Case 113.075: Episode of unlawful coercion against students from Temuco

42.- In his statement at page 629, Güido Alberto Poli Garaycochea, a lawyer, asserted that he had provided services to the National Information Center (CNI) from 1977 until February 1990, in the Legal Advisory Department.

This Department reported to the Director, who in 1986 was General Gordon. The mission of this department consisted of responding to official letters from the Courts, as well as reviewing decree-laws and processing cases in Local Police Courts regarding traffic accidents.

It also provided assistance to Army personnel and fulfilled any other requirements of the Director. The head of this Department was Víctor Gálvez, and it also included Miguel Ángel Parra Vásquez, Marcelo Elissalde Martel, Maximiliano Cortés, Miguel Ángel Poblete, and Jorge Erpel Inzunza, among others.

There were also legal clerks, among whom he remembers Gonzalo Ovalle Maturana. Regarding the event that is the subject of this investigation, he indicated that he does not remember anything about the guerrilla school detected in Lautaro, nor does he remember having sent Gonzalo Ovalle to Temuco to advise the CNI personnel in that city.

However, it is possible that this occurred. This request for legal support in the regions was something infrequent, which was always authorized by the Director or the Deputy Director of the CNI directly to the Head of the Department, all at the request of the Head of the regional offices, who at that time was Colonel Leddy.

The mission of the lawyer who went to the regions to provide legal support consisted of drafting official letters in an orderly manner for the prompt delivery of detainees to the competent court.

Source: Judiciary, October 30, 2009

CNI lawyer prosecuted for covering up the homicide of former intendant Acuña

Mario Daniel Acuña, a PS militant and public official, was murdered in his home on August 13, 1979.

The resolution by Minister Hormazábal was confirmed by the Court of Appeals of La Serena. According to the evidence, inside his home, agents shot Mario Daniel Acuña Sepúlveda in the head, whose body was subsequently destroyed using dynamite.

The Court of Appeals of La Serena confirmed the prosecution of lawyer Guido Poli Garaycochea, issued last July by the minister on extraordinary assignment for human rights violation cases, Vicente Hormazábal, in the capacity of accessory to two crimes of qualified homicide.

These illicit acts were perpetrated in August 1979. In a unanimous ruling, the First Chamber of the appellate court—composed of ministers Marta Maldonado, Juan Carlos Espinosa, and lawyer (i) Marcos López—confirmed the appealed resolution that prosecuted Poli Garaycochea as an accessory to the consummated crime of qualified homicide of the socialist militant and former intendant of Antofagasta, Daniel Acuña, and the frustrated crime of qualified homicide of his son, Roberto Acuña. 39 years have passed since the attack in which former intendant of Antofagasta Mario Acuña was killed in his home in La Serena. According to the evidence gathered during the investigation phase, the minister on assignment established that in the early hours of August 13, 1979, in a previously prepared operation, a group of approximately six agents from the National Intelligence Center (CNI) of La Serena arrived at the home of Daniel Acuña Sepúlveda. At the property's gate, the agents fired at Roberto Acuña, who managed to flee the scene; meanwhile, inside the home, three agents shot Acuña Sepúlveda in the head, whose body was subsequently destroyed using dynamite. Following the events, the CNI entrusted a lawyer from the security agency to prepare the false version that would be presented to the court. To achieve this objective, Guido Poli Garaycochea, together with the local CNI chief, Patricio Padilla Villén, instructed the agents who participated in the events on what they should declare before the justice system, maneuvers intended to cover up the illicit acts.

Source: diarioeldia.cl, November 13, 2018

Contreras: History of an untouchable. The DINA's Italian connection

INTERFERENCIA is presenting to its readers, in a dozen chapters, the book that narrates the biography of the late General (R) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, former head of the DINA during the civil-military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

We believe this is a way not to forget one of the darkest chapters in the contemporary history of our country. Manuel Contreras laid the foundations of the DINA on the experiences of anti-communist struggles recorded in other regions of the world during the 1950s and 60s.

From those irregular, cruel, and hidden wars, the colonel extracted the main sketches to organize the secret police of the Chilean military dictatorship. The doctrine of hemispheric security, dictated from the United States and put into practice by the Brazilian military, intersected with the recipes used by Francoism in Spain and by other nationalist groups, exacerbated by the rise of the Marxist left on all continents.

In Chile, a crucial, though little-publicized, aspect was the access to the DINA, in the capacity of officials, of a group of lawyers who had participated in the coup attempts prior to the advent of Salvador Allende to the Presidency of the Republic and/or in the political-editorial efforts parallel to or born from such initiatives: the magazines Tacna, Tizona, and Orden Nuevo.

Among others, it is worth mentioning Guido Poli Garaycochea, Iván Alvear Ravanal, Víctor Manuel Avilés, and Miguel Ángel Parra. Almost simultaneously, several militants of the dissolved Nationalist Front Patria y Libertad also joined the DINA as members of the Citizen Intelligence Brigade.

Such individuals provided services ad honorem, and it must be specified that lawyer Pablo Rodríguez Grez, founder and top leader of that movement, never approved or encouraged the link of his former comrades to Pinochet's secret police.

From the end of 1974, Colonel Contreras, based on his nationalist ideas and possibly with the intention of tempering the pragmatic criteria displayed by the civilian collaborators of the Pinochet government, financed the publication of the magazine Avanzada—the precursor to the National Advancement Movement—which, with a limited circulation but wide distribution among military and university institutions, aspired to provide a doctrinal platform of support for the military regime.

Some of those copies are in the National Library, and among the signatories of various articles appear Guido Poli, Iván Alvear Ravanal, Vittorio di Girólamo, Sixto V. González, Pablo Rodríguez, Osvaldo Lira, A.

Santa María Prieto, Patricio Montero C., Álvaro Ortúzar Santa María, Enrique Ortúzar Santa María, Lincoyán Guerrero, Víctor Manuel Avilés M., Guillermo Henríquez Alfaro, Rafael Ortiz Cuevas, Jaime Tramón Castillo, Andrés Benavente Urbina, Ramón Callís Arrigorriaga, Raúl Arancibia Cerda, Jorge Soto Vásquez, Jorge Salazar H., Eulogio Parizot, Víctor Gálvez Gajardo, Ernesto Witt, and Lucía B. de Montenegro.

Contreras also supported the appointment of Misael Galleguillos Vásquez as Secretary General of the Guilds, an entity dependent on the General Secretariat of Government, from where political work with young people and women was also promoted.

Galleguillos, then a university professor in Valparaíso, was one of the founders of the National Syndicalist Revolutionary Movement (MRNS), a political group born in 1952 that inherited part of the doctrinal baggage of Chilean nationalism from the 1930s.

Upon assuming the indicated position, he was assumed to be capable, together with a team of collaborators, of creating a broad base of union support for the military government, a purpose that was achieved to some extent.

In general, the DINA maintained excellent relations with the nationalist militancy, an aspect in which the invitation that Colonel Contreras extended to the priest Osvaldo Lira, co-founder of the MRNS, to assume the general chaplaincy of that intelligence agency, which fell, upon Lira's recommendation, to the priest Horacio Spencer, should be highlighted.

At the end of 1974, Colonel Contreras decided to expand his scope of action to European countries, particularly those that harbored Chilean exiles considered dangerous. To that end, Major Hugo Prado Contreras, attached to the DINA, was commissioned to make contact with European far-right groups.

The Spanish Falange, the Warriors of Christ the King, Fuerza Nueva, and the Spanish Center for Friends of Europe (CEDADE) in Spain; Nouvelle Ecole in France; and Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nero in Italy, were some of the most important links established by Major Prado.

