that, and mainly because her political past truncated a literary career that was expected to be promising.

Renowned editors who read her stories, but who did not publish them for political or moral reasons, recognize her as a writer of merit. Better than average in Chile, at least. There is a reason she was recognized with literary awards won fairly.

But Mariana Callejas is Mariana Callejas, protagonist of the most renowned crimes of the dictatorship. Hence, she has had to self-publish, and accustom herself to the rejection and slights of her peers. That, indeed, saddens her.

To tell the truth, in one of the meetings she said exactly the opposite: that it did not sadden her at all, only that she found it unfair, but she said it with a sad voice. That has been a true punishment, she admitted later, in one of the few occasions that she showed any crack.

SPY NOVELS

The starting point is in the winter of 1974, when she joined the literary workshop that the writer Enrique Lafourcade offered at the Las Condes Cultural Institute. There were about fifty students, and she stood out from the average.

She and a couple of names: Carlos Franz and Erik Polhammer. She had begun writing in the late sixties, while living in Miami with her third husband and father of two of her five children, Michael Townley. There, she took a writing course and rehearsed her first stories, several of them inspired by characters she had met a decade earlier in New York.

It was precisely one of those stories, called Do You Know Bobby Ackermann?, that favorably impressed the workshop master in Santiago. Set in Brooklyn, this monologue of a veteran Jewish tailor won first place in the 1975 Rafael Maluenda short story contest of the newspaper El Mercurio.

The story was included five years later in the author’s first book and subsequently, at the urging of Lafourcade, in a selection of Chilean stories by Editorial Andrés Bello that had a print run of 45,000 copies.

Lafourcade would be Callejas’s great literary pillar. He encouraged her writing and more than once influenced her to be published and win awards. It was also thanks to him that the author participated in the lunch that Chilean writers shared with Jorge Luis Borges in 1976.

Two years earlier, at the beginning of the workshop, her American husband used to pick her up by car and often they would take Lafourcade to his house. That is how they got to know his intimacy and gained his trust.

Callejas was his favorite student and exerted a special attraction on him and other students in the workshop, who admired her sharp and piercing observations, sometimes cruel, pronounced in a silky and measured voice.

She liked spy novels, especially those by John Le Carré, and commented with authority on works by Hemingway and Camus. Despite her short stature, she was an attractive woman, as well as cosmopolitan and enigmatic.

She had lived on a kibbutz in Israel and her third husband was an American ten years younger than her. One of her lovers, fellow DINA agent Antal Lipthay, would define her in a judicial statement for the Letelier case as an “extraordinarily intelligent and skillful woman (...) She liked to relate intimate details of her experiences on the kibbutz, the customs, the obligations, the equality between the sexes, the liberality in erotic manifestations.

And in this last detail, I remember that Mariana was satisfied to elaborate on images and even evoke some of her own experiences.”

In the same testimony, Lipthay would define her in a more hidden sphere: “Permanent political action gives her the spiritual satisfaction she needs.”

COMMANDER PEPE

Political action underwent a radical change of axis. If in her youth she sympathized with the left, from the late sixties she moved toward the opposite side. It is not easy to explain this. She does not explain it to herself either.

In one of her many statements to the justice system, she would say that just as she marched against the Vietnam War in the United States, she also did so earlier in favor of Senator Joseph McCarthy. And today she asserts that just as she remains anti-communist, she also declares herself anti-clerical.

The fact is that her true “spiritual satisfaction” began during the Popular Unity, when she joined, along with her husband, the far-right nationalist movement Patria y Libertad and participated in the clandestine station Radio Libertad. Michael Townley had more prominence, as he was involved in the death of a worker in Concepción and had to flee the country to avoid prison along with his family.

She had a political history, but that was not talked about in the 1974 literary workshop. They discussed literature, period. No one suspected her. For that reason, that same year, when Lafourcade announced the abrupt end of the workshop due to the desertion of several students, those who persisted accepted her invitation to continue the sessions in the attic of the house she had with Townley on Calle Pío X, in Providencia.

One of those students was the Catalan businessman Cristián Aguadé.

Ex-husband of the painter Roser Bru and a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, Aguadé recently published a book of memoirs in which he says that the lady of the house “wrote quite well some stories with a strong psychological charge.” In particular, he highlights one that caught his attention, although not necessarily because of its prose: inspired by José Liendo, Commander Pepe, the story described details of the capture and death of the legendary MIR union leader, murdered a month after the coup d’état.

“The description was so realistic and with such a wealth of detail, that although it is not strange in a great writer, it seemed like a lived experience. But also, she was the only one who dared to touch on current events, since all the rest of us avoided them so as not to fall under suspicion,” says Aguadé, who at the time never perceived anything strange.

Some time later he came to understand the purpose of the electronics workshop that Callejas’s husband had on the outskirts of that house and through which one passed to enter the attic. A workshop like any other.

A family home like any other. Of her, he admired her sharpness and literary talent. He remembers Townley as “a young man with a peaceful and industrious air who from time to time visited us where we met, as he was also fond of literature.”

FAMILY POSTCARDS

In Mariana Callejas’s apartment, there is a family photo in plain sight. It is a black and white image and shows her together with Michael Townley and their five children. The scene, which conveys satisfaction, even serenity, was captured around the mid-sixties when the couple lived in Los Dominicos and enjoyed a period of stability that would extend for the rest of the decade.

They had married in 1961 in Santiago and Townley became the adoptive father of the three children from her previous marriage.

In 1966, once the couple’s second child together was born, they moved to live in Miami.

There, she began writing in a workshop at the University of Miami. She also joined marches called by the New Party of Florida, a left-wing group that, among other things, proposed the legalization of abortion and marijuana.

Her husband, on the other hand, was not greatly interested in literature, much less politics. His thing was car racing. He worked in a mechanical workshop and before that had sold encyclopedias. Apart from the children, the couple had little in common.

Even so, she maintains that there was harmony between them and that this harmony was synonymous with happiness:

-Our house in Miami was not a luxury, it was relatively modest, but we had a little yacht and a very cute dog. Many Chileans came to visit us, flocks of Chileans who I don’t know how they got the word and would settle on mattresses in the garage. We would go out for rides on the yacht and we had a great time, but all that vanished when the ugly things happened.

The “ugly things” began in the times of the Popular Unity, more particularly when Townley fled Chile after taking part in the Patria y Libertad commando that killed the worker who was guarding an antenna that prevented the broadcasts of Canal 5 of Concepción, dependent on the Pontificia Universidad Católica, whose stance was one of decided opposition to the Allende government.

The American’s photo was on the front pages of the newspapers and forced him to flee. She followed him later with the children. There was a fugitive and a dead man in tow. But for her, the ugly things did not really begin there, but with the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).

