Although he was self-taught, Alvaro Puga considered himself an expert in propaganda and communications. He was also an expert in subliminal campaigns and psychological operations—a weapon that emerged during the Cold War, was systematized by French counter-insurgency warfare doctrine, and was exported to the world by United States Special Warfare schools.

Low-altitude flights by aircraft to intimidate the populations of Santiago, staged attacks attributed to leftist groups, infiltrators, and fake news. That is what the psychological action plan proposed to discredit one of the mass demonstrations against the dictatorship was about.

If in March 1974 the Declaration of Principles of the Government of Chile stated that "it is imperative to change the mentality of Chileans," by 1983 the realization of that desire was in serious doubt.

Internationally besieged, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, and in the midst of a resurgence of political and social opposition, the dictatorship was on edge, on the defensive against a majority that expressed its discontent through popular protests while reclaiming political symbols and emblems of the past.

Some of those political parties that the same declaration of principles had promised "will not be admitted again into civic life"—and which the 1980 Constitution had outlawed—were back on the streets.

In that context, amidst an intensification of repression, the reinstatement of states of emergency, mass raids in neighborhoods, and the military occupying the avenues of a Santiago impoverished by recession with painted faces and tanks, the propagandist and security services advisor Álvaro Puga Cappa dispatched a secret memorandum on November 8, 1983.

The title: "Psychological Action Plan to Counter the November 18th Concentration."

In that document, Puga proposes a list of measures that, in short, have the purpose of discrediting the first mass concentration of the political opposition with setups, intimidation, infiltrators, and fake news, while simultaneously sowing terror in the population.

In short, on the occasion of the demonstration called for November 18 at Parque O’Higgins, the idea was to spread the rumor that "terrible acts of vandalism will take place at this event" and, secondly, through what he calls "intermediate actions," to make that rumor a reality with acts of violence such as attacks, sabotage, assaults, and even the rape of a minor.

Puga proposed discrediting the first mass concentration of the political opposition with setups, intimidation, infiltrators, and fake news, while simultaneously sowing terror in the population.

Although it has no addressee, in the context of other documents from the same sender, it can be assumed that it was directed to the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), with which Puga collaborated that same year on other tasks, such as the propaganda campaign for the official celebrations of the ten years of the coup d'état, commissioned by General Pinochet himself, to whom Puga was close, as he was to the director of the CNI, Humberto Gordon.

The document also has the same formal structure and order of contents as other CNI memoranda prepared in 1983, such as the one sent on June 10 to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Major General Gordon. In that document, the director of the CNI reported on a recent report by Amnesty International regarding the human rights situation in Chile.

The document with Puga's psychological action plan also has an operational structure similar to the plans created by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), such as the Epsilon Operations Plan, sent by its director, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, to various state agencies in June 1975.

Its objective was to counter international pressure due to the questioning of human rights violations and to deter national public opinion on the occasion of the visit of a special United Nations group in July of that year, a visit that the dictatorship canceled days before it was to take place.

THE GHOST PRESS

In 1975, while directing the dictatorship's Public Affairs office, Álvaro Puga had played a leading role in Operation Colombo, a DINA communication setup that had the purpose of covering up the crime of 119 opponents and, at the same time, discrediting reports of the systematic disappearance of people at the hands of the regime's political police.

What they wanted people to believe is what the official versions used to say in those years: those people had voluntarily left their homes, were outside the country, and, in this case, had been murdered by their own companions as a result of their internal struggles.

For this purpose, the DINA—and in particular its Psychological Operations Department, directed by Army officer Vianel Valdivieso—devised a complex operation that involved the creation of a Brazilian newspaper baptized Novo O Día, which in its only edition of June 25, 1975, reported the death of 59 MIR members, who had fallen in "clashes with Argentine government forces in Salta." Twenty days later, in Argentina, the Buenos Aires magazine Lea reported a list of another 60 "Chilean extremists eliminated by their own comrades in struggle." The magazine, which also had only one edition, was edited by an agency dependent on the Argentine Ministry of Social Welfare, then in charge of José López Rega, founder of the anti-communist paramilitary group known as the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance). Based on this information, the Chilean evening newspaper La Segunda, in its edition of July 24 of the same year, published the front-page headline "Exterminated Like Rats," preceded by the sub-headline "59 Chilean MIR members fall in military operation in Argentina."

It was not just La Segunda. The same day in the morning, at newsstands across the country, the morning newspapers also picked up the information provided by Álvaro Puga in their headlines: "MIR murders 60 of its men abroad" (La Tercera), "60 MIR members identified as executed by their own comrades" (El Mercurio), and "Bloody MIR struggle abroad" (Las Últimas Noticias).

Although the DINA leadership was convicted for the crime of 119 people, the judicial investigation did not address the communication operation associated with the case, an operation that, according to an article published in Ciper by journalist Mónica González, "was key to achieving the success of the plan." This article cites a summary carried out by the Ethics Tribunal of the Colegio de Periodistas de Chile, which led to a ruling that sanctioned the journalists who remained alive, including the owner of the newspaper El Mercurio, Agustín Edwards, in addition to establishing the responsibility that fell to Álvaro Puga, who was pointed out as the government official who distributed the false information to the editors and directors of the Chilean written media. Since he was not a journalist, Puga could not be sanctioned for that act.

WE ARE AT WAR, GENTLEMEN

Puga was not a journalist, but he considered himself an expert in propaganda, communications, and press censorship. He was also an expert in what he calls subliminal campaigns and psychological operations, a weapon that emerged during the Cold War and was systematized by French counter-insurgency warfare doctrine and exported to the world by United States Special Warfare schools, through exchanges and technical assistance to different countries, including Chile.

Since the beginning of the sixties, various Chilean officers began to reflect on this military strategy. According to the article titled "Psychological Warfare" (Memorial del Ejército No. 309, 1962), it is a "weapon of a hidden, sordid, and mysterious nature, which employs intellectual and emotional means, both against the civilian population and toward the combatant." The objective: to modify the behavior and emotions of the population and undermine the morale of the enemies.

Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos

This war strategy was institutionalized within the Chilean Armed Forces from that time on and had exponential and practical development from the beginning of the dictatorship. Civilians and military personnel, psychologists and sociologists, filmmakers and journalists placed themselves at the service of the war against subversion and political dissent.

What the Argentine military officer Fernando Frade called "psychological warfare operators."

Álvaro Puga was not a journalist, but he considered himself an expert in propaganda and communications. He was also an expert in what he calls subliminal campaigns and psychological operations.

Everything goes in this type of war. As the DINA recommended in its Basic Course for Officers (1976), prepared by the National Intelligence School, one "must take advantage of the fact that people think the law will not be violated.

This credibility gives us [sic] the advantage of violating the law. The interesting thing is that when acting clandestinely, one must know how to do it in order to maintain this credibility. Now, the law also offers a series of guarantees, which must be exploited with skill and to our advantage."

In the series of articles on Dictatorial Psychopolitics published by the media outlet Interferencia, journalist Juan Íñigo Ibáñez maintains that the objective of resocializing and re-educating the population "was done by depoliticizing the social imaginary and re-ideologizing the popular sectors," through government agencies such as the Department of Human Relations and Social Conduct. "Together with the Creative Committee for Advertising Advisory and later the National Directorate of Social Communication (DINACOS), (it was) one of the pillars of the dictatorship's propaganda and psychological warfare structure," he writes.

In that sense, the aforementioned "Psychological Action Plan to Counter the November 18th Protests" by Puga follows the same pattern, perhaps in a more rustic way than other known documents. Prepared ten days before the November 1983 mobilization, it is structured in a way similar to that recommended by psychological warfare manuals such as the RC 5-2 Psychological Operations of the Argentine Army and the FM 33-5 Psychological Operation Techniques and Procedures of the U.S.

Army, from 1966 and 1968 respectively.

RUMOR CAMPAIGN AND COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS

The mass concentration of November 18, 1983, was the first organized by the opposition since the beginning of the days of popular protests, which began in May of that same year. The call to Parque O’Higgins was led by the Alianza Democrática, the opposition coalition headed by the Christian Democrats and supported by radicals and social democrats.

Towards the end of October, after the seventh day of protest called by the National Workers' Command, the tensions in the opposition between the Alianza Democrática, the Socialist Bloc, and the leftist Movimiento Democrático Popular (formed by the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario, MIR, and the Communist Party, PC) began to dissipate.

The common goal was to accelerate the democratic opening of the regime.

Tempers were high in the Government, given the realization that the political opening strategy proposed by the new Minister of the Interior, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, was not achieving its goal of containing the mobilizations, while it was perceived by the opposition as a mere diversionary maneuver.

In practice, the dictatorship was committed to generating a climate of "anti-communism and subversion" that would confront "democrats" and "communists," similar to that developed during the first days of the regime. That is, to avoid at all costs an agreement between the Alianza Democrática and the Movimiento Democrático Popular. In that, Puga believed he was useful.