In all of them, he found wide receptivity to spread the Chilean nationalist revolution led by Pinochet. On June 9, 1973, Generalissimo Francisco Franco appointed Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco as President of the Spanish Government, the man who until that moment had maintained his enormous power in the shadows and who was glimpsed as the clear political heir of the elderly caudillo.

After being sworn in at the Palace of El Pardo, the admiral decided to focus on a task he considered a priority to begin the path toward political transition: to annul the growing impulses of Basque separatism.

Carrero Blanco had never agreed that the anti-terrorist fight should remain only in the hands of the police. He then decided to create the Central Documentation Service of the Presidency of the Government (CESED) and appointed as its head an officer of his total confidence, Colonel José Ignacio San Martín López.

Both agreed that to exterminate ETA, it was necessary to use implacable anti-terrorist techniques, typical of irregular warfare. They also agreed that for that task, it would be best to try to obtain some foreigners.

Mariano Sánchez Covisa, leader of the far-right members of the organization Warriors of Christ the King, very close to the Francoist officialdom, put San Martín in contact with an Italian neo-fascist who had arrived in Spain in 1971 fleeing justice in his country.

His name was Stefano Delle Chiaie. On September 12, 1973, the day after the military coup in Chile, Admiral Carrero Blanco received Delle Chiaie and Valerio Borghese, the "Black Prince," in his office, who had been involved in several coup attempts in his country as the virtual new Duce of neo-fascism.

Delle Chiaie had also linked up with other ultra groups such as the Spanish Falange, led by Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, a former Franco minister; and Fuerza Nueva, led by Blas Piñar, a man who had emerged from Catholic Action and who remained very close to the main leaders of the European far-right, among them Giorgio Almirante, head of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), and the former French paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of Forces Nouvelles.

San Martín and Delle Chiaie understood each other well. Very soon, some 70 neo-fascists belonging to Avanguardia Nazionale, Ordine Nuovo, and other Italian groups were installed in Spain, very willing to confront ETA, especially in France.

All this in exchange for certain logistical and financial support, which Carrero Blanco promised to provide them through the Navy Information Service. The plans, however, seemed to be cut short when at 9:30 in the morning on December 20, 1973, a powerful bomb exploded under the heavy black Dodge Dart 3700 automobile, weighing more than 1,700 kilos, in which Admiral Carrero Blanco was traveling.

The explosion launched the vehicle 35 meters into the air, from where, after colliding with the cornice of a church, it fell into the inner courtyard of a Jesuit residence. Carrero Blanco and his driver surprisingly survived, dying minutes later on the way to the hospital.

The bodyguard who accompanied them perished instantly. The commotion caused by the assassination opened the floodgates for the dirty war against ETA. One of the main agencies in that silent and cruel fight became the Central Information Brigade, under the command of police commissioner Roberto Conesa, who began to hire mercenaries of various nationalities.

Conesa searched among the groups of the Spanish far-right, the Italian neo-fascists, and former members of the Secret Army Organization (OAS), harshly fought by the Civil Action Service (SAC) created by General Charles de Gaulle after several attacks against him.

Jean-Pierre Cherid, a former sergeant of the French paratroopers who opposed the independence of Algeria, was the contact between Conesa and the former members of the OAS; Delle Chiaie, the link with the Italian neo-fascists.

The Italian gave Conesa a list of collaborators who were ready to act against the etarras in their French sanctuary. Among them were Mario Ricci, Pier Luigi Concutelli, Elio Massagrande, Mario Tutti, and Carlos Cicuttini.

In September 1975, the former Carabineros sergeant of Chile, José Cuevas Segura, was presented in Madrid as "Mr. Commander Cárdenas, of the Chilean Army," to the Warriors of Christ the King. The author of the presentation was the Army Lieutenant Colonel, Hugo Prado Contreras, at that time a member of the DINA, and commissioned in Europe to obtain support for the DINA's international operations.

From 1981, after the period of the disbanding of the best-known DINA agents, Cuevas was hired at the central headquarters of INACAP, in Santiago, by the rector of that institute, Colonel (R) Oscar Coddou Vivanco, to serve in the position of official of the Special Services Office, an internal control and security body, in charge of Lieutenant Colonel (R) Alfredo Palacios, an officer recommended by Inés Pinochet Ugarte, sister of the then-President of the Republic.

Cuevas's relative friendship with Coddou began in Spain, in 1975, when the colonel was serving as a military attaché in that country and, as such, facilitated Prado's contacts with the far-rightists who swarmed the Iberian Peninsula.

Cuevas had been Manuel Contreras's driver in the DINA since 1974. In those functions, Commander Prado noticed him. He had a better bearing than the average Carabineros non-commissioned officer, and his level of interaction with high spheres was acceptable.

He could pass as "Mr. Commander Cárdenas, of the Chilean Army" and, consequently, establish high-level contacts on the condition of not opening his mouth except to speak of "the Chilean crusade against international communism," of "Pinochet, leader of the Christian West," or of the "common heroic style that unites Chilean nationalists with their comrades in Europe." However, the dealings with the Spanish fascists were not as fruitful as Contreras, Espinoza, and Commander Prado himself expected.

The youth of the Spanish Falange raised objections to their members serving as links for the DINA, even despite the generous promises of financial aid made by the representatives of the Chilean secret service.

On July 19, 1975, the American electronic technician Michael Townley, an operational agent of the DINA, under the false name of Kenneth Enyart, left Pudahuel airport in Santiago bound for Brazil. From there, he later flew to Madrid to meet his wife, Mariana Callejas, and the anti-Castro Cuban Virgilio Paz.

The three were to establish a network of contacts in Europe, carry out some intimidation operations against exiles, and collect data for the DINA. Paz traveled alone to Northern Ireland to photograph the camps where the British held members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

The DINA's assignment was to counter the British campaign against the Pinochet regime. Townley and Callejas, meanwhile, headed to France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. In all those countries, they managed to weave a secret plot of informants and collaborators.

At the end of September, they received new orders from Chile: they had to travel to Italy. They went down the European routes from Germany to Austria and entered Italy, heading to Rome. There was the DINA's target: Bernardo Leighton, the man who was striving to achieve the unification of all opponents of the Augusto Pinochet regime.

Townley called an Italian by phone, agreeing to meet at a downtown restaurant. Upon arriving with Mariana Callejas and Virgilio Paz, they met two subjects, one of whom called himself Alfredo Di Stefano and seemed to be the boss.

His real name—unknown then to Townley—was Stefano Delle Chiaie, accompanied at that moment by Pierluigi Pagliai, nicknamed "Gigi." The Italians said they belonged to the Youth Front of the Italian Social Movement.

They added, however, that they were not at all satisfied with their bosses, who had despised the use of weapons to prevent the advance of communism. They wanted action and to forge an alliance that would fight against the "reds" on all continents, without truce and with all the means at their disposal.

For this, they had gathered in their own movement, Avanguardia Nazionale, and also had allies such as Ordine Nuovo, all under the rule of deputy Pino Rauti, the true ideologue of the violentist far-right of the peninsula.

Aldo Stefano Tisei, a member of the neo-fascist gangs, declared before an Italian court on December 3, 1982, that in the last days of 1974, Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo had joined, an agreement reached by a political committee composed of Clemente Graziani, Elio Massagrande, Salvatore Francia, Eliodoro Pomar, and Pier Luigi Concutelli.

After the merger was consummated, Campo Falvio and Stefano Delle Chiaie joined the political commission. That night in September 1975 in Rome, Townley and Paz explained to the Italians that Leighton was not only an enemy of the new Chilean government, but also of Italy.

They also insisted that later they could undertake many other similar missions together. On October 6, the Italians fulfilled their part. A man fired on Bernardo Leighton and then on his wife, Ana Fresno, fleeing quickly.