SHARED TIME

Mariana Callejas has said that her ex-husband joined Pinochet’s secret police at the urging of the then-colonel Pedro Espinoza, deputy director of the DINA, who knew the couple’s work in Patria y Libertad.

That he did it for economic reasons because they had not long ago arrived from the United States and had no work. And that she also agreed to participate only to increase the family income, even though they paid her considerably less than him.

She has also said that she did not have a specific function in the DINA, unlike her husband, who was an expert in electronics. That she did not measure the consequences and things got out of hand, because she had no will to put a brake on what she considered was an exploitation by the superior commanders. She has said all that and says it again in her apartment, introducing some nuances:

-It is something to regret for the rest of your life. To kick yourself in the rear for the rest of your life. How could I have endured this? Why did I let Mike do this? But history cannot be repeated. It was a bad moment, it was a bad moment when he couldn’t find work and was desperate, we were desperate.

We had to pay rent, we had to pay for schools, you know how it is. Without work, without support, and suddenly Espinoza appears (...) I found myself involved in this matter, it’s not that I had said Ah, I’m going to fight for this, I’m going to get into the DINA and I’m going to do things, no.

I, for my part, would not have done anything. If Michael hadn’t insisted that I accompany him, I wouldn’t have had any reason to appear in anything. But, as he was very jealous, he insisted that I accompany him on his trips…

The first trip on which she accompanied her husband—according to the first-instance ruling by Judge Solís, which was ratified by the Court of Appeals—coincided with the assassination of Carlos Prats and his wife.

Among the pieces of evidence put forward by Solís to incriminate her is the testimony of a former soldier who asserts that in the days prior to the attack, the couple was testing explosives in the Cajón del Maipo, which was subsequently corroborated by Townley himself before the courts.

In any case, there was a distinction: while Townley devoted full time to his work at the DINA, Callejas alternated her duties as an agent with those of an amateur writer.

Her stories dealt mainly with veterans, losers, and lonely and disenchanted people. Also with terror and mystery. Several of the stories from that time were compiled in Larga noche (1981), a self-published book of very limited circulation that begins with a homonymous story that describes the torture of a detainee.

It also includes the story titled Parque pequeño y alegre, which is about a subject who is tasked with putting a bomb under a victim’s car.

The book reached the hands of literary critic Hernán Poblete Varas, who published a commentary on that book in which he said that “these are short, concrete stories, without a word too many (...) in the majority, a certain skepticism prevails in which there is, however, no defeat or bitterness, although there is disenchantment and death.”

RELENTLESS CRITIC

Mariana Callejas took her literary hobby seriously. She had a significant output and was the one who mobilized the group from Enrique Lafourcade’s workshop that continued working in the house on Pío X, in Providencia. “I installed seats, rugs, floors, lamps and announced that the workshop would be autonomous and that it would be open to anyone who wanted to attend,” she wrote in the introduction to her book Nuevos cuentos (2007).

She also wrote that among the “beautiful group of people attending” those first sessions were Cristián Aguadé, Lucho Hermosilla, Verónica Pizarro, Cassandra Gianini, Verónica Pizarro, Iris Cornejo, and Carlos Franz, whom she defined as “the pretty boy who spoke like a sixty-year-old gentleman.”

Pushed by her literary master, who more than once came to visit that house, Callejas exercised a certain leadership over the group. She led the sessions and determined their dynamics. According to the testimonial account that the writer Carlos Iturra published under the title Caída en desgracia, she “did not place restrictions on her hospitality and lavished her welcoming reception on everyone equally, but as a workshop leader she was relentless, perhaps the one who unloaded the most ruthless opinions on defective texts.”

The writer Gonzalo Contreras, who from 1976—at 17 years old—frequented the former agent’s workshops, says that “she was a very strong woman, with temperament,” and used to call the shots in the workshop and, probably, “from what I could observe, also in her house.”

Attending to the sequence of events, it is very likely that in the days when the literary workshops were taking place in the attic of the house in Providencia, the assassination of Carlos Prats was being organized.

Although she has never acknowledged any participation in this crime, admitting only that at that time she traveled to Buenos Aires for tourism and business reasons, it was her own ex-husband who betrayed her in a 1999 judicial statement before Judge María Servini de Cubría:

“I was sitting at the wheel and my wife on the other side and she had the radio on her lap. She picked it up and asked: what do I do? Give it to me, I said… No, I don’t know if I said it… I simply took it.

She was fiddling, pushing. It wasn’t even turned on. We had been sitting for hours… When she picked up the radio, the button was on the right side, she had it in her hand. I saw that when she picked it up she thought the explosion was going to happen, but it didn’t happen…”

The Supreme Court dismissed this testimony, as well as other evidence. For the country’s highest judicial body, only Townley bears responsibility as the material author of the crime. Be that as it may: it was the DINA’s first international crime.

And this would be followed by the attacks on Bernardo Leighton (Rome, 1975) and Orlando Letelier (Washington, 1976), in which Townley and his wife would be involved.

It was the beginning of a policy of international extermination and for this, the DINA arranged for the purchase of the house in Lo Curro, where the couple moved and the Quetropillán barracks was established. There, literary and social evenings continued to be held with new guests.

by Juan Cristóbal Peña

Source: ciper.cl, July 8, 2010

Unpublished: the full interview that Mónica González conducted with Roberto Thieme for the book "La Conjura"

Part of this interview, which Mónica González conducted in 2005 with Roberto Thieme, one of the founders of the far-right subversive group Patria y Libertad, was incorporated into the second edition of her book “La Conjura,” regarding the conspiracy of military officers and civilians against Salvador Allende.

Thus, that updated second edition, published in 2012 (Catalonia-UDP), featured the testimony of a key actor from those years. Today, following Thieme’s recent passing, CIPER offers its readers the full interview.

In the conversation, the 2019 National Journalism Prize winner addressed everything from the intimate aspects that shaped Thieme’s vital decisions to his plan to establish a paramilitary training center in Argentina against the Allende government, the nationalist group’s contacts with Manuel Contreras prior to the coup, and the members of Patria y Libertad who joined the DINA.

– In these days (of 2005) we remember a new anniversary of the coup d'état that radically changed the lives of Chileans, and yours among them.

– Yes, of course, in every sense, because I was not a young idealistic adventurer during the Unidad Popular, but rather a family man, an SME entrepreneur who had everything structured and three children when Salvador Allende was elected. And this entrepreneur turned into a revolutionary…

– Did you want to be a guerrilla fighter under a nationalist imprint?

– No, I didn't manage to reach those levels of professionalism in my revolutionary cause, but I tried during those short 25 months that the Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad lasted. And I followed the manuals… I learned a lot from the writings of Che Guevara, Carlos Marighella, and all of them, to reach a coup d'état that was not part of the nationalist design… And I believed that in some way we could change the course of this history of underdevelopment and frustrations of historical Chile and produce a revolution that would lead the country to development through another path.