His psychological action plan is structured in five levels that propose to discredit the opposition while dividing it between Marxists and democrats. At the same time, it seeks to make the concentration fail and generate a feeling of exhaustion with the mobilizations, emphasizing that these have only "represented useless deaths and vandalism." For this, it was necessary to empty the city and attribute that action to support for the government.

During the Chilean dictatorship, civilians and military personnel, psychologists and sociologists, filmmakers and journalists placed themselves at the service of the war against subversion and political dissent.

Through rumor campaigns, he proposes to instill in the population the fear of potential assaults, through the distribution of flyers associated with the "communists," indicating that, if they go to the concentration, "the houses will be left unguarded and the lumpen intend to attack the properties taking advantage of the absence of the residents."

In what is defined as an "intermediate level," the objective was to "create a collective psychosis for Friday the 18th," through actions such as sabotage of the Metro lines; paralysis of public transportation; "attack against Fantasilandia, attributable to the MIR"; power outages in the surroundings of Parque O’Higgins attributed to the Communist Party; reports of "coercion" by this same party to force people to participate in the mobilization, and "otherwise your family will have a very bad time"; and handing out flyers attributable to the MIR and the PC with "ideas absolutely contrary regarding what can and cannot be done at the concentration," among other proposals.

The plan adds another idea: "Rape of a minor by a group of criminals at Parque O’Higgins."

Regarding the Government, the planning contemplates a series of political, economic, and diplomatic actions. Everything articulated from a firm control of the press and the media. "The Government must call the main media outlets to ask them (demand them) not to give greater coverage to the plan for the 18th, and that this is never on the front page, but always a piece of news on very inner pages.

Threaten that otherwise the credits granted by the regime for the survival of the media will be collected in an urgent manner," the document reads, referring to the millionaire loans that the government, through the Banco del Estado, had granted to the newspaper companies that owned El Mercurio and La Tercera.

LOW-ALTITUDE FLIGHTS OVER NEIGHBORHOODS

At the political level, days before the concentration on the 18th, Pinochet should travel outside the capital, lash out at the opposition, and make announcements of economic and social policy: "The government must make known, no later than November 15, some major plan regarding the economic problem, without touching any institutional aspect at all."

In the handling of police and military troops, the night before the concentration "the aviation should make low-altitude flights over all the large neighborhoods" of the south and west sector of Santiago.

The Army should be quartered in its garrisons, especially in the regiments adjacent to Parque O’Higgins to give a "show of force in all the adjacent military units." Carabineros, meanwhile, on the same day of the concentration, "in large numbers should be installed only at the entrances to Parque O’Higgins, on the Metro stairs, and at the bus stops with long guns." For its part, Investigaciones should give "free rein" to pickpockets, prostitutes, and drug addicts in order to turn the act into something else."

Finally, the planning proposes to occupy the communications agenda with press reports, editorials, and radio and television programs that talk about "terrorism."

SABER RATTLING AND BAYONETS

Although there is no evidence that this plan was carried out to the letter, when reviewing the press of the time, some coincidences can be seen with what happened in the days before and after the concentration.

On the same November 7 that the concentration at Parque O’Higgins was authorized, seven inmates escaped from the Penitentiary and the Intendant of Santiago, Brigadier Roberto Guillard, denounced to the press that "the PC and the MIR set in motion a plan to provoke chaos." The quote was highlighted in the headline of the news published the following day by the newspaper La Tercera.

Brigadier Guillard's report specified that both organizations had drawn up lists and were threatening neighborhood leaders with death to pressure people who did not want to protest, seeking with this to "intimidate and create panic among people who are fulfilling a laudable mission. I have told them to unite, because that way the danger will decrease," the same note in La Tercera reads.

Puga's psychological action plan proposed to discredit the opposition while dividing it between Marxists and democrats. At the same time, it sought to make the Parque O’Higgins concentration fail and generate a feeling of exhaustion with the mobilizations.

A few days later, the Minister Secretary General of Government, Alfonso Márquez de La Plata, denounced that the Communist Party had made a call to arms for November 18, hidden in an acronym inserted in a classified ad published in La Tercera. "PC A LAS ARMAS" (PC TO ARMS), can be read if you take the first letters of each word.

According to Márquez de La Plata, the alleged call was "one more demonstration that behind the entire organization of the concentration called for the 18th is the Communist Party."

The Communist Party denied this accusation in a statement, pointing out that the dictatorship sought to generate a "violent anti-communist campaign and against all the democratic opposition," as La Tercera recorded in a publication on November 17.

A week before the concentration, some unions of bus drivers operating in the Santiago area, citing a security crisis, threatened to paralyze routes through the city.

And on the night of the 15th, as Puga recommended, Pinochet went on a tour of Arica and Iquique. In addition to carrying out a series of inaugurations of infrastructure works, he took the opportunity to lash out at "the Marxists," calling on the citizenry to fight against communism to achieve a "clean and pure democracy."

Just as Álvaro Puga's plan proposed, in the days prior to the concentration at Parque O’Higgins, rumors of delinquency and insecurity began to circulate among the middle and upper-middle class. The magazine APSI, in opposition to the dictatorship, reported that "some ladies commented that that day the extremists planned to devastate the houses, that there would be no transportation."

The press of the time does not report low-altitude flights by planes over the capital's neighborhoods. However, the opposition denounced that between November 10 and 17, the Armed Forces and security forces raided various neighborhoods of Greater Santiago.

According to press reports of the time, the occupations and searches of homes by uniformed personnel were carried out in neighborhoods such as Santa Julia and Rebeca Matte, in Ñuñoa; Óscar Bonilla, Teniente Merino, Maipo, Las Brisas, and the Venezuela camp, in Puente Alto; and Barrero, Bosque Uno, Bosque Dos, Villa Wolf, Patria Nueva, and El Rodeo, in the commune of Conchalí.

The total number of people detained in those operations was 310.

One of the objectives was to "create a collective psychosis" before the concentration of November 18, 1983, through actions such as sabotage of the Metro lines; paralysis of public transportation; an attack against Fantasilandia; power outages in the surroundings of Parque O’Higgins, and the rape of a minor in that same place.

The day before the mobilization, El Mercurio denounced that "the MIR has been striking spectacular blows for 15 days with graffiti on public buildings and private cars, in which it calls for the meeting at Parque O’Higgins.

Communists have done the same, also coinciding with the socialists. Thousands of pamphlets that have circulated calling for the Park in recent days reaffirm what has been asserted."

In line with Puga's psychological action plan regarding the mass distribution of pamphlets, Las Últimas Noticias recorded that former parliamentarian Carlos Dupré (PDC) denounced the production of thousands of pamphlets of alleged authorship by the MIR and the PC at a printing press located at Calle Serrano 225, in the center of Santiago.

The report suggested that said pamphlets had been printed by agents or officials of the dictatorship, in a political setup operation.

On Thursday the 17th, in his column in La Tercera, Puga predicted a complete failure of the concentration. "They only have the support of the murderous machine of international communism, which has now dedicated itself to killing carabineros whose only mission is to protect people and public and private property from criminal acts," he writes.

However, against the aspirations and plans of Puga and the dictatorship, in its edition of November 19, 1983, La Tercera reported that the concentration took place in "absolute tranquility." On those same pages, Intendant Roberto Guillard acknowledged that "we have had nothing, absolutely nothing to regret."

Source: revistaanfibia.com, August 17, 2023

He barely took a break. As the head of the Public Affairs office and a shadow advisor to the dictatorship’s intelligence services and to Pinochet himself, Álvaro Puga Cappa drafted hundreds of political and intelligence reports that are now coming to light.

There are 166 files containing speeches, detailing the rivalry between civilian officials, the participation of government and opposition informants, espionage, psychological and propaganda actions to sow terror and achieve civil obedience, the CNI’s political and propaganda agenda, and the creation of fake news.

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.

—I want to show you something, do you have time?

It was during our second or third meeting at his apartment in the Providencia commune that Álvaro Puga Cappa—Chilean, 81 years old, four children, married for the second time to his first wife’s younger sister—rose from a tapestry armchair and headed toward his study. He was looking for something that, he said, would surprise me.

It was May 2010, and I was visiting him for a series of interviews for the book The Secret Life of Augusto Pinochet (Debate, 2013), which deals with the books the dictator wrote or had written for him, and the thousands of heritage books he amassed at the expense of the public treasury.

That taste the general had for books and writers, a taste that predated the coup d'état, was the starting point for, if not a friendship—because Pinochet had almost no friends—at least a mutual sympathy with Puga.

He was one of his closest collaborators, a confidant, propagandist, ghostwriter, and ideologue in the early years, in open rivalry with Jaime Guzmán. With pride, like someone recounting an honorable feat, he defined himself as “the first and last civilian of the military government,” as well as “a man of the trenches, a fighter.”