Both were seriously wounded. A week later, on October 13, in Miami, El Diario de Las Américas published a statement issued on the 10th where the "Zero" group, one of the names used by the Cuban Nationalist Movement (MNC), claimed responsibility for the attack.

Virgilio Paz had kept his promise and, with a disinformation operation, tried to confuse those who looked toward the Chilean government or the Italian Social Movement. Townley returned to Chile from the United States in mid-October 1975 and informed his bosses of the two new powerful bases of international support that the DINA had: the MNC in the United States and, therefore, the territories of North and Central America; and the Italian nucleus of Avanguardia Nazionale in Spain and Italy.

To this, one had to add members of other European far-right groups and even Chileans and Latinos who would collaborate by infiltrating among the exiles and organizations that supported the fight against the Chilean military government on several continents.

Townley reminded his boss that the agreement had been signed on the basis of reciprocal collaboration and suggested that some Cubans and Europeans be invited to Chile to train and instruct them. The network for the DINA's foreign operations was already functioning.

One of the aspects that remains unclear to this day is how and through whom the DINA agents established their contacts in the United States and Europe. John Dinges and Saul Landau, in their book Assassination on Embassy Row, state that Colonel Pedro Espinoza provided Townley with a contact in the Cuban MNC, the militant Pablo Castellón, who vouched for Andrés Wilson's DINA credentials, with the approval of Vladimir Secen, a former member of the pro-Nazi Croatian groups that fought against Tito's guerrillas in the Second World War.

The American authors state

"Secen, a mysterious figure within the Cuban exile community, was called 'the colonel' and had a reputation for being connected to Latin American intelligence circles. An FBI informant in Miami reported that Secen, a taxi driver, was related to Jay Vernon Townley, Michael's father, through 'banking business' and that it was precisely Jay Vernon who introduced them.

In his testimony, Townley said that the DINA's chief of operations, Pedro Espinoza, was the one who gave him Secen's name." Secen appears linked in the 60s to Mile Ravlic, an active member of the Croatian secret services that collaborated with the Gestapo and the SS in the persecution of their compatriots during the occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War.

After the defeat of the Nazis at the hands of the Yugoslav National Liberation Army, Ravlic fled in 1945 to Austria and from there to Italy, where he presented himself to the American occupation forces as a declared anti-communist, and obtained a job as a translator for the American military police in Rome...

In those tasks, he linked up with the Argentine diplomat José Antonio Guemes, Knight of the Order of Malta, who obtained a new identity and a passport for him to travel to the South American nation, where several of the most prominent Croatian war criminals arrived, who founded in Buenos Aires the government-in-exile of the Independent State of Croatia, recognized only by King Hussein of Jordan and General Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan.

Ravlic, under the false name of Milosz de Bogetich, worked for General Trujillo, recruiting Croatian emigrants for his guard, under the protection of the CIA, until the American intelligence agency decided to dispense with the dictator of the Dominican Republic.

At that time, his representative in Europe, in the capital of Germany, precisely, was Vladimir Secen. Milosz de Bogetich then moved to Madrid, where he recruited mercenaries to fight in Biafra, the Congo, or Vietnam.

There also, thanks to his American contacts, he met José López Rega, and began to frequent the Puerta de Hierro, the refuge in exile of General Juan Domingo Perón, with whom he returned in 1973 to Buenos Aires to try to revive past times of splendor.

At the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s, many characters coincided in Madrid who in the following years would play prominent roles in Latin America under the orders of the military dictatorships.

Latin American nationalists saw in the Francoist regime the ideal society for their own nations, a model that in the following years they would try to implement when military regimes took power in their countries.

To that attempt would be added former Nazis, neo-fascists, and far-rightists of the most diverse origins and backgrounds. The process would be similar, almost as mechanically copied as that of the real socialisms imported by the left-wing revolutionaries who dreamed of the Soviet workers' homeland, the Castroist revolution, and even Mao Tse Tung's China.

Franco's death in November 1975 made Delle Chiaie think that the Latin American climate could turn out to be much healthier and calmer. In December 1975, he arrived in Santiago de Chile with two of his comrades—Maurizio Giorgi ("Gino") and Roberto Granitti ("Mario")—accompanied by DINA agents Hugo Prado and José Cuevas Segura.

Shortly after, they would be joined by Pier Luigi Pagliai ("Gigi"), who left Italy fleeing after starring in an explosive attack against a Communist Party headquarters. Delle Chiaie ("Alfredo") and Graniti stayed at Espinoza's house; Giorgi and Pagliai at Michael Townley's house.

In May, Alfredo left Chile for Spain to carry out work for the Spaniards. On the 9th of that month, at the height of Montejurra, a sanctuary of Carlism that was ceasing to trust the notary Blas Piñar as leader of the far-right, at the head of Fuerza Nueva, a decisive political battle would take place between the heirs of Francoism.

That day, while members of the Carlist Party, led by Carlos Hugo de Borbón, tried to reach the summit, the followers of Sixto de Borbón, brother of the former but a traditionalist, members of the National Brotherhood of Ex-Combatants, and other far-right groups, took over the place.

Among them was Stefano Delle Chiaie, Mario Ricci, Augusto Cauchi, and Giuseppe Calzona. The confrontation was violent, in the end with gunfire, resulting in two dead, five wounded by bullets, and more than a hundred injured.

The victory went to Sixto de Borbón's men. Back in Chile, Delle Chiaie immersed himself in the interests of the DINA. Colonel Manuel Contreras, accompanied by Majors Vianel Valdivieso and Hugo Prado, and Captain Gerardo Urrich, held several meetings with the Italians to measure their talents and then entrusted them with the task of unifying and giving political coherence to the innumerable factions into which Chilean nationalism was divided.

Contreras not only wanted to worry about the security of the regime, but also to provide it with a political base of support, something in which at the same time the gremialista sectors led by Jaime Guzmán, and the neoliberal economists who were trying to apply a new development model for the country, were engaged.

Delle Chiaie was then faced with the old militancy of the National Syndicalist Revolutionary Movement (MRNS), subdivided in turn into the followers of Ramón Callis and those of Misael Galleguillos; the "Tacna" group, which recognized lawyer Sergio Miranda Carrington as its mentor; the dissolved Nationalist Front Patria y Libertad, which still considered Pablo Rodríguez as its only leader; the Revolutionary Nationalist Action, led by Erwin Robertson; the "Tizona" group, led by Juan Antonio Widow and Juan Carlos Ossandón; in addition to a numerous nationalist militancy that did not accept leaders. In September 1976, the first official meeting of local nationalist leaders with the peninsular fascists took place. Misael Galleguillos attended, representing the MRNS; an unidentified envoy of Franz Pfeiffer Richter, "commander" of the Chilean National Socialist Workers' Party; Juan Diego Dávila Basterrica, a rather symbolic figure of Chilean nationalism of the 40s-50s; Gastón Acuña Mac Lean, a rather solitary nationalist, close to Pablo Rodríguez Grez; Erwin Robertson Rodríguez, a national socialist who was beginning at that time to form the Center for Studies for an Ibero-American Alternative; Pedro Medina Murúa, son of Colonel Pedro Medina, one of the ORASA officers (Active Reserve Officers in Active Service) most loved by General Pinochet, representing the Revolutionary Nationalist Action, and some other people. For most of those present, the feeling remained that the Italians aspired to act as intellectual mentors to "picturesque and underdeveloped characters." The expression belongs to Erwin Robertson, who held a tense dialogue with Alfredo, as they called Delle Chiaie.

• "Do you think that Mussolini's legacy is compatible with one of the dirtiest expressions of capitalism, such as General Pinochet's government?" the Chilean lawyer asked.

There was tension among those present. No one was unaware that that meeting had been prepared by the DINA and that, with complete certainty, there were hidden microphones or security agents among those present.