– How and why did you resort to Colonia Dignidad to fake your death in a plane crash and go underground in Argentina in those years?

– I am the son of Germans, from the second wave of German immigration; my parents arrived between the two wars. In the early 60s, during the government of Jorge Alessandri, my stepfather and my mother—Germans—went to the Colonia, they visited the camp.

My father was a farm administrator and he was struck by the development that the Colonia had and by the social works it carried out. When I arrived there, I had the impression that its people were good Germans who had come to Chile after the war, a bit like my parents, to rebuild their lives that had been destroyed.

– But how does an ideological and, to a certain extent, military complicity (with the Colonia) come about to collaborate in the subversive action against Salvador Allende?

– There was strategic, ideological closeness, if you will. Surely, those people were national socialist in their majority, like 90% of the Germans, and they had a sympathy for this Chilean nationalism of ours and assumed there was a Nazi imprint in the approach, which was not the case, because Nazism was territorial expansion, living space, antisemitism, things that Patria y Libertad has never had, at least with those I shared with.

So, already advanced in the UP—we are in the October Strike of '72—when the Army General Alfredo Canales rises up, a movement begins to form within the generals and President Allende dismisses him (September 21, 1972).

This coincidence occurs with the strike and with Federico Willoughby, who tells me “look, you have a plane, the pilot, here a very important flight must be made: let’s take this general to meet with these Germans.” And I took General Canales on a clandestine flight, in the middle of the October Strike, with the country in turmoil, with military control, and that is where this contact is produced.

– Why did you take General Canales to Colonia Dignidad?

– With the entry of the Armed Forces, through the commanders-in-chief, to co-govern with President Allende, the political council of Patria y Libertad thought that a break in the Army could be produced, a civil war… Through Federico Willoughby we saw that there was this break in the Army high command.

And Canales had already manifested his approach to nationalist thought and the intention was to unite all these mini-groups that swarmed, self-proclaiming themselves nationalists, and the idea was that Canales, having been called to retirement prematurely, would have the full support of our bases in the south and of the Germans of Dignidad, who offered for him to settle there so he could act as the binder of the civic-military movement that was going to end the Allende government.

I took him in my plane. Francisco Prats, as a leader of the Catholic University gremialistas, and Willoughby, who articulated all this, were on that flight. We were there for an entire day with the Germans. General Canales declined the invitation. But from then on, I remained connected with the head of the Colonia, Paul Schäfer.

– Why did you see that entry of the military chiefs into the cabinet as a defeat?

– As a defeat and as the surest path toward a civil war. And there we said: “Well, let’s create a paramilitary force that carries out or promotes a military uprising with the sectors of the Armed Forces that are sympathetic.” That is how this equation was produced, which I later used strategically to produce the supposed accident, because otherwise where was I going to land…

– You made people believe you had died in an accident when in reality you arrived in your plane at Colonia Dignidad, from where you went underground to Argentina. What was the true objective of that setup?

– The day of the supposed accident I land at six in the afternoon at the Colonia, at night the plane is repainted and everything is changed, and I fly the next day to Argentina in the same plane, which is re-registered as Argentine.

I had discovered before—on other flights—in the Argentine south, more or less in the area of the Colonia, a no-man's-land of thousands of square kilometers suitable for creating a paramilitary training camp. That was my plan.

– And for that, you went underground?

– I dedicated myself to that the whole time until June 29, '73, until the tanquetazo. By then, this Argentine project had just been stopped, because Patria y Libertad also established, through a policy post-October Strike of '72, several paths to contact military middle-management, with troop command and young officers, colonels.

There we bet on the revolution of the colonels, in view of the fact that the generals were co-governing. With that logic, John Schaeffer (leader of Patria y Libertad) dedicated himself to traveling through Chile while I was in Argentina, making contacts with commanders, and there he met Manuel Contreras, Carlos Forestier, Manuel Torres, etc.

Starting in early June '73, the first agreement for a coup begins; it was not the American one, but the nationalist coup of Chilean officers, young and anti-Marxist. But this movement is detected by the official command of the Army…

– You speak of Generals Carlos Prats, Mario Sepúlveda, Guillermo Pickering, and Augusto Pinochet.

– Yes, and that is why on June 28 it is suspended. And there occurs this episode of the tanquetazo at the Armored Regiment No. 2, when they were already going to dismiss Colonel Roberto Souper and other officers and they say “we are going to go out and make a heroic gesture.”

– And all supported by Patria y Libertad.

– I was in Argentina, but I support the decision of the leadership of Patria y Libertad at that moment: first, to try to dissuade the rebellion of this regiment during that long night of the dawn of the 29th, because it was foolishness.

But, on the other hand, it had the virtue of breaking this sacrosanct unity of the Armed Forces and the Army by taking nine tanks to the street, ten trucks with troops, going to La Moneda, trying to rescue Captain Rocha, detained at the Ministry of Defense, putting a tank through the gate… All that, obviously, managed to accelerate the other coup, the master coup that was coming from outside.

“The idea was that (General) Canales, having been called to retirement prematurely, would have the full support of our bases in the south and of the Germans of Dignidad, who offered for him to settle there to act as the binder of the civic-military movement that was going to end the Allende government.”

– When you decide to install a paramilitary camp in Argentina, did you have help from the Armed Forces of that country?

– Yes, I had it. And after the tanquetazo, when the leadership of Patria y Libertad goes into exile, it is contacted abroad by Brazilian intelligence services, which also support the movement and produce, among other things, the re-entry of Pablo Rodríguez just in time to give a press conference on September 10, '73, and save the dignity and honor of the movement.

– Was that clandestine re-entry of Pablo Rodríguez carried out by the Armed Forces of Brazil, where there was a dictatorship?

– That is correct. We had the main support from Colonel Joao Figueiredo, who later becomes president of Brazil.

– And from which officers did you obtain help in Argentina?

– I obtained help mainly from the Air Force, with the commander of the Fourth Brigade of Mendoza, the “Indio” Fernández; and in Buenos Aires, with the head of the Buenos Aires police, on one hand, who helped me with the whole part of the asylum, the exile, and later in the underground to continue in this, and some Army officers also who were going to provide us with material for the training camp.

– How large do you estimate the paramilitary force you planned to create to attempt to overthrow Salvador Allende or collaborate in it?

– This project contemplated the preparation and military training of 500 young people from the movement. It did not materialize because the dynamics of the process here accelerated. And in parallel, here we had the so-called Operational Brigades of Special Forces.

With that bombastic name, we managed to organize a parallel operations front, which captured and selected the militants who were subsequently going to be sent to Argentina. We managed to prepare these forces here with instructors—former Navy and Army officers.