In charge of the Public Affairs office, which handled propaganda, speeches, and censorship, he had been a pivotal advisor in the seventies. His field of influence was broad and murky, from the upper floors of the Diego Portales building to the basements of the repressive agencies, with which Puga collaborated.

He was a friend of the director of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Manuel Contreras (who did have friends), and later of the director of the National Information Center (CNI), Humberto Gordon. He liked to boast of his power, to sow respect, fear. Behind his back, he told me with amusement, they had invented a nickname for him: The Bishop.

He was one of Pinochet’s closest collaborators. His confidant, his ideologue, his ghostwriter.

All of that had been Alvaro Augusto Pilade Puga Cappa. And yet, when I visited him in his apartment, he was already an impoverished and withered man, a man apart, almost at the end: relegated to a place of contempt, infamy, and oblivion. He had been important, and no one valued or recognized him anymore, except for his friends who were serving sentences in the Punta Peuco prison.

That is why that afternoon in 2010 he returned from his study with a stack of two-ring binders with metal fittings that contained speeches, minutes, political reports, and plans for espionage and propaganda and psychological operations, among other matters. By dusting off those papers, he seemed to want to boast of the power and importance he once had.

Contained in those binders was a part of the memory of the civil-military dictatorship, a gray part, if there is any other. There, the rivalry of civilian officials was accounted for, especially the underground dispute between nationalists and gremialistas; government and opposition informants; the espionage of political leaders; and the propaganda and conspiratorial activities carried out by the CNI, in parallel to its repressive work.

There, in short, were the evidences of the conspiracies hatched in Puga’s head, who had written each one of those reports typed on a typewriter, every single day of the year.

AGENT AND GHOSTWRITER

That is the origin of

The First Civilian of the Dictatorship, the Secret Files of Álvaro Puga , the exclusive investigation that adds up to 166 documents ranging from July 1974 to February 1986. It is a partial and, in a way, arbitrary archive, because it contains only what he entrusted to me at random, probably without being fully aware of everything that was in those binders.

In fact, some of the documents he gave me, knowing that I would make a digital copy of them, contradicted his persistence in denying his links to the dictatorship’s intelligence agencies.

The papers do not only speak of the role Puga played in the shadows of dictatorial power. Read in context, in the light of other archives and testimonies, they allow a glimpse into the bowels of the dictatorship, its struggles, its tricks, its closed-door practices.

Those of us who worked on their analysis and verification defined three groups, according to a chronological timeline: the papers from the seventies, those from the first half of the eighties, and those from the second half of that decade.

The writings of the seventies are composed primarily of political reports, responses to journalistic interviews that Puga conducted on behalf of Pinochet, and drafts of speeches to be delivered by Pinochet or some other member of the Military Junta.

In that group, for example, is the draft of one of the speeches that the Chilean dictator gave during the May 1974 visit he made to the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, the original of which corresponds word for word to the speech given on that occasion.

Also the Christmas and New Year greetings that Pinochet delivered via national radio and television broadcast in 1975; drafts of speeches for anniversaries of the coup d'état and some of the many times he attended ceremonies in his honor, in which he was celebrated with medals, plaques, and keys to cities and towns. Dictatorial power is built on genuflecting and monarchical gestures.

Read in context, in the light of other archives and testimonies, Álvaro Puga’s secret documents allow a glimpse into the bowels of the dictatorship, its struggles, its tricks, its closed-door practices.

That decade, the most prosperous for Álvaro Puga as a government advisor, coincided with the years he was at the head of the Public Affairs office, while, behind the scenes, he collaborated with the DINA’s Department of Communications and Psychological Operations, which depended on Army officer Vianel Valdivieso Cervantes.

It was that department that conceived Operation Colombo, devised to cover up the crime of 119 leftist militants whose deaths were attributed to “a bloody struggle” between guerrillas, as El Mercurio headlined in 1975.

La Segunda went further in its front-page headline: “Exterminated like rats.” Those headlines bear Puga’s mark, as he was in charge of distributing that information to the national media. However, the documents gathered here do not account for his complicity in the dictatorship’s crimes in that decade, nor for the censorship, death threats to journalists, or communicational setups in which he participated.

Something very different occurs with the series of documents from the first half of the eighties.

In those years, and especially in 1983, the most revealing and valuable documents in historical terms are concentrated. Hence, the journalistic investigation of the series of reports has focused on this period.

A period marked by an acute economic and political crisis, the beginning of popular protests, and the official celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the coup d'état. A milestone in which Puga and the CNI participated actively, by order of Pinochet himself, while they conspired against opponents and leaders aligned with the dictatorship and carried out setups and what they called subliminal campaigns and psychological actions.

FRIENDLY FIRE

As told in one of the reports of this investigation, Pinochet handed over nearly 2.5 billion pesos in today’s value for the CNI and his advisor Álvaro Puga to launch a propaganda campaign for the celebratory acts of September 11, 1983, which lasted for three days and included merchandising, parades, and advertisements in the press, radio, and television.

Also, one day before, they organized a massive act that was broadcast live by Televisión Nacional, in which they swore loyalty to their leader and launched a political party of nationalist origin.

This is perhaps one of the main findings that emerges from the documents prepared by Puga: his analysis—in contrast with press and television archives, as well as interviews with actors of the time—allows us to dimension the effort of Pinochet’s political police to influence the course of the government and dispute places of power with the gremialistas, mostly young people loyal to Jaime Guzmán, who by the first half of the eighties had filled the high and middle positions of the public administration, to the detriment of the nationalists.

Ultimately, in a period of high political and economic uncertainty, there was a power struggle, and that dispute was expressed in reports in which Puga gave a detailed account of the content of meetings of leaders aligned with the dictatorship, as if he himself had been present.

In a memorandum from June 1983, for example, he accuses Jaime Guzmán of meeting in private with other right-wing political leaders to conspire against Pinochet, in view of his imminent fall.

The 1983 documents are especially valuable in historical terms. In the midst of an economic, social, and political crisis, the celebration of the 10 years of the coup is apotheotic, a milestone in which Puga and the CNI participated actively.

When weighing these documents, it is necessary to consider that their author speaks from his place of interest, which coincides with the interest of the nationalists and the CNI, to whom several of the writings of the first half of the eighties are addressed.

In this sense, it is possible that in cases like the one cited with the reports of conspiracies, they contain at the same time conspiracies hatched by intelligence agencies. Hence the convenience of contrasting the content of these documents with testimonies, bibliography, and documents, just as is done in the reports of this series, which also gathers a vast audiovisual archive with propaganda documentaries and press coverage from public television.

But beyond the effort to verify every relevant fact or statement, the documents from the first half of the eighties also have the value of providing clues about the resources that agents and advisors like Puga used to gather information.

Hidden microphones, government and opposition informants, agents infiltrated in offices, companies, factories. Nothing new for a dictatorship, nothing that had not been known and commented on behind closed doors in those years, but it is a different thing for those practices to be evidenced in documents linked to intelligence services.

DYNAMIC, MULTIPLE, UBIQUITOUS

Hidden microphones were the order of the day in those years. The microphones, the informants, the agents of what they called the service. In a report dated June 1983, regarding a new meeting of right-wing leaders, Puga laments that “knowing the time and place where the second meeting would be held, no listening devices were placed at the meeting to confirm what was being planned against the Government.” In any case, from what other reports say, Puga was quite aware of the things that leaders aligned with the dictatorship and the opposition were talking about, especially the Christian Democrats, their financing channels, who received funds, how they were spent.

Puga—and therefore the CNI—seemed to know almost everything in those days. His effort to control, to get ahead of events, to stay two steps ahead makes sense in the Shakespeare quote that is read at the beginning of his autobiography titled The Mosaic of Memory (Editorial Maye, 2008): “The cautious man never deplores the present evil; he employs the present in preventing the future.”

That is also what the reports are about. About preventing the future, about getting ahead of it to try to twist it. For example, in April 1983 he maintains that “in the highest spheres” it is believed that the new Minister of the Interior will be Sergio Onofre Jarpa, which will happen four months later.

And when Jarpa has just been appointed minister, Puga sends out a memorandum titled Analysis of the personal activities of Sergio Onofre Jarpa, in which he portrays him with a “poor relative complex,” guided by a desire for “overcoming his own misfortune,” who has swindled his family and received money from the CIA to fight Allende.

In that report is everything one needs to know about the new Minister of the Interior. His past, his links, his movements. “Last Friday he ate with (businessman) Ricardo Claro at his house,” he reports. “He was alone.”

Diplomats, military personnel, businessmen, journalists, priests, political leaders. His sources are broad. Broad and, in some cases, when they are exposed, disturbing.

One of the main findings of these archives: the effort of Pinochet’s political police to influence the course of the government and dispute places of power with the gremialistas, mostly young people loyal to Jaime Guzmán.