• "You are wrong, comrade. This government is not capitalist, the economic line is a pragmatic option. You have to look beyond appearances: the government's economic management is only instrumental," Alfredo replied calmly.

Robertson, a former member of the "Tacna" group and unofficial leader of the Revolutionary Nationalist Action, replied to him how could "one of the dirtiest forms of capitalism" be a reference for the Hispanic-American and Western nationalist reaction, adding that more than two years of political leadership were already quite illustrative of the pretensions of Pinochet and his team of civilian advisors.

The attempt was a failure. The most enthusiastic about working with the Italians was Pedro Medina, but for almost all those present, the Italians turned out to be rather arrogant. Erwin Robertson would later say that the Italians began by assuming that their Chilean comrades were little less than indigenous people without any doctrinal solvency and, therefore, that they had to undergo a process of consciousness-raising that started from scratch.

Apparently, the Italians held four or five work meetings with the local fascists, with no result other than the decided adherence of Misael Galleguillos and the DINA's team of lawyers to their proposals.

The Italians advised Contreras that the most immediate measure to adopt to unify the nationalists was the physical elimination of dissident elements. They insisted to him that nothing conspires more against the monolithism of a political movement than heterodoxy and personalistic desires for leadership.

The first target of the purge suggested by the Italians was to be the then-law graduate Erwin Robertson Rodríguez, according to what lawyer Guido Poli later recounted. Manuel Contreras finally did not authorize the Italians' plan, and at the beginning of 1976, he renounced the DINA's political aspirations.

The Italians, then, were installed in comfortable offices and were provided with various elements so that they could work in intelligence and develop a transcontinental propaganda project, with bases in Portugal, Spain, and France.

Contreras was not only worried about the internal situation, but also about the growing signs of war preparations in Peru. The colonel had several apprehensions about those movements and in particular about the support provided by the USSR and Cuba.

He then sent the Italians, who obtained valuable aerial photographs of radar installations and mobile surface-to-surface missile bases in Peruvian territory. In the first days of April 1978, the neo-fascists led by Delle Chiaie quickly left Chile through the Puyehue border crossing, opposite Osorno.

The group was composed of Stefano Delle Chiaie ("Alfredo Di Stefano"), Mauricio Giorgi ("Gino"), Pier Luigi Pagliai ("Gigi"), Roberto Graniti, and the Frenchman Napoleón Leclerc ("Jean"), a member of the OAS, the Secret Army Organization.

The five foreigners were guided by Pedro Medina Murúa, a militant of the Revolutionary Nationalist Action, son of Colonel Pedro Medina Arriaza and nephew of Jorge Medina Arriaza, one of those implicated who ended up with the assassination of the former Army Commander, René Schneider, in October 1970.

The flight of the Italians was due to the departure from the Army—in March 1978—of General Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, who in July 1977 had been marginalized from the DINA, and General Héctor Orozco had entered the secret police barracks.

After the appointment of Colonel Odlanier Mena, he let them know through lawyer Guido Poli, one of the DINA's legal advisors, that they had nothing to fear and that, on the contrary, the new CNI was interested in continuing to count on them.

Until now, it is unknown what missions they may have carried out in 1977, but apparently General Mena made some not very enthusiastic efforts for the group of Italians to continue providing some degree of political advice to the CNI, preferably in intelligence analysis tasks, an aspect in which both the DINA and the CNI had shortcomings.

In April, they could no longer withstand the tension and decided to leave for Argentina, where they also had friends. The Italians and the Frenchman, led by Delle Chiaie, the "Black Pimpernel" of international terrorism, feared that Contreras's dizzying fall would also drag them down.

They knew too much about Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, Vianel Valdivieso, Jerónimo Pantoja, Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, and other DINA chiefs. Townley was talking to the FBI, and it was possible that he would tell them about them and their operations for the DINA in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia...

Before leaving the national territory, Delle Chiaie and his henchmen made a scrupulous delivery to Medina of a large part of the material that the DINA first and the CNI later had entrusted to them: six VHF-UHF radio sets, several sets of aerial photographs of the southern sector of Peruvian territory, and an imprecise number of folders with other diverse background information.

All those intelligence materials were jealously kept in the house of one of the officers of the Tejas Verdes School of Engineers. Medina got in touch with General Contreras, already out of the DINA and the Army, and recounted the episode to him.

Contreras, aware of the very sensitive information the Italians possessed, sent one of his most trusted men, Lieutenant Colonel Rolf Wenderoth, deputy director of the School of Engineers, to retrieve all the items.

Regarding Wenderoth's relationship with Contreras, Luz Arce provided information to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Nothing more was heard of the Italians. Only Guido Poli would later claim to have continued having epistolary contacts with "Alfredo." Over time, versions proliferated that the Italians were CIA agents.

On this matter, there is no more concrete evidence than Erwin Robertson's estimation that the group had been part of a cell of the American intelligence entity since 1970, in charge of destabilizing the governments of Spain and Portugal, a purpose that would have been successfully achieved.

Later, the CIA's darts would have pointed to the South American military governments, in particular the one led by General Augusto Pinochet, under the assumption that an outbreak of "Thirdism" was in the making that could have caused a regional imbalance detrimental to Washington's interests.

The story of "Alfredo" and his links with Chile was still far from over. In Argentina and later in Bolivia, working with the Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie, he would add new and important chapters to his agitated life. by Manuel Salazar Salvo

Source: interferencia.cl, April 21, 2021

At the beginning of the 1980s, with an unleashed economic crisis and the start of popular protests, nationalists saw an opportunity to recover the influence and positions they had lost to the gremialistas (guild members), led by Jaime Guzmán.

According to previously unpublished documents based on informants and political espionage, Guzmán and his men projected that the dictatorship would not survive beyond 1985 and were secretly negotiating an early transition and “an honorable exit” for Pinochet with the opposition. In that state of affairs, Puga denounced that the gremialistas “are rats abandoning the ship.”

This article is part of

The First Civilian of the Dictatorship , a multimedia project by Revista Anfibia and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état.

He said he almost never took vacations. No vacations, no holidays, no free weekends. Even less so in that year of 1983, a tumultuous year in which a danger emerged, but also an opportunity for the regime’s hardliners like him, who had been displaced from high and mid-level positions in the public administration, to return to the place they believed they deserved in the de facto government.

His government. Hence, that Sunday, May 15, four days after the first day of national protest against the dictatorship, the propagandist and intelligence advisor Álvaro Puga Cappa sat down in front of his typewriter and drafted a “Political Evaluation” report in which he analyzed “the surprise blow” of that week’s protest actions, “which are not (only) rooted in a low-income sector of the population, but are disseminated throughout the entire city of Santiago, with special connotation in neighborhoods considered middle and upper class.”

Almost ten years after the Armed Forces stormed the Palacio de La Moneda, the country was experiencing an economic crisis unprecedented since 1929. Hundreds of companies went bankrupt, banks and financial entities were intervened, and unemployment reached 26 percent that year.

In that state of affairs, “civil disobedience can reach unsuspected levels, at the same time that it can develop at an unusual speed that leads the country to a state of internal commotion,” Puga made known in that May 1983 report, which, although it has no addressee, like others from that era, can be assumed to be directed to the leadership of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), with which he collaborated.

In his view, the dictatorship was under threat—the dictatorship and, above all, the man who headed it—because the “political enemy of the regime (...) is unfortunately more inside the Government today than outside of it.” A “sectarian and exclusionary” enemy, who, according to the undersigned, responded to the leadership of Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz, ideologue and legislative advisor to the Military Government Junta, who two decades earlier had formed the gremialista movement and had several of his disciples occupying ministries and positions of relevance.

Puga used the figure of the nationalists as the dictator’s lovers, in a scenario where the gremialistas, and in particular Jaime Guzmán, were the official wife of the regime.