But everything was a bit improvised, due to the lack of resources and the acceleration. And then comes the tanquetazo: today I see it as the most serious and most mistaken step from the political point of view of the Nationalist Front, because it means the death of the movement.

– Why?

– For the sake of a frustrated and failed military plot, the political organization Patria y Libertad is destroyed with its post-coup project, and it immolates itself in this action. What continues to operate after the exile of its leaders, the closing of the headquarters, the disbanding?

This small operations front of no more than 500 people. I return clandestinely and we articulate it with my brother. We said: What is left for us to save dignity and honor? Go underground. But in a forced step, without resources, with almost no preparation.

And there the countdown to the coup continues and the Navy contacts me. Shortly before the truckers' strike begins, on July 25, a couple of aides to Admiral Merino contact me, among them Commander Hugo Castro, his right-hand man.

I meet with him in an apartment in Vitacura, and he tells me: “Look, Roberto, the thing is going, the strike is coming with everything, we are going to paralyze this entire country. This is not going to be the October Strike, this time the thing is serious and we want you to contribute to carrying out a sabotage campaign that we are going to indicate to you.” This campaign did not have the objective of terrorizing people or killing opponents, but rather, given that the State Railways existed and there was a pro-government truckers' organization parallel to the striking union of León Vilarín, it was necessary to physically produce the total strike of the country.

– But it was not like that. And in that “campaign,” Salvador Allende’s naval aide-de-camp, Commander Arturo Araya Peeters, was assassinated.

– Notice that of all the crimes attributed to Patria y Libertad, there are two or three that are accidents—the case of the electrician from Concepción with the interference to Channel 5 and the attack on the Curicó oil pipeline (in which 2 people died and 14 were wounded)—they did not obey a policy of going out to kill people.

It was due to logistical ignorance since the pipeline did not carry oil at that moment, but liquefied gas. But the Araya case… Today I can tell you that I was in charge of this, and how was I going to order the killing of the president’s naval aide when I was working with the Navy?

It doesn't fit. As far as I have investigated, in the deaths of General René Schneider and Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, the CIA is behind it. That is clear. Now, in the case of Araya, seeing that a Jorge Ehlers, a former sailor, hands over the weapons that night and compromises me, because I had brought that weapon on a clandestine flight—among many—to Chile, and he puts the seal, the imprint of Patria y Libertad, through the weapon that I personally brought.

And he uses some far-right extremists for that assassination.

– A group in which Antal Lipthay, a leader of Patria y Libertad, participated.

– For me, the death of Commander Araya is the work of the CIA. It is not accidental that it is a former sailor who hands over the weapons nor that they use a weapon that compromises Patria y Libertad with the assassination and peripheral people, not nationalists, and that July 26 is chosen for it—anniversary of the Cuban revolution—with all the symbolism that carries, the break it produces for Allende personally, the problem that existed in the Navy command with the power play between Admiral Merino and the commander-in-chief Raúl Montero, clearly, everything fits.

It is not an accident and it was not a policy of Patria y Libertad.

– Is it not the order that you give, as you were in charge of all operations that night?

– I was in charge and I did not give the order to kill Commander Araya. Now, if you say that Lipthay participated in that group, we will have to continue investigating to see if one day it can be established how and who.

– Were you infiltrated by the CIA and by whom else?

– Seen 31 years later, not only by the CIA, but by the Armed Forces and by all the intelligence services. I have verified the case of the Air Force. Roberto Fuentes Morrison was a civilian when he was a commando of Patria y Libertad and appears after the coup as a squadron commander and close to the most immediate circle of General Gustavo Leigh.

In '78, when Leigh had just been removed from the Junta with the white coup, with some of his generals and advisors he goes to a furniture store of mine on Calle Suecia to see what we were doing. And there I saw that Fuentes Morrison was hovering, taking care of him. I tell you again: he was an infiltrator of the Air Force.

– And it happens that Fuentes Morrison takes Adolfo Palma Ramírez and two other members of the group that assassinated Commander Araya Peeters to the Comando Conjunto. All of them, as has been judicially demonstrated, assassinate several of the forcibly disappeared.

– … I didn't know that.

“A couple of aides to Admiral Merino contact me, among them Commander Hugo Castro, his right-hand man. I meet with him and he tells me: “Look, Roberto, the thing is going, the strike is coming with everything, we are going to paralyze this country (…) and we want you to contribute to carrying out a sabotage campaign that we are going to indicate to you.”

– How do you see Fuentes Morrison and Michael Townley today, who also belonged to Patria y Libertad?

– I knew Townley. Manuel Fuentes introduced him to me, the same leader of Patria y Libertad who brought this character in the middle of the October Strike, when the radios were closed and this Ciro Pera Loca (or Giro Sintornillos, the Disney character) appears, who had invented a mobile radio on top of an Austin Mini and Fuentes gets hooked on that—Fuentes is another doubt, right?—and introduces him to me.

This gringo really knew the technique of the matter, but politically he was a hysterical anti-communist who wanted to kill everyone in the UP. He was not a nationalist, he unfortunately belonged to the 80% who constituted the base of Patria y Libertad: hysterical anti-Marxists whose only interest was to topple Allende and take revenge; and they did not have the concept of the movement, of aspiring to a revolution, of thinking—even if it sounds arrogant—that toppling Allende was a stage of the struggle and then the great work would come.

All these hysterical anti-Marxists, like Townley, surely had to do with the CIA, and they did us great harm.

– Why did you come into contact with Manuel Contreras before the coup?

– After the October Strike, when we decided to establish contact with commanders with troop command, I landed in Osorno when Contreras was there at the Engineers Regiment. I was secretary general of Patria y Libertad and I didn't want to make it so official, so I told him “Johny, you are in charge of these contacts.” And Schaeffer left to meet with Contreras.

But the story continues, we are not going to play the good little boys here… When the movement dissolves, that whole harder group of the Operations Front, from the human point of view, felt the immediate displacement—which we all felt—from power, from the Junta, leaving us aside.

To young people who had given themselves to this cause with everything, the fact that a general or a colonel tells you “look, here you have a TIFA and you are going to be able to help the Armed Forces in this noble mission of national reconstruction.” Obviously, 30% of the Operations Front constituted the civilian base of the DINA, against my will.

I am not saying it now: I said it at that time. And those I could convince—few—can attest to that. And it is not because I am smarter or a better person, I considered that it was burning oneself unnecessarily in a cruel repression because we knew that there were not 15,000 foreign guerrillas nor that the MIR had another two thousand. We all knew how much we measured, how much force there was.

– How did Pablo Rodríguez’s leadership function in that sense?

– It remained intact from the point of view of the ideologue, the politician. And since he managed to arrive before the coup, to give that press conference, he immediately assumed the defense of those of us who were prisoners on the 11th.