In a memorandum from August 19, 1983, regarding a meeting of Jarpa with leaders of the Christian Democracy, he identifies the leader of that party Adolfo Zaldívar as one of the people who recount details of that meeting. The other, mentioned in a report dispatched three days later, is Luis Pareto.

And three months before that meeting, in another memorandum, Puga asks to carry out an action before the State Defense Council to help Luis Matte Valdés, a socialist militant and former Minister of Housing and Urbanism under Salvador Allende, who in those days had a legal dispute over some land he owned in La Florida.

The request is because “Mr. Matte is a very valuable element for the information on leftist sectors that he provides voluntarily.”

Puga is a dynamic, multiple, ubiquitous man, who asks for and offers help for his informants, positions for his friends, and favors for his close associates and for himself, as evidenced in a document titled Agenda, in which he expresses “the need to change the judge or change the place of the trial” in Concepción, regarding a lawsuit that affects a fishing company he owns in Talcahuano.

The microphones, the informants, and agents of what they called the service were the order of the day in those years. Puga—and therefore the CNI—seemed to know almost everything in those days.

As can be seen, dictatorial power is generous and can move wills, officials, resources. What else is a dictatorship if not a chain of abuses, arbitrariness, and discretionary favors.

In mid-1983, for example, he asks that his friend, the journalist Héctor Durán, be appointed to the management of the Orbe agency, in addition to reminding them of the pending payment of fees for a communication consultancy.

Incidentally, in that same document, he asks that the CNI infiltrate the textile factory of businessman Jorge Comandari Kaiser, “because someone tipped him off that miguelitos (caltrops) are being manufactured there (...).

He is a man who helps us a lot with his political contacts. He even tells me that he could give work to someone sent by the service to control and verify if what has been reported there is true.”

SUBLIMINAL CAMPAIGNS

Puga’s obsession with information, with influencing, with twisting and manipulating reality is a constant in his reports. His most recurring theme is propaganda, a subject in which he considers himself an expert. “We could well say that it is our favorite,” he admits in November 1983.

He is also skilled in what he calls “subliminal campaigns” and “psychological actions,” which are nothing more than plans to manipulate public opinion through setups, disinformation campaigns, and actions that have the purpose of sowing terror in the population.

In this regard, the memorandum titled PSYCHOLOGICAL ACTION PLAN TO COUNTERACT THE 11-18 CONCENTRATION is illustrative.

In order to discredit the opposition demonstration that was held in November 1983 at Parque O’Higgins, Puga proposes actions such as the “rape of a minor by a group of criminals in the Parque O’Higgins sector”; “attack against Fantasilandia, attributable to the MIR”; “malfunction in the Metro line”; “low-altitude flights over all the large neighborhoods of the southern sector of Santiago” and “talking about terrorism again, especially through press and television reports.”

A recurring theme in the Puga archives is his obsession with information and propaganda. He was skilled in “subliminal campaigns” and “psychological actions” to manipulate public opinion, sow terror, and achieve civil obedience.

As stated in another of the reports in this series, psychological operations were a common practice of the DINA and the CNI, and in them, the complicity of the media and journalists was fundamental. In this case, the above is evidenced in a 1983 document that identifies the director of La Tercera, Alberto Guerrero, as “a man totally ours, unconditional” to the intelligence services.

The same did not seem to be the case with one of the main controllers of that newspaper, Germán Picó Cañas. “He has an aversion to the CNI that borders on paranoia and for that reason I think it is very important that the General Director (of the CNI) have an apparently social meeting with him,” the same document suggests.

There are no clues about the result of that proposal. But another document from the same year states that, as a result of the millionaire loans that the State gave to the newspapers El Mercurio and La Tercera to save them from certain bankruptcy, “the Government practically owns the property” of both companies.

Puga suggests that the government stage a coup and take over both. Ultimately, his plan consists of a “direct intervention of all media.” However, if that does not happen, if he cannot control everything, he has an idea in motion: “We have countered that force a lot with the hiring of the services of many journalists from those newspapers.”

Those newspapers are El Mercurio and La Tercera. The two national newspaper chains that sustained the dictatorship. And the only two that survive to this day.

THE SECRET LOVER

The third and final group of documents is concentrated in the second half of the eighties. And unlike the previous group, they are reports on national and international politics prepared primarily with open sources, that is to say, the press.

There are no longer any allusions to intelligence services. No conspiracies, espionage, propaganda plans, subliminal campaigns, or psychological actions. Not at least in the set of binders from that last period that Puga brought from his study and also authorized to be copied.

Those papers have a different tone, more distant, impersonal. In fact, already since the end of 1983, his reports show a decline in his mood, perhaps a desperation, a bewilderment, if not a sadness. “I also feel the pressing need to regularize my political and communicational advisory functions to the Government, since I am always doubtful about what I should give, because nothing is especially asked of me,” he writes on Christmas Eve.

It is very likely that the lawsuit and subsequent bankruptcy of his fishing company in Talcahuano, which led to an arrest warrant against him, took their toll. Definitely, from what is read in those papers, he will never be the same as he was at the beginning of the eighties, much less the one he had been a decade earlier, when he was in charge of the Public Affairs office.

He no longer had as much influence, but he also did not live in turmoil. He had the protection of Pinochet and, according to an article in the media Primera Línea, of the CNI itself to evade his legal troubles.

According to what he told me, the reports of this period were addressed to Pinochet, who had arranged for an Army official to arrive at his advisor’s house every Monday morning to collect them in a sealed envelope.

He paid him well and probably did not read them, although Puga said he did, because “every so often they would get me together with him and he would comment on them to me.” He used to bring him chocolates as a gift, “because I knew him quite well and I knew he liked chocolates.” He also knew the reason why Pinochet summoned him to talk at the Army Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters or at the Military Club, never at La Moneda.

—Never?

—Never at La Moneda, never, because (Jaime) Guzmán could appear there. Pinochet 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 loved me very much, sincerely, and I tell you this without boasting: there was an affection that was born that night I told you about, September 11, when he sent for me and signed his books for me.

PALE, THICK, WITHERED

Three years after the series of interviews, I saw Puga again to give him a copy of my book about Pinochet. For that, and above all, to know more about his archive.

It was 2013, two years before his death, and he was now living in the house of one of his daughters, in the Los Domínicos neighborhood. Debts had forced him to leave the apartment he occupied with his wife in Providencia. He received me in the living room.

Just as he did the last time we met, he complained again that no one gave him work. But now he said he didn’t care, that nothing mattered to him anymore. He thanked me for the book I brought him, although he clarified that he had already managed to get a copy. He had read it carefully and it had seemed good to him. Basically, he had no objections to the way I had reproduced the interview with him.

Álvaro Puga met with Pinochet but never set foot in La Moneda. So as not to cross paths with Guzmán.

Then I asked him about the archives. About the ones I took the first time cradled in both arms, like someone carrying a pile of logs, and after copying them I took them back in a suitcase. About that second batch of binders that I took from his apartment in that same suitcase and that I also returned.

About those and the other papers that he had not wanted to show me, because those were “more private,” he had said in 2010. Now, three years later, I wanted to know what had become of all that, and in return, without hesitation, he told me that he no longer had them, that he had gotten rid of them.

—How? How did you get rid of them?

—I burned them.

If true, he did the same thing the Army had done with the CNI archive in 2001, which led to a judicial conviction. Álvaro Puga never accounted to justice. Nor did I ask him for an account of the content of the papers he gave me. I barely spoke about that in the book about Pinochet, because it exceeded the thematic axis and was part of another investigation, which I did not know if I would ever do.

He came out to see me off at the door of his daughter’s house. He shook my right hand, a thick, pale, withered hand. He thanked me for the book, he said goodbye without smiling.

—Have a good day, take care.

by Juan Cristóbal Peña

Source: revistaanfibia.com, September 11, 2023

Alvaro Augusto Pilade Puga Cappa, the questioned editor of the website linked to the CNI, Despierta Chile, not only evaded justice in the year 2000, when he was declared dead by the Supreme Court. The former CNI intelligence analyst has dodged arrest warrants from the courts since 1983 and even left unanswered a subpoena from the American prosecutor investigating the crime of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his secretary Ronny Moffit.

In '83, a lawsuit was filed against Puga for fraud and fraudulent bankruptcy of the Sociedad Pesquera Pacífico Sur in his capacity as a partner. The libel filed by the workers led to his first arrest warrant.

But he was never found, and in 1988 the Court of Appeals of Concepción prosecuted him in absentia for fraud. Former officers who were part of the dissolved CNI indicated to Primera Línea that until the year 1990 Puga worked as a press analyst for the CNI.

Wanted by justice, every dawn a vehicle from the information center would pick him up at his home, protected by a metal gate and an electronic intercom. His material was only delivered to those who knew a password, as on several occasions the Investigations police arrived there to look for him.

His intelligence reports were delivered to the then operational chief of the CNI, Alvaro Corbalán, who, after contrasting them with the service’s own reports, would forward them to the director of the entity.