As can be inferred from that and the subsequent reports he prepared that year, the economic crisis and the protests had the dictatorship on edge, with its days numbered. The calculation of the government and opposition political leaders was that the Military Junta would not survive beyond 1985, another report by the same advisor anticipated.

In that state of affairs, Puga insisted that the gremialistas were conspiring against the government, together with other political forces, with the objective of “obtaining the transfer of power to civilians as soon as possible.”

It was a new chapter of a civil war within the dictatorship that had begun around the mid-seventies. On one side, the so-called hardliners, with whom Álvaro Puga identified, close to the nationalist movement and the CNI.

On the other, those whom the pro-government press baptized as the softliners, who were none other than the gremialistas loyal to Jaime Guzmán and who, in truth, had little of the "soft" about them. Regardless, the reports shed light on the two souls that vied for influence and positions in the dictatorship.

That Sunday in May 1983, when the echoes of the cacerolazos (pot-banging protests) still resonated in the city, Álvaro Augusto Pilade Puga Cappa kept hammering away at his typewriter and wondered what could be expected from Guzmán’s men.

After all, he sentenced, they are “relevant people who until yesterday supported the government and who today have abandoned the ship with a speed worthy of certain rodents.”

RATS, MICE, RODENTS

The rodent thing was nothing new in Álvaro Puga’s lexicon. Eight years earlier, when the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) executed Operation Colombo, a media setup intended to cover up the murder and disappearance of 119 opponents, it was he who distributed the false information to Chilean media outlets that led to the headline in La Segunda that afternoon of July 24, 1975, which read: "Exterminated like mice." His responsibility in the setup was established in a ruling by the Ethics Tribunal of the Colegio de Periodistas de Chile.

As can be seen, in the universe of the CNI advisor, that designation applied as much to the opponents of the dictatorship as to the followers of Jaime Guzmán. The dispute between the two had broken out shortly after the dictatorship began, when Puga directed the Public Affairs office and had Guzmán as a subordinate.

In principle, they seemed to understand each other, if not hold each other in esteem, as evidenced by a Christmas card sent by Puga in 1975. However, the young lawyer soon stood out on his own merits, distanced himself from nationalist thought, and rose to become the favorite advisor to Pinochet and the Military Government Junta.

He sympathized with the arrival of the Chicago Boys in the government, precursors of neoliberal policies, managed positions for his close associates, and designed the institutional legal architecture that in part still governs Chile today. “Deeply Catholic, attending mass and communion daily, a visceral right-winger (but without a party), a bachelor with the air of an old maid, he seemed like an ‘old child’ due to his short stature, advanced baldness, and thick nearsighted glasses.

But that appearance hid amiable qualities—he liked music, good food, relaxed conversation with friends, masterfully imitating the speech of famous people—and even unexpected ones: such as his passion for soccer (he was a qualified referee) or for the Viña del Mar Song Festivals,” defines historian and former dictatorship minister Gonzalo Vial in Pinochet. La biografía (El Mercurio/Aguilar, 2002).

Once he settled in and found a position of privilege from which to exert influence, he did not take long to distance himself from Puga and the nationalists, who communed with old corporatism and were losing positions and power.

And there was something else: Puga was very close to Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, director of the DINA and a nationalist sympathizer, who loathed Guzmán, distrusted him, and spied on him with the purpose of pitting him against Pinochet.

A secret DINA report on Guzmán, cited by Vial in his biography, tells of “a brilliant individual,” for whom politics “is a chessboard where he manages everyone from His Excellency the President of the Republic, even if he believes the opposite,” to the last government official.

What Vial omits from that report is that it also says that Guzmán was bent on “the missionary search for followers among the children of figures of business and journalistic power, obviously to reach the parents”; and that with them “he forms his group of assistants and admirers” to whom “he gives retreats” in his apartment on Calle Galvarino Gallardo, which he has “at the disposal of his ‘young friends.’”

The report is dated November 1976 and could well have been written by Puga. In fact, just as he did a decade later, in the same report he warns that Guzmán and his people are seeking to displace Pinochet and the Junta “to place (themselves) physically in that position” and achieve a “broad political opening.” The term for hardliners and softliners within the regime had not yet been coined; it began to take hold following a 1979 headline in Qué Pasa magazine that reported on the two souls within the government, regarding the debate over the draft of a new Constitution.

The designation can lead to misunderstandings, if not a condescending view of one group over the other. As Manuel Gárate posits in his book La revolución capitalista de Chile (Ediciones UAH, 2002), the economic and social project of the Chicago Boys, which the gremialistas made their own, “could not be carried out without a repressive framework in accordance with the depth and speed of the changes imposed from the central power,” which implied privatizations under the table and the deep reduction of public spending and labor rights, among other measures.

The softliners needed the hardliners, and depending on the occasion, they could be as tough or tougher than the others. Guzmán himself, in one of his first recommendations as an advisor, stated in a memorandum that “the success of the Junta is directly linked to its hardness and energy, which the country expects and applauds. Any complex or hesitation in this regard will be disastrous.”

Regardless, the dispute between the two, which seemed to have been settled forever in the second half of the seventies once the neoliberal model was assumed, revived at the beginning of the following decade.

A November 1982 cover of Hoy magazine is eloquent in this regard. Portrayed by a cartoonist who places them face-to-face, defiant, in a cockfight, Puga and Guzmán appear on the cover with the headline "Two pro-government figures in conflict." The inner pages report an atmosphere of “antechamber to a political apocalypse,” a product of the economic crisis and the disrepute of the Chicago Boys, to whom an “economic miracle” had been attributed until recently.

The country is on the verge of exploding, and Guzmán, in response to a virulent column by Puga in La Tercera, identifies the latter among the “exponents of creole fascism.” In return, Puga responds with harshness, as he knows how to do. Guzmán and his acolytes “are rats abandoning the ship,” he says.

THE SECRET LOVERS OF THE REGIME

The week following the first day of national protest, the analyst was back to drafting a new political report. And then another, and another, and another. The political situation of those days gave no respite to the advisor and his typewriter.

As if it had not been clear in the previous report, this one from May 19, 1983, takes for granted that “the disembarkation of the gremialista sector from the Government continues in such a precipitous manner that it gives the impression that they believe the time for the end of the Government has arrived.” And three days later, on Sunday, May 22, he accuses a “conspiracy of the political right with the Christian Democracy, the Social Democracy, the Socialist Party, and groups like the gremialistas and others, who are carrying out a work of union at the top that allows them, under the wing of the Catholic Church, to arrive at putting the Government in a fatal dilemma.”

For good measure, a month later, he reports on a “conspiratorial meeting” held at the house of former senator Fernando Ochagavía Valdés, which was attended by the cream of the old Chilean right. Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes, Julio Durán Neumann, Sergio Diez Urzúa, Juan de Dios Carmona Peralta, and the owner of the house.

And, of course, how could it be otherwise, Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz, who according to the report proposes “an honorable exit” to a General Pinochet cornered by the protests and an economy in crisis. “Otherwise,” reports Puga, citing what Guzmán had allegedly said, “the increasingly growing degree of popular discontent could lead the country to a civil war that General Pinochet would undoubtedly be unaware of until it had occurred right under his nose.”

Everyone who was present at that meeting is dead. And all the gremialista political leaders of that time who were contacted and are still alive—Juan Antonio Coloma, Andrés Chadwick, Javier Leturia, Hernán Larraín—did not answer calls or declined to speak for this series of reports.

In his biography of Pinochet, when reporting on this period, historian Gonzalo Vial says that “the support that the military regime had enjoyed in those political-social sectors that, until then, were always with it, was cracking.” And Guzmán, in his book Escritos personales (Zig Zag, 1992), places 1982 as the year in which “a fairly close work with various Ministers of State” was interrupted, without going into details about the reasons for the end of that collaboration.