I was released on September 24. Pablo continued to inspire the ideological line, and the operational part, because of everything I had done, fell to me. It is very difficult to convince many people that I stopped this even before the coup, when I turned myself in.

– After the coup, who assumes the leadership of Patria y Libertad?

– We met later, one Sunday in October, all the national leaders at the house of Enrique Turri, my lawyer and national leader of the movement. We looked at each other, we hugged, and we said “we look like a bunch of defeated people.” This was a month after the coup.

And there it is decided that the movement, even though it was officially already finished, will continue to maintain an organizational structure. And we named John Schaeffer in charge of this, with the commitment that I was going to help him.

We were very good friends and I, as a pilot, had more mobility. Pablo did not want to continue as national chief. The first trip was to Arica. I arrived on November 16, the day of my birthday, with John Schaeffer.

I requested an audience with General Odlanier Mena, I went to greet him with John. We introduced ourselves as leaders who were regrouping to give all the support to the bases of Arica in this work of salvation.

And there he tells me: “Look, Mr. Thieme, do you remember what happened to Manuel Rodríguez?” I had read that they said he was walking around disguised as a soldier. “Yes—I told him—and he ended up assassinated in Tiltil, as the song says.

But the song doesn't say that the pigs ate him; the body was left out in the sun for a week and no one picked it up.” “Well, take him as an example for yourself,” Mena replied. And he added: “I don't want anyone here—hitting the table—organizing movements or giving us support, because we don't need it, so tell your people to dedicate themselves to working, not to meet ever again, and you go back to Santiago to do your things.” That was the end of the reorganization of the movement.

– And did you obey?

– Not so much, because the Rafael Cañas headquarters continued to function by inertia. John Schaeffer went every so often and I did not. Until one day in mid-December '73, I went one afternoon and I saw that the thing was more bustling than before, with more people, with more work, secretaries, and there I saw for the first time long lists of names and names of people from the left who worked in the ministries.

Well, later we know what happened to those people…

– What do you mean?

– That the civilian DINA started working there, six months before the official decree came out. All those people no longer responded to the political-ideological command of Pablo Rodríguez or to my operational command: they responded to the military structure, specifically, to Contreras.

– And who exercised the civilian command?

– Vicente Gutiérrez, a former Navy officer who articulated the Operational Brigades, Captain Gutiérrez, with courses in Quantico, a great professional, but a wretch from the human point of view, a savage.

He directed all that. And I got into a fight with him there and it was the last time I saw him. And the last time I stepped on Rafael Cañas. And all this can be certified by Blanca Echeverría, with whom I still did not have a personal relationship, and who in her good faith was working there as a secretary for this individual.

I told her: “Blanquita, you get out now, you come with me.” She was the only one who listened to me.

– How much money did you receive from the CIA?

– Well, it is in the declassified public records that Patria y Libertad received about 35 thousand or 38 thousand dollars. If the CIA had rung my doorbell and arrived with 100 thousand dollars, I would have taken them.

But it didn't happen to me. And I spent my factory, my resources, I practically left my family on the street and it cost me a divorce. And those thirty-something thousand dollars were for the National Civic Movement Patria y Libertad.

There is a confusion there that has not yet been clarified. Because that movement, with an Alessandrist contingent, was formed as a result of the election of September 4, in which Salvador Allende obtains the first majority.

The objective of that Civic Movement Patria y Libertad was to pressure Congress to elect Alessandri. That plan failed and Schneider was assassinated, this movement dissolves and it is in that period—if they review the American documentation—where these dollars fall.

I have nothing to do with it, because I did not participate in that movement. What's more, I admit that I was going to leave Chile, I was in Argentina doing a market study to install a furniture company, because I did not want to live in a socialist country.

– But you did receive resources from the War Command that Orlando Sáenz spoke about.

– That yes. Orlando Sáenz was a member of Patria y Libertad, an advisor on the Invisible Front.

– Who else formed that Invisible Front?

– There were some who were not nationalists, but participated in some meetings, like Enrique Campos Menéndez, Álvaro Puga, Benjamín Matte when he was still president of the National Agricultural Society, and other businessmen.

I am going to declassify them all in the memoirs I am writing. And among them was Juan Costabal, general manager of Ladeco (Línea Aérea del Cobre), a great pilot and the biggest contributor that Patria y Libertad had.

Every month Juan Eduardo Hurtado, our head of finance, would go to Cerrillos and collect a significant and regular figure that this businessman gave us. He was even going to contribute a DC 3 plane to transport people to Argentina, and the weapons from Buenos Aires.

The whole logistical issue was going to be done with Ladeco. For me, Ladeco was Juan Costabal’s. Later I learned that Juan Costabal’s partner was Agustín Edwards.

– What role did Jaime Guzmán have in Patria y Libertad?

– Jaime Guzmán participated in the founding of the Nationalist Front Patria y Libertad. He was at the event at the Nataniel Stadium. This alliance between a Pablo Rodríguez of radical, secular origin, with a member of the oligarchy of this ultra-conservative, Opus Dei, and Francoist nationalism, appears spurious.

But at that time Guzmán presented himself as a Falangist, as a Joseantoniano (José Antonio Primo de Rivera). There was apparently a closeness, an ideological affinity to join gremialismo with this incipient nationalism.

And it made a lot of sense to all of us. Time passes and in mid-72 a conflict apparently arises between Jaime and me. And they give the excuse—I refer to Jaime Guzmán, Eduardo Boetsch, Gisella Silva, all these Alessandrists entrenched in Patria y Libertad, who help form the movement, members of the Political Council and the Visible and Invisible Front—of a struggle between Jaime and me over the violentist thing, because there we were training the youth for street fighting, because we wanted to take the street away from the left, with nunchucks, karate, and all that stuff.

There Jaime gives as an excuse that he does not want his gremialistas taking these paramilitary courses and he takes all his gremialismo with him. And, of course, later we learned that Jaime had already established a holy alliance with the Chicago Boys. The structure of the “Ladrillo” is armed and the conjunction Catholic University-University of

Chicago—oligarchic right.

– Were you already preparing for the post-coup period? – Exactly. One in which we were not included. Some analysts say that, deep down, they armed us, left us running, gave us enough rope, and then walked away because they said, ‘these guys can continue on their own.’ – And it has already been proven that the tanquetazo served as an experimental model for the real coup. – That is correct; all things considered, yes. 22 people died, Patria y Libertad was destroyed as a political organization, but it served to articulate the great American-business-right-wing masterstroke.

But I must say that at that time, I did not feel used. Whether out of naivety, idealism, or whatever you want to call it, I felt I was in a revolutionary cause; I had a vocation for power, and I thought we were going to access quotas of power. – Did you ever kill anyone? – No.