Former CNI agents state that his old relationship with the DINA and its chief Manuel Contreras, as well as with the operational chief of the CNI, Alvaro Corbalán, were key to avoiding his arrest.

Complying with the court’s orders, the Investigations police went to look for him at his residence on several occasions. Overwhelmed by the stalking that surrounded his advisor and friend—former agents relate—Corbalán and the lawyer Patricio Vildósola, recently awarded by the Corporación 11 de Septiembre and former national secretary of Avanzada Nacional, interceded before the director of the civil police of the time, General Fernando Paredes.

He, however, indicated to them that it was not in his hands to revoke the arrest warrant. But the effort was not in vain. Puga always remained in his home located in the Providencia commune, without being arrested, despite regularly attending political meetings.

First, he actively joined the meetings of the Nationalist Movement, which he founded in 1982, and then he joined the Avanzada Nacional group, where he was a member of the political commission in close relationship with former agents of the repressive service Marcelo Elizalde and Guido Roley.

Those close to this last collective recount that at that time the meetings were held at the Pereira Palace, today the headquarters of the CUT. The party’s top brass, made up of José Ramón Molina, Sergio Miranda Carrington, and Carlos Portales, would arrive there.

It is even pointed out that the current Corporación 11 de Septiembre is made up of former leaders of Avanzada Nacional, who would be financing the website "Despierta Chile."

As a finishing touch to confirm his status as untouchable, in March 2000, the request from the American justice system arrived in Chile, seeking to clarify his relationship with the Letelier Case, the same plot still not unraveled that in 1977 cost him his removal from the military regime.

Puga was born in 1929 and his curriculum is full of close relationships with the press, experience that must have served as a guarantee to be general editor of Despierta Chile, despite his judicial requirements. During the government of the Popular Unity, he worked at Radio Agricultura and in later years was a regular columnist for the newspaper La Tercera.

In addition, he was the only civilian who was in the Ministry of Defense on September 11, 1973, working alongside Admiral Patricio Carvajal. Within his subsequent link to the military dictatorship, he appears in propaganda positions of the regime.

After having abandoned the junta in 1978, he advised General Humberto Gordon, former director of the CNI, between 1986 and 1988. He also supported the Armed Forces during Pinochet’s detention in London, proposing lines of action to them.

Source: Primera Linea, September 10, 2017

Profile of Alvaro Puga Cappa: A Functionary in Hell

Propagandist, censor, screenwriter, and playwright, Álvaro Augusto Pilade Puga Cappa was a multifaceted character of extremes who embodied the excesses of the military dictatorship, for which he sought to provide an epic and foundational narrative.

From the very first hours of the coup d'état, he was drafting military decrees, and his early closeness to Pinochet and the high military command established him as the regime's first civilian advisor.

From that position, he wrote speeches and intelligence reports, and designed psychological operations and setups such as Operation Colombo, commissioned by the DINA and later the CNI. He died poor, forgotten, and unpunished. His traces as an ideologue of the dictatorship remained hidden. Until today.

When his figure seemed to be fading into oblivion, when he was nothing more than a diffuse shadow of a past horror, in extinction, Álvaro Puga Cappa managed to return to public life in an improbable way.

Improbable and controversial. It was November 1997, and to the surprise of the jurors, his name appeared inside the sealed envelope that announced the winner of the ninth version of the Eugenio Dittborn dramaturgy contest, held by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

In addition to being a propagandist, columnist, mastermind of psychological operations, and collaborator with Pinochet's political police, Puga was now a playwright and author of a work of dark, topical humor that, in the jury's opinion, contained “a very interesting dramatic structure, which poses several plot axes” and “constitutes a metaphor for hell, through recurring and Kafkaesque nightmares where current Chilean society is criticized.”

The title

A Civil Servant in Hell

It was a scandal, of course. A scandal that was first experienced behind closed doors, among the jurors of a contest in which participants entered under a pseudonym, and which later spread to the world of dramaturgy.

How could they give first place to the man behind that disgraceful headline in the newspaper La Segunda that read “Exterminated like rats”? How was it possible that Puga won first place and that someone like Jorge Díaz, a renowned and prolific playwright, was left with second place for a text about torture and betrayal called The Scar?

Academic Inés Stranger, one of the members of the jury, recalls that the play was written in a satirical register and seemed more like a critique of the dictatorship than of the new democracy, as the winner later explained to the newspaper La Segunda: a critical look “at the bureaucracy, the ineptitude of public employees, and the moral corruption” of those days.

Stranger remembers that it was not a unanimous verdict. And since none of the jurors had heard of the winner, much less knew what he had done, there were no objections to awarding him first place in the contest. “It was what was appropriate,” she says.

The ceremony was sober and brief. “A very uncomfortable thing,” recalls actor and theater director Ramón Núñez, who was also part of the jury. To the astonishment of those present, Puga had the idea of attending accompanied by retired General Humberto Gordon, who a decade earlier had been director of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) and a member of the Military Junta.

Gordon “arrived dressed in a military uniform and watched each one of us, from head to toe, one by one, in a scrutinizing manner,” says the actor. There were no speeches and no room for thanks. The winning play was never staged, let alone published, as if it had never existed.

And after that, Puga returned to his usual life, to a second or third tier, to public oblivion, to the alleys and basements of the dictatorship's intelligence services that continued to operate in the shadows and in the Punta Peuco prison.

Ultimately, Álvaro Augusto Pilade Puga Cappa returned to a place reserved for oblivion and contempt, even within the right wing itself.

That Puga was the winner of the UC dramaturgy contest put the jury in an uncomfortable situation. But the most surprising thing is that he thought to attend the awards ceremony accompanied by former CNI director Humberto Gordon, who arrived in uniform.

He was a hardliner among hardliners. The first and last civilian of the military regime, as he liked to say. And of course, it was not just a saying.

From the first hours of September 11, 1973, if not before, he was installed in the Armed Forces building, with his sleeves rolled up, drafting military decrees on a typewriter. Later he moved to the Diego Portales building, in charge of Public Affairs, which oversaw the regime's communications and censorship.

He had direct access to Pinochet and the other coup leaders, but along the way, very soon, he clashed with Jaime Guzmán and, by extension, with all the gremialistas. And in this case, clashing meant a ruthless struggle both in the public eye and in the shadows of the intelligence agencies, in an attempt to gain positions of influence and power within the dictatorship.

He identified with the old-guard nationalists, who founded a political party under the wing of the CNI and began losing power from the second half of the seventies to the gremialistas, whom he called “Pinochet’s favorites.” He had been left in the place of the defeated, that of the civilians who bet on turning Pinochet into a cult, that of the military men who did the dirty work while the civilians administered the government and, in the process, did business.

And all that—coupled with his link to the dictatorship's repressive agencies, the DINA and later the CNI—ended up taking its toll.

In August 2010, when I frequented him at his apartment in the Providencia commune for a series of interviews for the book The Secret Literary Life of Augusto Pinochet (Debate, 2013), Puga was poor as a rat.

He had no regular income or pension. He wrote columns that he published every so often in the IV Region newspaper El Día, owned by his family, “for peanuts.” He didn't know if he would make it to the end of the month. If things continued like that, he told me, he would have to move with his wife to the house of one of his daughters, which he did at the end of that same year.

It was the first year of Sebastián Piñera's presidency, the first democratically elected right-wing government in fifty years, and no one in that administration had called him or would call him to give him work. It was the price of loyalty, he told me. The price for being friends with people like Humberto Gordon and Manuel Contreras, the director of the DINA.

Manuel Contreras, whom he had known since his youth, had five years left to live. The same five years that Puga had left. Both were born in 1929 and died in 2015, three months apart, at the age of 86.

THE CAUTIOUS MAN

As a good conspirator, Puga insisted on hiding who he was and, above all, what he did in the field of political intelligence and repression, if he did not insist on building a myth about himself. In the hallways of the Diego Portales, which was the seat of government in the seventies, they nicknamed him The Bishop. “In general, I got along very well with the military; my problem was with some civilians.

And to be frank, I wasn't easy either,” he told me in one of the visits to his house. “I would walk by and the secretaries would tremble; they thought I might make some observation to them.”

If in those years he liked to flaunt power, after the return to democracy he preferred to make himself invisible. The Supreme Court itself was surprised that he was still alive in the 2000s. According to a note from the following year in El Mercurio, when his appearance was requested in a human rights case, the justice system “had desisted from interrogating him ‘because it was a public and notorious fact that he was dead.’”

And he was not.

Puga managed to go unnoticed by the justice system. And he never rendered accounts nor did he repent for anything. What was he going to repent for, if he never acknowledged links to military intelligence nor having participated in any political or repressive operation?

Puga boasted of being “the first civilian of the dictatorship” because he installed himself in the Armed Forces building early on September 11, 1973, where he was tasked with writing the military decrees with which the dictatorship debuted.