The arrival of Sergio Onofre Jarpa to the Ministry of the Interior in August 1983 was a defeat for the gremialistas, who were displaced from their positions along with several Chicago Boys, although they did not entirely lose their power.

Perhaps the definitive distancing is marked by the cabinet change that meant the departure of Brigadier General Enrique Montero Marx as Minister of the Interior, replaced in August 1983 by an old right-wing politician like Sergio Onofre Jarpa.

The leader of the gremialistas, Puga writes, opposed that change because he said “that he fully managed Montero.” According to Pinochet’s biographer, Onofre Jarpa carried out “an anti-gremialista and anti-Chicago Boys razzia” as soon as he was installed at the head of the Ministry of the Interior, tasked with opening a dialogue with the opposition and relaxing press censorship.

The end of the regime seemed near.

In that state of affairs, the nationalists saw an opportunity to recover the influence lost within the dictatorship. But that task was not easy at all. Puga himself, in the aforementioned report of May 22, 1983, complained that even in the described scenario—when “the country’s economic situation is becoming increasingly serious and questioned” and “the street belongs to the opposition”—, “even the nationalists feel wounded in their support, which has been repeatedly rejected, and in the face of which an attitude of little less than a secret relationship is maintained.”

The nationalists as the dictator’s lovers. A relationship not entirely acknowledged, much less reciprocated. Puga used that same figure three decades later, in a series of interviews with the author of this text, when he said that from the late seventies he used to meet with Pinochet at the Military Club or at the Army Commander-in-Chief’s office, never at La Moneda, because there he could run into Jaime Guzmán. “He was already guided a lot by Guzmán, I don’t know, he was dazzled by that guy, so I was like the secret lover.”

Pinochet may have been dazzled by Guzmán, but in La historia oculta del régimen militar (La Época, 1988), by Ascanio Cavallo, Manuel Salazar, and Óscar Sepúlveda, it is said that by 1984 the relations between the gremialista lawyer and La Moneda “had reached their lowest point.” It is also said that a year earlier Pinochet agreed to integrate some nationalists into the cabinet, which was ultimately frustrated, and that around those same dates Pinochet held a lunch at his house in Bucalemu with “some prominent nationalists, who had a severe opinion about what was happening” and “accused the gremialismo of taking over the undersecretariats and waging war against the changes that the government required.” The book does not account for the names of those present at the lunch, with the exception of one in particular: “The evening had a gentle and friendly ending thanks to a young captain named Álvaro Corbalán who enlivened it with the guitar.”

The CNI agent Álvaro Corbalán played the guitar at a meeting of nationalists at Pinochet’s house (CC BY 3.0 CL, via Wikimedia Commons)

LOYALTY IS OUR HONOR

In addition to being an amateur musician, a figure of the nightlife scene, and an operational agent of the CNI, Army Captain Álvaro Julio Federico Corbalán Castilla was one of the precursors of Avanzada Nacional, the movement that Chilean nationalists founded in 1983 with the objective of projecting the figure of Augusto Pinochet and endowing it with a base of popular support for his permanence in power.

An army of unconditional civilians, not like the others. In fact, the movement’s motto was La lealtad es nuestra honra (Loyalty is our honor), bordering on the motto of the SS of National Socialism: Meine Ehre heißt Treue (My honor is called loyalty).

As recounted in one of the reports in this series, the debut of Avanzada Nacional occurred on September 10, 1983, in an act on the San Cristóbal hill in Santiago that was broadcast live by Televisión Nacional de Chile, thanks to the services of agent Corbalán, who managed the public television broadcasts.

The event received much less attention in the following day’s press. In a brief note in Las Últimas Noticias, it was reported that “hundreds of young people belonging to the ‘Avanzada Nacional’ movement held a vigil and a tribute act last night ‘in gratitude for the 10 years of Government of the Armed Forces,’ on the summit of San Cristóbal hill.”

The CNI agent Álvaro Corbalán was one of the precursors of Avanzada Nacional, the movement that Chilean nationalists founded in 1983 with the objective of projecting the figure of Augusto Pinochet and endowing it with a base of popular support for his permanence in power.

Its origins dated back to the pro-fascist magazine Avanzada, created by the lawyer and collaborator of the dictatorship’s repressive services, Guido Poli Garaycochea. Also to the Romanian Horia Sima, precursor of the Iron Guard who supported Nazi Germany and later Francisco Franco.

According to journalist Manuel Salazar, Sima recommended that the Chilean nationalists “found a political party that would bring together Pinochet’s followers and project his government into the future.” The task was entrusted to agent Corbalán, with the blessing of the CNI bosses, who at the same time obeyed Pinochet’s orders.

As it was a formal movement that aspired to found a political party, Avanzada Nacional had an emblem, an anthem, and a doctrine that Corbalán entrusted his friend Álvaro Puga to write.

The latter is also narrated by Manuel Salazar in Las letras del horror. Tomo II: la CNI (LOM, 2012), which addresses Puga’s role in the origins of the movement and his links to the CNI. Puga was a man with initiative, accustomed to acting in the shadows.

Thus, on August 29, 1983, a strange full-page insert appeared in the national newspapers from a so-called Independent Alliance that no one had heard of until then and that called “to form a great civic-military movement (...) that will project the work of the current Government fruitfully and lastingly into the future.”

Instead of a name, the insert was signed only by an identity card number. And of course, the next day it was learned that that ID belonged to Álvaro Puga Cappa.

Although it can be assumed that this insert was a sort of manifesto of the principles that inspired Avanzada Nacional, a couple of days later one of the main references of Chilean nationalism, Pablo Rodríguez Grez, questioned the representativeness of the publication and Puga himself.

And in return, in the same article, as if it were a comedy of errors, Puga “denied value, credibility, and plausibility to what was said by Rodríguez, or even more, to the mere possibility that he had said it.”

Neither the nationalists of that time nor Puga were characterized by their party discipline and spirit of camaraderie. In that, they differed by far from the gremialistas. Much later, Puga acknowledged that “in general I got along very well with the military; my problem was with some civilians.” How could it be otherwise.

After all, it was the civilians who were followers of Jaime Guzmán who managed to remove him from the head of the Public Affairs office, at the end of the seventies, after accusing him of keeping a percentage of the advertising notices he contracted in the name of the government.

A TENTACLE OF THE CNI

Even though by the mid-eighties Jaime Guzmán was distanced from the high spheres of dictatorial power, and even though historian Gonzalo Vial asserts that the arrival of Sergio Onofre Jarpa to the government was an anti-gremialista razzia, Puga’s documents show that Guzmán’s men managed to continue occupying positions of relevance.

Undersecretariats, mayoralties, heads of services, technical positions, and management roles in public companies that had not yet been privatized. In practice, according to a report from late 1983, they were “hundreds of public officials whom they (the gremialistas) placed in the administration while their power lasted and whom they defend today against all odds, always exercising that power in a rather mysterious way, because no one has been able to find out what bridge they use to convince the President of the Republic so quickly (...) while the true supporters are permanently persecuted and harassed.”

The true supporters of the government were grouped around Avanzada Nacional, which was founded with the purpose of perpetuating Pinochet's power, at the same time that Minister Jarpa was carrying out a process of political opening and negotiation.

The gremialistas also did the same, and around those same dates created the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI). Sergio Onofre Jarpa, writes Puga, “continues to be for many government supporters and former supporters the key figure for the coming months, because in him they hope to find the middle ground required to advance the political schedule and put the country into a democratic government before 1985.”