But my conscience is pained by the three or four deaths that occurred as a consequence of directives I gave on the operational side. I am also pained by the 22 deaths from the tanquetazo. But revolutions are not made with words.

That is a Chilean invention that was not the case. – What is your opinion of Salvador Allende? – When I was a prisoner on the morning of September 11, 1973, in the Public Jail, in the worst conditions, covered with newspapers, mixed with criminals, very mistreated, and as the hours passed, around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, my brother Ricardo—an officer who had provided me with uniforms and badges—arrived with his patrol and told me that Allende had committed suicide, I cried.

I saw a coup d'état that was not as clean as those of '25 or '24, but well-executed, with an Allende detained in the worst-case scenario. And if there was corruption and political errors to be judged, it had to be done under the rule of the Constitution, respecting him and all his people.

I was shocked by all that excessive violence. Let us ask ourselves: Institutional, professional Armed Forces with excellent training, how is a coup organized and Allende is not detained at 6 in the morning at Tomás Moro?

Let us assume that the "Chilean style" did not work there, but why was he not detained on the way either, and why was he allowed to enter La Moneda? The logic of this indicates that the imprint of the coup, dictated by the Americans, had to have a violent, exemplary force on a continental and global scale.

In the chess game of the Cold War, the American strategy aimed to weaken movements similar to the UP that were brewing in other latitudes and growing in France, Italy, and Spain, a phenomenon recognized by Nixon and Kissinger.

I return to Allende: a great idealist of a utopian cause, because he bet on support from the other bloc, and we all knew that the Soviet bloc had already arranged with the Americans not to help Chile or Allende.

It was utopian and naive, as he failed to understand that the game of politics is played with power and not with ideas and projects, no matter how good they may be. – How do you see Pinochet in this process? – No one knew him: he was on the list of the "stopper generals," along with (Orlando) Urbina, (José María) Sepúlveda, (Guillermo) Pickering, and (Carlos) Prats.

I back up what I am going to say now with the information held by General Augusto Lutz, head of Army Intelligence, who contacted me regarding the famous .30 caliber machine guns that we were left with after the tanquetazo.

That is where I became connected with Lutz, who, through Saturnino López, a leader of the movement, gave me the outline of what was happening with the Army, of where things were heading. And Pinochet was seen over there, not among the Marxist generals—a hoax, because General Prats—whom I respect a lot—and all those professional generals were not Marxists but constitutionalists.

And in the end, they were right: it was not the path. And Pinochet was a great opportunist, a great latecomer out of visceral opportunism. – Because the command of the coup was held by Merino and Leigh… – Merino, and the heart of the coup was Leigh.

So Pinochet, a general whose career was already finished, sees an opportunity for power and frustrates a revolution by leading it down a path in which he not only did immense damage to the country but to his own institution.

And finally to himself. – As soon as the Military Junta is installed, the competition between Jaime Guzmán and Pablo Rodríguez for the seal of the new regime breaks out, isn't that so? – It was not competition but a frank internal war between the civilian sectors that supported the coup before, during, and after.

Pablo Rodríguez, the one who opposes the neoliberal project of this savage capitalism that executes the privatization of the national heritage acquired over 50 years of effort; the one who raises his voice against the Chicago project, who debates as an equal with Milton Friedman, Sergio de Castro, and who ultimately does not sign the Political Constitution created by Guzmán and his circle, ends up finally tied to the military government and defending the dictator.

It has no explanation. – But you knew him well… – Although it may also be utopian, the loyalty I owe Pablo for those three years lived will not be broken by anything or anyone, because it is the most important stage of my life.

There I met a humanist, idealistic, generous Pablo, with a country project that I share to this day when I reread his writings, his speeches, and his books, and I see that that is why we bet everything and people from Patria y Libertad died.

This is why they shot my brother, this is why everything that happened, happened. Well, I want to hold on to that Pablo Rodríguez. I am still not capable of judging him. – Could it be that you are clinging to something that never existed? – I am not of an age to play games.

I have no political ambitions; my only commitment is to the truth, to present myself before my children and give them explanations for the country we handed them, which I do not like. It has been more than ten years since I saw Pablo Rodríguez, exactly since '89.

That time I thought the last train was passing through the station of this project; it was also a dream of mine, to reorganize the movement with a presidential candidacy for Pablo Rodríguez. I gave up a lot of things, my denunciation, my solitary position, criticized by all of them, and I gave in to see if the train would pass with Pablo Rodríguez, a candidate independent of Pinochet.

And it was not so. And that was as far as we got. “John Schaeffer (a leader of Patria y Libertad) dedicated himself to traveling around Chile while I was in Argentina, making contacts with commanders, and there he met Manuel Contreras, Carlos Forestier, Manuel Torres, etc.

Starting in early June '73, the first agreement for a coup began.” – Why did Pablo Rodríguez finally not accept? – Because he is essentially a Pinochetista, and his discourse is one of gratitude until the last day of his life for this magnificent work of General Pinochet in having saved this country from communism.

Which was not the case. I have his book—"Between Democracy and Tyranny"—and when doubts come to me about who is the one who strayed, I read it… In the end, it was just a speech, a thing of the moment. – To what influence have you been most sensitive: power, wealth, or fear? – To power, although I did not achieve it and I am no longer going to achieve it.

And at several moments in my youth, in a time when I felt I had quotas of power, I was arrogant and delusional. That arrogance made me give everything for this revolutionary project. – And commit errors… – The first was trying to create a paramilitary power, to take the movement down a violent path.

It was not necessary. And if it had to be done, those who used weapons could have done it. I was wrong; it is important to say that. Facing a Pablo Rodríguez who, until September 11, 1973, refused to create a paramilitary force, and everything I did was against his will, even twisting his arm, he was right because he always said that the Armed Forces of Chile were not going to divide.

No one could move him from that conviction. The first political error I committed was that. – And if you think Pablo Rodríguez changed, did he do it under the influence of what? – Never fear. The doubt remains between power and money, but they also go hand in hand. – Why does it irritate you that Pablo Rodríguez defends Pinochet? – It has bothered me for 31 years, because although it is true that Patria y Libertad promoted a military uprising, it thought of it as something that would respect the Rule of Law or that would reinstate that apparent institutional breakdown of the UP.

We never thought we were going to have a dictatorship. So, it already bothered me that Pablo supported a government that became distorted, that did not fulfill what was promised in the Declaration of Principles of '74, because that declaration is damning regarding the military's work and Pinochet's role.

The facts destroy the military government; they destroy the good intention, the patriotism, the nationalism, the decency, the humanism, everything that was proclaimed on September 11. – Did Pablo Rodríguez have peers in Patria y Libertad?