One of the first clues in the elusive and scattered biography of Álvaro Puga is found in his book The Mosaic of Memory (Editorial Maye, 2008). A cryptic text, with literary pretensions, preceded by an epigraph that quotes Shakespeare: “The cautious man never deplores the present evil; he employs the present to prevent the future.” Published by the publishing house of the dictatorship's former Minister of Labor, Alfonso Márquez de la Plata, The Mosaic of Memory is a sort of autobiography in which its author insists on reaffirming “his patriotic ideology,” which “meant being considered a hardliner, a position he maintains today without wavering,” while at the same time revealing a certain feeling of ingratitude in the face of oblivion, contempt, and, above all, the lack of recognition, “in the face of the very little attention to what one might say or tell.”

Structured in patches, with fragments of partial and arbitrary episodes—a construction of scattered memories “that arrive in my brain like dry leaves falling from trees, without a premeditated order”—the autobiography is composed of a set of chapters that are very far from proposing a plausible and complete vision of his professional and political trajectory.

It is a biography in flashes, of selective and forgetful memory, that insists on omitting the most controversial aspects of his role in the dictatorship.

Indeed, there is not a single mention, much less acknowledgment, of his link to the DINA and the CNI. At most, with a touch of pride and self-sufficiency, he gives an account of his participation in formal instances of the dictatorship and in the coup d'état itself, as the author of the military decrees that were disseminated from the first hours of September 11, 1973.

Of those texts typed on a typewriter, whose originals he said he gave to collector Carlos Alberto Cruz, he highlights the communiqué that announced the death of Salvador Allende, “one of my best works born from my pen, for the conciseness and restraint with which this news was told to the country.”

THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE

The pen, if there is such a thing, runs in the family. Born on July 10, 1929, in Santiago, he was the firstborn, and the only male child, of the marriage of Clara Cappa Moretti and Álvaro Puga Fisher—she a housewife, he a journalist, playwright, and show business entrepreneur of some fame in the forties and fifties in the capital.

For the eldest son, his father was a genius who wasted his talent and all the money he earned with it. A gambling addict, womanizer, and drinker, he died at 48, leaving nothing but debts, so the firstborn, barely out of school, had to take charge of his grandmother, his mother, and his sisters.

Thanks to the contacts of his paternal uncles, he came to work in the police section of Las Últimas Noticias and from there in the Banco Sudamericano. He married, had children. As his expenses grew and he earned little—$1,480 pesos of the time—he left to try his luck in Buenos Aires, where his mother had been raised and had relatives.

The Cappa Morettis helped him get a job in a textile factory and later in a television distributor.

Puga, who did not go to university, said he learned in Argentina much of what he later applied upon his return to Chile. Without going into details, in a 1980 interview he claimed, quite casually, to have advised Admiral Isaac Rojas, de facto vice president after the 1955 coup d'état against Perón, which began the so-called Liberating Revolution.

One of his few mentors, if not the only one, was the Argentine lawyer and writer Marcelo Menasché, who taught him “much more than what the universities offered me.” Menasché, who was the first translator of Marcel Proust into Spanish and a screenwriter for Enrique Santos Discépolo's films, introduced him to the classics of literature and encouraged him to write dramaturgy.

A near-ghost dramaturgy, because the works he wrote in Buenos Aires he said he destroyed, in a crisis of confidence.

Confidence, of which he had plenty, returned to him upon his return to Chile, in the mid-sixties. He settled in Santiago and created the legal book publishing and marketing company Encina and joined the Friday Club, a circle of friends that met at the Club de la Unión and spent time drinking and talking about politics and literature.

Certainly, in the Friday Club everyone was a man, mostly right-wing journalists, who in the following two decades collaborated in some of the operations executed by Puga and the intelligence apparatuses.

Álvaro Puga identified with the old-guard nationalists, who founded a political party under the wing of the CNI and began losing power from the second half of the seventies to the gremialistas, whom he called “Pinochet’s favorites.”

In that circle of friends were Fernando Díaz Palma and Alberto Guerrero, who during the dictatorship would direct Las Últimas Noticias and La Tercera, respectively. Also Mario Carneyro, director of La Segunda, who took him to write columns in that evening newspaper at the beginning of the Unidad Popular and gave rise to the myth—and the terror—of Alexis.

Under that pseudonym, the now political columnist fired against the Unidad Popular government and every so often, without half-measures, called for a military coup. Puga's combat also moved to an opinion space on Radio Agricultura and, starting in 1972, to the Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad, a Chilean paramilitary organization of ultra-nationalist thought, in which he held the position of secretary general, replacing Roberto Thieme.

From Buenos Aires, where he resides, Thieme says that Puga was “an upwardly mobile and charismatic character, very popular for his columns in La Segunda and on Radio Agricultura in the times of the Unidad Popular, but ultimately a mercenary, an opportunist, like many hysterical anti-communists who joined the ranks” of the far-right movement.

His columns were gathered in the book Your Life Diary (Encina, 1973), which he published through his own legal publishing house. In the prologue of that self-published book a couple of months after the military coup, a book that gave Puga a writer's license, the genuinely writer and dictatorship official Enrique Campos Meléndez defined the role that would fall to Puga after the coup d'état: “The historical moment of responsibility has arrived.

The nation seeks its best men to restore its deep wounds, to emerge from the abysmal crisis into which it has been plunged. It is the hour of sacrifice, of work, of action.”

TO THE DISTINGUISHED WRITER

The hour of sacrifice had its first reward on the very night of September 11. The shots had not yet ceased in the vicinity of La Moneda when Puga, busy drafting military decrees, received a call: Pinochet was summoning him to his office at the Army General Command.

He wanted to meet him, congratulate him, deal in person with the famous columnist and writer, considering that Pinochet himself saw himself as a man of letters, attending to the four books on geography, geopolitics, and history that he had published before the coup.

They introduced themselves, chatted, and treated each other as equals. And in recognition of his work as a drafter of military decrees, at the end of the meeting, Pinochet gave him two books of his authorship.

On the first, Military Geography (Military Geographic Institute, 1967), the general stamped his name and signature. On the other, War of the Pacific (Military Geographic Institute, 1972), he wrote the following dedication:

To the distinguished writer Mr. Álvaro Puga. Affectionately, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte CJE (Commander-in-Chief of the Army)

11-IX-1973

Puga kept both copies in the study of his apartment in Providencia. He displayed them with pride, that pride that reveals emotion, as a sign of his bond of trust and complicity with Pinochet, expressed in positions and “the thousands of pages in which (I) analyzed week by week the national political events so that it would be delivered directly to the President of the Republic.”

It was that personal relationship with the general, rather than his links to parties or politicians of the Chilean right, that led him to establish himself as the first civilian of the dictatorship. In a secret cable from March 1975, dispatched by the United States embassy in Chile to the State Department, “the far-right fanatics Puga and (Federico) Willoughby” are identified as two of the main communication advisors to the dictatorship, with offices “practically next to Pinochet’s office.” One was in charge of Public Affairs; the other was press chief and government spokesperson.

The informant on whom the cable is based adds that although “so far it seems that the Junta and the other military officers still exercise independent political judgment on political matters,” they listen to Puga and “use him to draft speeches and political documents.”

As a good conspirator, Puga insisted on hiding who he was and, above all, what he did in the field of political intelligence and repression, in an attempt to build a myth about himself.

Civilians such as Gastón Acuña, Gisella Silva, Rubén Díaz Neira, and Anthal Lipthay, all linked to the nationalist movement, also worked in Public Affairs. The tasks of this office, and of Puga in particular, were diverse.

As evidenced in the documents released on this site, he wrote speeches for the coup leaders and answered interviews on behalf of Pinochet and other military officials. He also published propaganda and counter-propaganda books and pamphlets and was in charge of censorship of the press and books.

The latter is evidenced by a letter published in November 1974 in Las Últimas Noticias, in which the writer Enrique Lafourcade expressly asks Puga, a member of “a committee that qualifies the books that can be read,” to allow the circulation of the book Salvador Allende, authored by the former.

In the same note, however, Puga denies being part of that censorship commission, “which is transitory and is formed exclusively by military personnel.”

He was more than a civilian advisor. In the first years, he rose—or pretended to rise—as the ideologue of a dictatorship, in open competition and rivalry with Jaime Guzmán. At first, the dispute seemed to be won by the former, who had the favoritism of Pinochet and the head of the DINA, which was no small thing.

In any case, the mark of both remained imprinted on the Declaration of Principles of the Government of Chile, published in March 1974. But it was Puga who had the idea of presenting that text in the auditorium of the Diego Portales building, on whose stage, on his initiative, the inscription Chile, 1810-1973 was engraved in copper.

He also had the idea of erecting the Eternal Flame of Liberty, a ceremonial fire inaugurated on September 11, 1975, by Pinochet and the other coup leaders, in Plaza Bulnes, in front of the La Moneda Palace.