With that anticipatory spirit that drove him, aided by informants and espionage actions, the advisor learned that even Jarpa himself and his close associates “are preparing the great right-wing party (...) which would begin in the south of Chile and with which they plan to gather 1,000,000 voters.” That party, which the memorandum identifies as Alianza Nacional, could well have been Unión Nacional, which from 1987 was registered under the name Renovación Nacional.

Although Avanzada Nacional opposed the political opening process, members of the group complained about being excluded from the negotiations at La Moneda. A memorandum presumed to be from 1984 speaks partly of this, regarding a meeting called by Jarpa's chief of staff to which all political leaders were invited, with the exception of those from Avanzada Nacional, “because according to the expression of one of the members of that cabinet, that movement is only ‘a tentacle of the CNI’.”

Whoever said that was correct. In its first board, to name the two most visible members, were the singer-songwriter Willy Bascuñán and the musician Óscar Olivares, one of the two members of the group Los Perlas.

A facade for those who were behind it, governing in the shadows, in favor of a project that according to an article in the magazine Qué Pasa “rejects both Marxism and traditional liberal-oriented democracy.”

Neither the nationalists of that time nor Puga were characterized by their party discipline and spirit of camaraderie. In that, they differed by far from the gremialistas.

In short, it was a movement tailored to Pinochet, who, according to the former deputy and dictatorship official Maximiano Errázuriz, used to assign political tasks to the CNI. He once even asked for “a development plan on how and where the country should advance.” In that understanding, it is not strange then that he also entrusted it with the founding of a political movement like Avanzada Nacional.

A party “of mercenaries, sold to neoliberalism,” says Roberto Thieme today, one of the founders of the Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad, who distanced himself from the dictatorship and the nationalists of his generation, who in his view ended up “fanaticized” by the figure of the dictator.

In fact, on July 9, 1986, at the La Tortuga gymnasium in Talcahuano, Avanzada Nacional organized a first major mass event in which Pinochet received a symbolic card that accredited him as the first militant of that party, formalized the following year before the new electoral registries.

They were reopened on March 25, 1987, and on the morning of that day, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, smiling, dressed in civilian clothes, in a cream-colored suit, white shoes, and a pearl pinned to his tie, was the first Chilean citizen to register.

TOGETHER AND MIXED UP

In a report by the magazine Cauce, published in July 1986, it is said that Avanzada Nacional was controlled in the shadows by a CNI agent they called Álvaro Valenzuela and that the party received millions in resources from that same repressive service and the General Secretariat of Government.

Later it was learned that Álvaro Valenzuela was the alias of Álvaro Corbalán Castilla, a former operational agent who is currently serving a life sentence for various crimes during the dictatorship and who in 1989 came to lead the party under his real name.

Although Avanzada Nacional opposed the political opening process led by Jarpa, members of the group complained about being excluded from the negotiations at La Moneda.

The same magazine collects the testimony of a leader, who acknowledges that, in addition to proselytism, Avanzada Nacional carried out attacks on parishes and acts of intimidation against opponents, in order to “gradually create a climate of terror in the population.” And that as a paramilitary group, with a party facade, the group postulated in its statutes that “everything that is done within the movement will always be of a secret nature.”

In parallel to its secret activities, Avanzada Nacional gathered signatures to legally constitute itself as a political party, in order to face the elections that were approaching at the end of the eighties, at the beginning of the transition to democracy.

Guzmán and his followers did the same in favor of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, who once the economic crisis was overcome, returned to declare loyalty to Pinochet and supported him in his candidacy for the 1988 plebiscite.

Deep down, they never abandoned him completely. Nor did Pinochet abandon them. Álvaro Puga already said it, on the eve of the first national protest in May 1983. Again and again, no matter what happens, “curiously, those who represent gremialismo in their political and economic ideas are publicly rehabilitated.” by Juan Cristóbal Peña

Source: revistaanfibia.cl, August 17, 2023

Visiting Judge Vicente Hormazábal leads reconstruction of the scene of the former intendant's homicide

In the proceeding, Judge Hormazábal took statements from the surviving victim, three witnesses to the events, and the accused retired military officers Gustavo Camilo Ahumada, Jerman Ocares Morales, and Luis Pavez Silva; as well as René Ojeda Caro, a civilian employee and Army reservist.

The extraordinary visiting judge for human rights violation cases of the Court of Appeals of La Serena, Vicente Hormazábal Abarzúa, led the reconstruction of the scene of the qualified homicide of the former intendant of Antofagasta, Daniel Acuña Sepúlveda, and the frustrated homicide of his son, Roberto Acuña Araneda.

Crimes perpetrated in August 1979 by agents of the Central Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), in the Tierras Blancas sector of the commune of Coquimbo.

In the proceeding (case file 2-2010), Judge Hormazábal took statements from the surviving victim, three witnesses to the events, and the accused retired military officers Gustavo Camilo Ahumada, Jerman Ocares Morales, and Luis Pavez Silva; as well as René Ojeda Caro, a civilian employee and Army reservist.

“This is a case in which the qualified homicide of Mr. Daniel Acuña and the qualified homicide, but in the nature of frustrated, of his son Mr. Roberto Acuña is being investigated. We are already in the plenary stage, in the stage of measures for better resolution, and in that stage of the process, I decided to carry out the reconstruction of the scene for the purposes of providing for the good use of the right to defense that all the accused have,” stated Judge Hormazábal.

With the background information collected in the case, the visiting judge considers it proven that in the early hours of August 13, 1979, a group of CNI agents from La Serena arrived at the home of Daniel Acuña Sepúlveda.

At the property's gate, they fired at his son Roberto Acuña, who, wounded in the stomach, managed to flee the scene and survive. Three agents entered the home and, upon locating Acuña Sepúlveda, gunned him down and then destroyed his body with dynamite.

In the case, the former head of the Central Nacional de Inteligencia for the regions, Juan Viterbo Chiminelli Fullerton, is also identified as the perpetrator of the crime of qualified homicide, as he gave the order to eliminate Acuña Sepúlveda; and as an accessory after the fact, the lawyer Guido Poli Garaycochea, who after the events, together with the local CNI chief Patricio Padilla Villén—who was definitively dismissed due to death in May 2013—instructed the agents who participated directly in the events on what they should declare before the justice system, a maneuver intended to cover up the crimes.

In the proceeding, Judge Hormazábal Abarzúa had the collaboration of officers from the Human Rights Brigade and experts from the Criminalistics Laboratory of the Investigative Police.

Source: Poder Judicial, February 22, 2023

CNI lawyer convicted for crime committed during the dictatorship

Visiting Judge Sergio Troncoso issued a verdict that considered the responsibility as an accessory after the fact of the lawyer, who traveled from Santiago to La Serena to—the ruling indicates—instruct the agents on what they should say to evade their responsibilities.

For the first time since investigations into human rights violations during the dictatorship began in 1991, a visiting judge convicted one of the lawyers who provided services to the defunct Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), the secret police of Augusto Pinochet, which only formally ceased to exist in 1990.

In previous rulings, different judges had prosecuted and convicted other lawyers linked to the repression unleashed after the 1973 coup d'état, as happened with the former Army auditor and former military prosecutor ad hoc, Fernando Torres Silva, convicted for the crimes of Eugenio Berríos and Tucapel Jiménez (and pardoned in 2021 due to a terminal illness), or with the former military prosecutor of Temuco, Alfonso Podlech, convicted for several crimes executed in La Araucanía.

However, different actors in the human rights world indicate that, before the convictions issued by the visiting judge of the Court of Appeals of La Serena, Sergio Troncoso, for the homicide of former intendant Daniel Acuña and the frustrated homicide of his son, there were no precedents like the current one, due to the conviction as an accessory after the fact of the 78-year-old lawyer Guido Poli Garaycochea.