Or was he a solitary leader? – Pablo Rodríguez is one of the most brilliant minds I have known in my life. I have intellectual respect for him. There was no one in the movement who was his peer intellectually, nor anyone who had his charisma and magnetism.

In that era of The Beatles, John Lennon, Nicola Di Bari—I remember going to the south with Pablo, flying in my plane and listening to “Il cuore è uno zíngaro,” and Pablo almost crying. An emotional guy, open, an intellectual thug, but he had the merit of accepting, even against the grain, the opinion of those of us on the council.

Later he changed. – Other people, like Álvaro Puga, Guido Poli, and many others, also changed and stayed in the DINA. – It causes me great repugnance to have had contact with those people. It is a shame that a Mr.

Puga, for example, continues to have a platform in an electronic newspaper and is not judged as one of the main people responsible for the murders and the repression in Chile. A parasite of the process, a criminal. “We knew there were not 15,000 foreign guerrillas, nor that the MIR had another two thousand. We all knew how we measured up, how much force there was.”

HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PINOCHETS

– The years passed, and in 1992 you ended up marrying Lucía Pinochet, the eldest daughter of the man you have criticized so much. How did you arrive at that relationship? Was it a great infatuation? – As far as a man who had already failed in several marriages and who was 50 years old can fall in love.

I had a great intellectual affinity with Lucía, because she is a political animal. Let us remember that Lucía came from a DC [Christian Democrat] background, and against everything that some so-called nationalists say today, if we are going to find political affinities between the nationalism of Patria y Libertad and any party, it would have to be with the DC, because it was Falangist.

National Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera—that is, the same seed as ours. Besides, maybe it was hidden in my conscience, but Lucía also has the concept of power. She learned it. The reality is that we were two self-exiled Chileans in Miami.

There, Pinochet, Thieme, and no one else counted. And it was enriching because that relationship had no political connotation. We started in Miami to build a new life, fighting side by side. I with my furniture and she with her things.

And there we made the mistake of returning to Chile: that was the end of the marriage. Because as soon as we got off the plane, she was no longer the Lucía from Miami, and neither was I. – How was your relationship with your father-in-law? – I met him the same day I met President Aylwin.

On September 19, 1992, I came to meet my father-in-law; we were going to get married in November. On the Day of the Glories of the Armed Forces, when this impressive cocktail party is held in Lo Curro, where all the institutional and de facto power groups gather around exquisite shrimp, with champagne, whiskey, in the greatest harmony, Lucía managed to get me invited, and at one point she says, ‘now I am going to introduce you to my father.’ We approached the center of that gigantic room, Pinochet in his gala uniform, I nervous, and we greeted each other very courteously, and he winked at me and introduced me to Aylwin. “I present the president to you,” he says. And I remained in the circle. A year or two later, I came again. Aylwin was no longer there, but Frei, the same scene, and suddenly, I was talking to Frei, a silence falls in the room, all the bustle stops. ‘What is happening?’ I ask. And what was happening was that Minister Ricardo Lagos was entering. – Was that all the contact you had with your in-laws? – No, sometimes on these trips I would come on vacation and go to Bucalemu or El Melocotón, family things, but as a visitor. There was never an argument. I spent 10 years outside of Chile, so you see things from another perspective from the United States, and arriving as a visitor… Later, when I returned to Chile and got involved again in certain activities with study and analysis centers, I began to dimension that experience and see things through the prism of power or what remained of power. – Did Pinochet continue to maintain the habit of power? – Absolutely. I believe that until the day he handed over the commander-in-chief position, he was the man of power in Chile through his Constitution, his economic program already consolidated through the articulation of the de facto powers and the de facto party itself, the UDI, a creation of Pinochet, an undemocratic party, because the UDI would not have the representation it has in Parliament if it were not for this undemocratic Constitution which, through the binomial system, allows 30% to have 50% of Parliament. It is a farce today to talk about this Chile being so democratic, about this example of transition. A country that continues with a Constitution that is not democratic and that is so perversely well-designed—one must give credit to Guzmán and company—that it does not allow for modifications. Brilliant! – How have you seen the transition from when he left the commander-in-chief position, when he still had all the power, to today when he is seen alone? – We all know that before Pinochet left power and put the sash on Aylwin, this tacit pact had been signed that Pinochet, the economic model, and the Constitution would not be touched. If they removed a bolt from any of these institutions, the building would come down. And Pinochet knew it. Well, the bolts were removed after he left, and now we are in the dismantling of the machine. It has been slow, 15 years, but we are moving forward. Augusto Pinochet, Lucía Hiriart, and family members – How do you explain his fall now? – What happened in Chile starting with the '73 coup is of a gravity that has no parallel in all of history. With everything this dictatorship has cost the country and all Chileans, that finally, 15 years later, the truth is beginning to be known is the minimum that could be expected. That it happens to Pinochet while he is alive is better. I do not believe in hell, I do not believe in God; what one does, one pays for here—it usually happens, and it is happening. Chile continues to be a country of fiction. On the economic level, there is talk of the success of an exemplary model, and that is false. Chile is like a cyst in the region with its neoliberal model. If the minimum democratic keys existed in Chile for the people and the workers to express themselves, even the SMEs, we would have a piquetero proposal like the Argentine one. But of course, a country that lived 17 years with the military boot, where they devastated the neighborhoods and where even the right to assembly is not fully in force—what democracy and freedom are we talking about! Chile is a myth, a country frustrated and broken in its human development. – Isn't it a paradox that many businessmen are beginning, starting with the Riggs accounts, to distance themselves from Pinochet while Pablo Rodríguez remains unscathed as his shield? – I do not know if the businessmen are abandoning him, because there the right shows itself as it has been historically: if you look at the history of Chile, the military has been there for 120 years, not to wage wars but to repress the workers. And that is repeated. This right, in its public discourse, separates itself from him, but in private—and I know this for a fact—it fully justifies him. Many even criticize Pinochet and the Army for not having killed more people and all the communists. I knew them in the first years, and I know them today in the social circle in which I move. I have not had the courage to pull the curtain on many people in the so-called Chilean society, and there I see in private that the issue of human rights is not only justified but continues to be exalted as one of the great works of the regime. Now, in Chile, there exists this hypocrisy consubstantial to certain sectors of power for whom it does not matter if people are killed or tortured, but if they steal and are discovered, that is indeed serious… – Would you say they do not care to know that the Army itself admits to having kidnapped them and even having thrown the forcibly disappeared into the sea? – No, because they are people of great hypocrisy: they drive Mercedes Benz, they travel a lot to tropical beach paradises, but they have very little culture, and they have a lot of the barbarian left in them. I saw them before the coup, how they pushed us and tried to make Patria y Libertad just a shock group available to defend companies, farms, and properties. It was a constant process of clarifying things to them and "disappointing them." After the 11th, thanks to Pinochet, an ideology of repression is imposed that is born in Opus Dei, which in '74 invites Escrivá de Balaguer to give them his blessing for the repression they were intellectually directing through Jaime Guzmán. It is Jaime Guzmán who warns the military and the Junta that if they do not repress strongly, Chile will suffer serious problems. And then this saintly beatified man comes to tell them that blood—in this case, communist—at certain moments in history was well spilled. And with that, he gives the green light to all this ultra-right to politically sustain the dictator in his bloody repression. That is where the ideological matrix of the repression and its justification is built. These sectors are the great economic powers of this country. And I know for a fact that these people have not changed: they see this Pinochet, harassed by the truth and the weight of his own errors, as a victim. – But they do not dare to defend him publicly. – Because they are cowards—they have always been—but they allow themselves, within their cowardice, to criticize and attack General Juan Emilio Cheyre, a commander-in-chief who is finally putting the Army on the professional line that corresponds to it. – Did the Riggs accounts of Pinochet surprise you? – No, because as I have participated for a long time in the study and analysis of the problems of the arms race, with a study center that I formed, I dedicated myself to analyzing the issue of arms purchases, and from there I quickly arrived at the Rayo rocket. And when the Army, still commanded by Pinochet, decides on the purchase and the strategic alliance with Royal Ordnance and brings in Famae and the Army, I was horrified. The people who studied with me were too, because we knew it was absolutely incorrect and that much more convenient options were discarded, such as the Brazilian or Israeli proposals. When I raised my voice about this in front of some general—with several witnesses—and I said how it was possible that this option was decided, which costs double, nearly US$300 million, against the heritage, the interest of Chile and the Army, an expert in these subjects told me: ‘Look Roberto, get real, 10% of US$300 million is much more interesting than 10% of US$150 million.’ And with that argument, I learned how this works.