It was the dictatorship's first mass act, one of Puga's great obsessions, who devised a parade of followers with torches and jingoistic fervor. He also devised the documentary Forever Free (1975), in which he appears as a screenwriter, in addition to reserving a prominent role for himself: as seen in the images, he is the only civilian who goes up to the stage.

In 2010, in his Providencia apartment, he said that the Eternal Flame of Liberty was his own invention, inspired by the votive flame that has been burning since 1946 in front of the Buenos Aires Cathedral, where the remains of San Martín are.

Hence, four years after the inauguration of the Eternal Flame of Liberty, in the same place, the Altar of the Fatherland was erected, which contained a crypt with the remains of Bernardo O’Higgins.

The ceremonial fire of 1973 next to the remains of the liberator of 1810. From the beginning, Puga was aware that the coup d'état meant a before and after in the history of Chile. A second Independence, if not a revolution, as he claimed to have labeled the coup before General Pinochet himself, a few days after their first meeting at the Army General Command.

In his apartment, sitting in a tapestry armchair, Puga said: “We were alone and I told him: ‘My General, what we are doing is a revolution.’ ‘What do you mean a revolution,’ he said very seriously. ‘Don’t talk to me about revolution, please.’ ‘You call it whatever you want—I told him—but this is a sudden change.

A before and after in history, that we have to be clear about.’ And I told him that as long as the Comptroller’s Office didn’t come down on us, we could do whatever we wanted. And that’s what we did, believe me. A revolution.”

THE TYPE OF PERSON

That revolution, which in strict terms was a conservative counter-revolution, involved eliminating the adversary and scaring away any sign of dissent and criticism. And in those tasks, Puga also played a prominent role.

According to the testimony to the Colegio de Periodistas de Chile provided by John Dinges, an American journalist who served as a correspondent for the Washington Post and other print media in his country, Puga had links to the DINA and exercised surveillance functions over foreign correspondents.

On one occasion, he even promoted his expulsion from the country, which failed due to the intervention of the United States embassy in Chile. And later, in 1977, when Dinges appeared at Puga's office, he directly threatened him with death: “He told me that it was a mistake that the government could not expel me, because my journalistic work was anti-Chilean.

More or less verbatim, he said that, since they couldn't kick me out, they couldn't protect me either, and that there were many terrorists on the streets who could run me over while I was walking.”

The threat was due to a publication that Dinges had made about the case of the 119 opponents murdered and disappeared in 1975, within the framework of Operation Colombo. Conceived and executed by the DINA's Psychological Operations Department, of which Puga was a part, Colombo consisted of a communication setup intended to cover up the murder of militants from different parties and movements affiliated with the Unidad Popular.

The Friday Club met at the Club de la Unión. They were all men, mostly right-wing journalists who would later collaborate in some of the operations executed by Puga and the intelligence apparatuses.

To this end, the DINA devised a complex operation that meant the creation of a Brazilian newspaper baptized Novo O Día, which in its only edition of June 25, 1975, reported the death of 59 MIR members, who fell in “clashes with forces of the Argentine government in Salta.” Twenty days later, in Argentina, the Buenos Aires magazine Lea reported 60 “Chilean extremists eliminated by their own comrades in struggle.” Based on this information, the Chilean evening newspaper La Segunda, in its edition of July 24 of the same year, published one of the most ignominious headlines in the national press: “Exterminated like Rats,” preceded by the following epigraph: “59 Chilean MIR members fall in military operation in Argentina.”

It was no surprise that Puga could be behind that headline. Already in September 1975, a cable from the United States embassy in Argentina, referring to the case of the 119 Chilean dissidents reported dead in alleged settling of scores, suspected a DINA setup and in particular Álvaro Puga, “the type of person who could have tried to cover up the crimes.”

Puga denied any link to Operation Colombo. Also with the DINA, despite the fact that his name appears on the list of civilian officials of that agency prepared in July 2000 by the Fifth Department of the Investigative Police, commissioned by the Ninth Criminal Court of Santiago.

The Chilean justice system did not investigate, much less sanction, his participation in the communication setup. However, in 2006, a summary carried out by the Ethics Tribunal of the Colegio de Periodistas de Chile sanctioned the collegiate journalists who were alive, in addition to establishing the responsibility that fell to Álvaro Puga, who was pointed out as the government official who distributed the false information to editors and directors of Chilean written media.

Among them was his friend Mario Carneyro, director of La Segunda.

SEPARATED AT BIRTH

Puga boasted of the power he accumulated in those first years of the regime, to the point of saying that some had come to call him, with evident excess, the fifth member of the Junta. He also boasted of having given a narrative to the dictatorship in those first years, of having cultivated a relationship of trust with Pinochet, and even of saving the country money.

In 2010, ensconced in the armchair of his apartment, he threw out:

“Do you know that I managed to reduce by ten percent the percentage of commission that was paid to the advertising agencies we worked with in the government?”

And yes, of course, the percentage thing was commented on in the power circles of that time, but in another way. Journalist and also press advisor Federico Willoughby, who perhaps accumulated as much or more power than Puga in his area, told me that “it was known” that Puga did not save anything, but rather arranged with the advertising agencies a commission for himself for each campaign he contracted on behalf of the government.

According to Puga, “that story” was spread by the gremialistas, always the gremialistas, until it reached the ears of Pinochet, who allegedly entrusted General Hernán Béjares to ask him for explanations. “We had already had some friction—he told me—, but that’s when the thing with Jaime Guzmán and his people started.

It started and didn’t stop anymore; they started inventing stories about me with the DINA, they went with stories to Pinochet, what didn’t they do to get me out of the way. And of course, you see, they succeeded.”

His departure from the government coincided with the departure of Manuel Contreras, director of the DINA, who was forced to accept the call to retirement once the United States held him responsible for the assassination of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington and requested his extradition in 1978, two years after the attack.

Puga and Contreras shared the same fate, a friendship from their youth, a nationalist ideology. That eagerness to conspire, to influence from the shadows in the high spheres of power, they also shared, even if they no longer held a position.

They were made for each other. Once Contreras was called to retirement in the Army, Puga became his spokesperson and advisor. One of those unconditional ones willing to say the unspeakable. In a 1980 interview in Cosas magazine, Puga defines Contreras as “quite a man, who has a series of moral conditions.” So tight was that relationship that in that same interview it is said that Puga usually uses a business card in which he presents himself, in printed letters, as “unofficial spokesperson for the friends of General Contreras.”

And it was no joke: when the United States requested the extradition of Contreras for the crime of Orlando Letelier, Puga spoke on his behalf with officials from that country. A cable from the embassy to the State Department gives an account of that fact.

The officials expected the advisor to propose conditions for a voluntary surrender, but in return, in what they describe as “a sort of blackmail,” they hear that the former director of the DINA “is confident that there is not enough evidence either to extradite him or to convict him in a Chilean court.” Furthermore, Puga makes it known in that conversation, the Letelier case is “a complex case,” comparable to the assassination of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy.

That was Puga. A daring, verbose, excessive man. A man apart.

FRIEND OF FRIENDS

When Manuel Contreras retired and the DINA became the CNI, the Central Nacional de Informaciones, several of the uniformed agents who were loyal to him remained lodged in this other repressive service.

And of course, in the process, Contreras's friends in the CNI became Puga's new friends, if they weren't already. One of them was none other than Humberto Gordon, director of the CNI starting in July 1980, the same one who in 1997 accompanied him to receive the dramaturgy award.

Museum of Memory and Human Rights

Those links are exposed in the documents released on this site, which show plans for psychological operations and espionage against political leaders of the opposition and the government. Also the execution of a millionaire propaganda plan for the celebration acts of the ten years of “national liberation” that Pinochet entrusted to the CNI, through Puga.

In that sense, the documents reaffirm that the CNI was not only a repressive agency, but also sought to influence the course of the government through political and communication activities executed in the shadows. In that, Puga was useful.

In an article in Primera Línea, it is said that Puga was an intelligence and press analyst for the repressive agency, and that “his intelligence reports were delivered to the then operational chief of the CNI, Álvaro Corbalán,” with whom he also cultivated a friendship. A friendship and a political vocation.

A man of Contreras and a figure of show business, politics, and repression, sentenced to life imprisonment for multiple crimes, Álvaro Corbalán was president and one of the visible figures of Avanzada Nacional, a political party founded within the CNI, whose purpose was to project the figure of Augusto Pinochet and oppose the power of the gremialistas.

According to what journalist Manuel Salazar relates in his book The Letters of Horror. Volume II: The CNI (LOM, 2012), Puga was in charge of writing the doctrinal principles of this movement and one of its operators in the shadows.

THE MIRACULOUS CATCH

Puga and Corbalán. Puga and Gordon. Puga and Contreras. Puga and Pinochet. As we can see, the propagandist and author of military decrees managed to remain linked to the high spheres of dictatorial power in the eighties.