The Ruling

According to what was investigated by the special judge, the events occurred during the early hours of August 13, 1979, in Coquimbo, when a CNI commando attacked Daniel Acuña Sepúlveda, a member of the Socialist Party and former intendant of Antofagasta, and his son Roberto Enrique Acuña Aravena, in their home.

The investigation determined that the operation was carried out by an “elimination order” issued against Acuña Sepúlveda, issued by the Regional Division of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) in Santiago.

According to what was confessed many years later on his deathbed by Captain Patricio Padilla Villén (who died 13 years ago), the CNI agents under his command traveled to plot 222 in Tierras Blancas, in Coquimbo, where after falsely identifying themselves as police officers, they fired at the victim's son, Roberto Enrique Acuña Aravena, who managed to survive, and then entered the home, where Padilla shot Daniel Acuña Sepúlveda in the skull.

Subsequently, in an attempt to cover up the murder and make it look like a suicide, the CNI agents placed dynamite on the victim's body and detonated it, destroying his corpse.

The survivor, meanwhile, was detained at the hospital and then subjected to pretrial detention for about six months, under the false accusation of crimes linked to the Arms Control Law and possession of explosives.

After the investigation, Judge Troncoso convicted Juan Viterbo Chiminelli Fullerton, head of the CNI Regional Division, of qualified homicide (15 years and one day); while Gustavo Adolfo Camilo Ahumada was sentenced to 10 years for the homicide and 540 days for the serious injuries caused to Acuña Aravena.

Regarding the accomplices, Manuel Humberto Catalán Arriola received 5 years and one day for the homicide and 41 days in prison as an accessory after the fact to the serious injuries, while René Hugo Ojeda Caro was sentenced to 5 years for the qualified homicide.

Finally, the lawyer Guido Poli was convicted as an accessory after the fact to both crimes, receiving sentences of 3 years in prison for the qualified homicide and 40 days in prison for the serious injuries, obtaining the benefit of parole.

The Schneider Case

On October 10, 1970, at 23 years of age, Poli—who at that time was studying law at the Universidad Católica and was a member of the National Party—was arrested, accused along with two other defendants of having installed several explosive devices (some of which failed) in different areas of Santiago, in the midst of the maneuvers prior to the homicide of General René Schneider, Commander-in-Chief of the Army at that time and a strict constitutionalist, who maintained that if Salvador Allende were elected by the Plenary Congress on October 24, 1970 (after having won the first round on September 4 of that year), the Army should remain attached to the Constitution and not participate in any military uprising.

That led to an absurd plan concocted in Washington D.C. at the behest of Agustín Edwards, in which U.S. military intelligence agents (the CIA chief in Santiago, Henry Hecksher, was removed from the plot due to his criticisms of how poorly designed it was), retired and active-duty Chilean generals, common criminals, and young people belonging to far-right groups and others of pro-Nazi thought, as was the case of Guido Poli, who was part of several movements of that type, participated.

On October 22, a clumsy attempt to kidnap Schneider culminated in his homicide, and in 1972 the implicated parties were sentenced to various penalties.

Poli was one of the 43 convicted in that case, although he had no responsibility in the homicide; instead, in the first instance, he received a sentence of 2 years of relegation in Caldera for violation of the State Internal Security Law, but later, after the 1973 coup d'état, almost all the participants were pardoned.

The Legal Advisor

In 1979, as established by Judge Troncoso's ruling, Poli worked as a lawyer for the CNI, being second in the hierarchy of the staff of lawyers for that secret police. According to him, his role was “to provide legal advice on all requests made, analysis of legal bodies and bills, and to prepare responses to the courts, in accordance with the background information provided to them.” That team, as specified by former CNI agent Fernando Rojas Tapia, was composed, in addition to Poli, of several lawyers, among them Víctor Gálvez (who was the chief), René Alegría, Juan Carlos Manns, Fernando Dumay, and a certain “Iribarra.”

Poli assured the justice system that in August of that year, Chiminelli ordered him to travel to La Serena in order to “advise” Captain Padilla on the statement he would provide to the military prosecutor's office, for which he ordered another CNI agent, Captain Manuel Catalán, to accompany him.

Still according to Poli's statement, on August 13, 1979, in the afternoon, Víctor Gálvez told him that “an event had occurred where CNI personnel were involved and a person had died as a result of an explosion in their home, managing to travel around 11:00 PM in a CNI vehicle.

They arrived in La Serena in the early hours of the next day, waiting for the time in the unit's facilities. Around 08:30 AM, Captain Padilla, who was the chief and with whom he had to meet, arrived at the unit. At that moment, he explained his version of the events and that everything was reported to the Regional Government.

He indicated to Padilla that, if there were requests from the court, he should satisfy them in a timely manner. Subsequently, he accompanied Captain Padilla to the Intendancy, then they returned to the unit, and shortly after, he returned to Santiago on August 14, never to hear about the case again.”

Likewise, he argued, “the legal department only knew the official version of the events.”

Poli also asserted that he did not transmit any instruction to Captain Padilla regarding what to declare and that he only limited himself to telling him “to cooperate with the court.” Likewise, he “stated that he was unaware that the event was a setup, adding that Padilla never told him that there was a wounded person who fled the scene and who was in prison,” and asserted that it was “absurd that they would give a lawyer an order to go and check the compliance with a military order.” He also said that he “never worked with Chiminelli at that time (1979), and that they only had a social relationship.”

The Doubts

However, several pieces of evidence caused the judge to doubt the version. For example, the version provided by the then-procurator Miguel Ángel Parra Vásquez, who, in addition to saying that in the summer of 1980 he was sent to accompany Padilla to another statement, specified that the lawyers belonged to a unit called “legal intelligence,” also explaining that Poli and Chiminelli knew each other from before and that between them “there was a very familiar treatment.”

At the same time, one of the agents who participated in the event, Luis Pavez Silva, “pointed out that he had lied in court in his statement at the time and assured that they told him what he had to say, realizing that everything was a setup by the chiefs,” states the ruling, which points out that Poli's version that he only traveled to La Serena to carry out “the delivery of a brief message, regarding the duty to cooperate with the courts” is “inadmissible, as it lacks logic to organize a trip from Santiago to deliver a simple message like that, when it could have been delivered directly to Padilla by phone, or by telex if it was considered necessary to encrypt the message. It is certainly absurd that a message like cooperating with the investigation should be delivered in person, when Padilla himself confessed that he received an order as serious as killing Acuña by telex, which notoriously merited more reserved treatment.”

Faced with this, among other arguments, Poli's defense attorney, Maximiliano Murath, asserted that the elements against his client are not sufficient to be able to incriminate him, indicating that “it was not within his duties in the CNI Legal Department to prepare judicial angles or similar things” and that “it is contradictory to think that the lawyer Poli would go to tell the agents or the head of the operation what to say, since they had already prepared the false facts and version” and that “in that sense, one cannot cover up what is already covered up.”

However, the judge rejected the allegations and determined that the real motive for Poli's trip was “to meet with those involved in the execution operation of Daniel Acuña, to verify how the mission had been carried out and to issue directives for what would be the official CNI version before the courts,” adding that “his trip was motivated by the need to protect the institution from the ‘screw-up’ (in Chiminelli's words) that the existence of a surviving victim and eyewitness to the events implied, making it necessary to coordinate the statements of those involved.”

It should be noted that, before being a member of the CNI, Poli was a member of the DINA and in that capacity, according to the biography of Manuel Contreras written by journalist Manuel Salazar, he had close contact with the Italian neo-fascists of the terrorist group Avanguardia Nazionale and its leader, Stefano Delle Chiaie.

Poli eventually became the Army's auditor general, where he worked until 1999, and subsequently was one of the founders of the NGO Jure (Justice and Reconciliation), which defends military personnel accused of human rights violations.

by: Carlos Basso Prieto

Source: elmostrador.cl, September 27, 2025