DEFEATED NATIONALIST AND ABANDONED SON

– Who is Roberto Thieme today? – At 61 years old, with 6 children—three men and three women—and 3 granddaughters, my only success in life, I am a failed and frustrated revolutionary because what Chile is today, frankly, I detest. – In Hitler's Germany, would you have been a Nazi? – If it had fallen to me, like my father, to live through the Second World War, yes.

My father was not only a Nazi but was an agent and one of the leaders of German espionage in Chile; he rescued part of the crew of the German cruiser that sank in Uruguay and was imprisoned when the Chilean government, due to American pressure, fell into line with the Allies against the Axis, and he was sentenced to three years for espionage.

Of course, if I had been an adult, naturally I would have been in that organization, making it clear that, after the war, we realize the Holocaust and all the atrocities of the Nazi regime are absolutely unacceptable and unjustifiable. – Did your father also consider them unacceptable? – Like Miguel Serrano and certain Chilean groups, who define themselves as nationalists and who are Nazi hangers-on, because the Nazi phenomenon has nothing to do with the history of Chile, my father denied the Holocaust until the day of his death.

As almost all Germans in Chile did, all those in the south whom I knew very well during the UP era when I went on my tours to the south to organize the Patria y Libertad movement from Osorno to Puerto Montt, and I would find myself in these meetings with these Chileanized Germans who put all their insignia and decorations and swastikas everywhere.

The first thing I would tell them was, “take this out of here. I am a Chilean nationalist; I am inspired by Portales, by O’Higgins, by Rodríguez, Carrera, Balmaceda…” – So can you understand that there are people who continue to deny the human rights violations in Chile? – No, because the Nazism of the Holocaust is with a ruined, annihilated Germany, with 20 million dead Germans, with cities flattened, where those Germans could not have access to information about what had happened with Hitler.

And when Germany manages to have the vision of these horrors, the Army, the people, its citizens, its children, and its institutions are denazified. And in Chile, we all knew from the first years of the military government what was happening.

There is complicity by omission and subsequently by action, because today it is a political action to sustain a criminal regime—as Pinochet's dictatorship was. It is more serious in this case. – Do you condemn your father to that point? – With my father, the truth is that there is a personal issue.

He divorced my mother when I was 5 years old, and I did not see him for many years, ten or fifteen, and when I reunited with him and I was an adult, we got into these topics, and I realized that we were not going to be able to get along in any sense.

The affection had been lost. And even if I am a failure, I have at least the right to be a dilettante, so I am not going to be one with a Nazi, on principle, and that meant the end of everything. – It is hard to drag the lack of a father. – I drag a strong lack.

What is more, I will confess to you that I have asked myself for 33 years why I, a son of Germans, got so involved in the Chilean process, without having grandparents buried here and without having history in Chile.

I think that the one who was my affective father, my stepfather Ernesto Müller, also a Nazi German and member of the Republican Militia, in the dinner table conversations, was a fascinating guy, and, of course, with his Germany defeated, he was forever marked by that.

He was a scholar of the Second World War, and I swallowed it along with the primer. All this issue of the Cold War I lived through my relatives in Berlin, my mother born in Dresden, my family that loses everything—properties, fields in Dresden that remain on the communist side—my father was from Leipzig, cradle of German music, and that historical, physical, and economic heritage of my family remains behind the Iron Curtain, so the dose of anti-communism and anti-Sovietism that my family subliminally put into me.

And there is the shock that it produces in me that Allende is elected president. – The fear of repeating history. – Of course, I swallowed that this was going to fall into the Soviet orbit, and I swallowed the story of the Russian tanks in front of La Moneda, the CIA's campaign of terror, and all the campaigns.

And all that is empowered with my information, and that explains this Roberto Thieme, extremist, head-on… – Do your affective lacks, your ghosts, the family baggage explain something of your romantic failure, your inability to form a family? – I think so, of course, of course, because there is the abandonment by the father and then the abandonment by my mother.

When this marriage, her second one with my stepfather, goes into crisis, they send me to Argentina. I was 9 years old when they put me on a plane and sent me to Argentina to an unknown, strange family.

I cried for about three months there, until I got my mother out of my system too. But the abandonment remains. Today I am clear that the abandonments in childhood also generate the abandonments that one goes on to produce: I was abandoning my women under the same lack. – Did you repeat the model? – Exactly, without justifying myself, but that is how it was.

Unfortunately, I learned it very late. But well, let's change the subject. – Why do you feel better with the armor of intellectual rigor and forget the abandoned child? – It is that if I detach myself from that intellectual rigor… Look, I have no tears left, nor the capacity for astonishment. – And when you look back and see that little boy crying in a foreign house and country, without a father and without a mother and without a war? – It makes me sad!

But since I have my own children, I say: it doesn't matter anymore, these are the compensations of life. I try not to produce in my children what was produced in me, but I don't know how I am doing with that. by Mónica González

Source: ciper.cl, October 4, 2023