He had a weekly column in the newspaper La Tercera in which he reaffirmed his reputation as a hardliner, arguing equally with the opposition and the gremialistas. He also had the attention of the press, in which he was interviewed with some frequency and positioned himself to the right of the right, which is already saying a lot for a civic-military dictatorship like Pinochet's.

In a November 1982 interview in Hoy magazine, regarding a public controversy with Jaime Guzmán initiated by Álvaro Puga, the latter said of the gremialistas: “They are rats abandoning the ship.”

Puga never abandoned that ship, largely because he depended on it, and because his cause was solitary and was linked both to the intelligence services and to the pro-government media, which fueled a myth around him.

In Cosas magazine, in a 1983 interview, they spoke of “this man so tall, so sturdy, with such white skin, who seems so distant (but who) has continued to gravitate, and every time there is talk of the possibility of a cabinet change that is harder than softer, one hears it said ‘they are going to appoint Puga to this position, they are going to appoint Puga to this other one.’”

The truth is that he could not be appointed to any position, much less a ministry. In 1983, the fishing company he had in Talcahuano with his wife and another partner was declared bankrupt and the workers filed a lawsuit.

Puga was desperate. In one of the secret documents, referring to what he describes as the “judicial situation in Concepción,” he expresses the “need to change the judge or change the place of the trial.”

Then, as a consequence of the same, in the “economic situation” item, he complains about the “problem of the auction of my house, which can be solved with a loan of three million pesos or with the order to the receiver of the BHC (Banco Hipotecario de Comercio) so that they do not continue with the trial and leave it lost until its prescription.”

During the UP, he was a well-known columnist who fired against the government in La Segunda and Radio Agricultura under the pseudonym Alexis, and became secretary general of the paramilitary organization Patria y Libertad.

It is not clear to whom that 1984 document is addressed, which he titles TEMARIO, in capital letters and underlined. Further down, in the same document, he raises doubts about the “personal situation regarding the advice I provide to the Government. What effect does it have? Will I continue?”

In light of those documents, he continued as a drafter of increasingly inconsequential reports, addressed to Pinochet. His influence was in decline. It is likely that this is due to the consolidation of the power of the gremialistas, but above all to the problem that he would continue to drag for the rest of the decade with the company Empresa Pesquera del Pacífico Sur Ltda.

In the Primera Línea article that profiles Puga, it reads that the lawsuit for fraud in Concepción led to an arrest warrant against him. And since he did not appear, the Court of Appeals of Concepción prosecuted him in absentia and since then, with the purpose of evading justice, “every dawn a vehicle of the Central Nacional de Informaciones picked him up at his home, protected by a metal gate and an electronic doorman.”

In 2010, when commenting on what became of him after leaving the government, he overlooked the intelligence reports and his legal troubles. He only referred to those reports on current events that he prepared at the expense of the public treasury, commissioned by Pinochet. And as proof of veracity, he went to his study and showed some of them: info

Very long weekly reports, produced using open sources, regarding the politics and economy of Chile and the world. Essentially press summaries, which an aide to the general would pick up from his house every Monday morning aboard a car.

Holding a copy of those reports in his hands, typed on a typewriter on yellow paper, Álvaro Puga said with a hint of pride and nostalgia: “I did this for twenty years, without failing a single time, not even when I was sick, nor when I was on vacation, although I almost never took vacations, that is the truth.”

VALENTINE’S DAY

The last time he made the news was in September 2001, four years after having won a playwriting contest. The Minister of the Interior at the time, José Miguel Insulza, accused the electronic media outlet Despierta Chile, and its general editor, Álvaro Puga Cappa, of having ties to former agents of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI).

The latter was nothing new. What was new was that some of those former agents, who were serving sentences in the Punta Peuco prison, were carrying out operations to pressure the government in search of pardons. That gave rise to a Sunday interview with Puga in El Mercurio that was titled “The resurrection of a tough guy.”

Certainly, the interviewee did not acknowledge or deny the media outlet’s ties to the CNI, although he was ironic about the reason for his return to notoriety and the fact that the Supreme Court believed him to be dead.

And, in the process, he took the opportunity to cultivate his profile as a tough guy among tough guys by narrating the advice he gave to a group of Army officers when Pinochet was detained in London. What did he propose? Well, kidnapping the British ambassador to Chile.

By then, in 2001, he was 72 years old, had eighteen grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and was about to be widowed by Rebeca Rojas Arellano, the mother of his children and administrator of the bankrupt fishing company.

It did not take long for Puga to remarry. He did not hesitate much, he did not make a problem of it. On February 14, 2004, Valentine’s Day, he married Elcira Ileana Rojas Arellano, the younger sister of his first wife.

Elcira had also been widowed, and Puga declared his love to her: “‘I was left alone, you were left alone, why don’t we get married? It is the best thing we can do, because being alone makes no sense, being alone is the most terrible thing that can happen to a human being.’ So we got married.”

That is what Puga told me in 2010, in his apartment. He was happy with his new wife, he said, but he complained that his first wife’s illness had been so long that it left him ruined, due to the bills from the clinic where she was treated.

He had no savings or regular work. The last businesses of which there is a record, if they can even be called businesses, are two. One was the Compañía Distribuidora Independiente de Cine-Video y Televisión S.A., which he founded in 1997 with the Argentine businessman and producer Carlos Marcelo Harwicz Charchir.

The other, a publishing company registered in 2000 with one of Manuel Contreras’s daughters, Editorial Encina. It had the same name as his old legal publishing house, and it released only two books, both signed by Contreras: La verdad histórica. El ejército guerrillero (2000) and La verdad histórica II. ¿Desaparecidos? (2001).

As things stood, without income, without recognition, before I left to say goodbye, Álvaro Puga Cappa alleged ingratitude:

“I have turned around, I have looked for work but it hasn’t gone well for me. I could be writing articles, you see how I am. I am 81 years old and my head works perfectly, but for the people who are in the newspapers now, I am not their cup of tea.

And of course, you know, books don’t leave you anything. It is complicated to be without work, more so for me: my name, my figure, my being have been so distorted. I am a totally different person from the one they try to say I am.

You see how I have received you, knowing that you are from the left. They pile it on me for I don’t know what reason, perhaps because of my friendship with Manuel Contreras, but that does not mean that I worked for the DINA or for the CNI. They have invented so many things.” by Juan Cristóbal Peña

Source: revistaanfibia.com, August 17, 2023

The confrontation between two sides

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

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

This article is part of El primer civil de la dictadura (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. Neither vacations nor holidays nor free weekends. Even less so that year of 1983, a tumultuous year, in which a danger appeared 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 the protest actions that week, “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 degrees, at the same time that it can develop at an unusual speed that leads the country to a state of internal commotion,” Puga makes known in that May 1983 report which, although it has no addressee, like others from that era, it 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 (...) unfortunately today is more inside the Government than outside of it.” A “sectarian and exclusionary” enemy, which, according to the signatory, 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 image of the nationalists as the dictator’s lovers, in a scenario where the gremialistas, and in particular Jaime Guzmán, were the regime’s official wife.

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, anticipated another report by the same advisor.

In that state of affairs, Puga insisted that the gremialistas were conspiring against the government, in conjunction 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 towards 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 affiliated with Jaime Guzmán and who, in truth, had little of the softliner about them. Be that as it may, the reports shed light on the two souls that vied to influence and obtain 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 not something 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 press outlets that led to the headline in La Segunda that that afternoon of July 24, 1975, 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 appreciate each other, as evidenced by a Christmas card sent by Puga in 1975. However, the young lawyer soon stood out with his own light, 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 continues to govern in Chile today. “Deeply Catholic, of daily mass and communion, visceral right-winger (but without a party), single with hints of being a confirmed bachelor, he seemed like an ‘old child’ due to his short stature, advanced baldness, and thick myopic 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 the historian and former minister of the dictatorship Gonzalo Vial in Pinochet.

La biografía (El Mercurio/Aguilar, 2002).

Once he settled in and found a place of privilege from which to influence, it did not take long for him 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 from His Excellency the President of the Republic, even if he believes otherwise,” to the last government official.

What Vial omits from that report is that it also says that Guzmán was committed to “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 aides and admirers” to whom “he gives retreat” 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 hardliners and softliners within the regime had not yet been coined; it began to be installed starting from a 1979 headline in Qué Pasa magazine that reported on the two souls within the government, regarding the debate on the draft of a new Constitution.

The denomination can lead to misunderstandings, if not to a condescending view of one over the other. As Manuel Gárate poses 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 in the dead of night 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 just as hard or harder 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.”

Be that as it may, 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 caricaturist who places them face to face, defiant, in a duel, Puga and Guzmán appear on the cover with the headline Two pro-government figures in conflict.

The inner pages report an atmosphere of “antechamber of a political apocalypse,” a product of the economic crisis and the discredit of the Chicago Boys, to whom until recently an “economic miracle” was attributed.

The country is about to explode 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 hardness, 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 after the first day of national protest, the analyst returned to draft 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 of 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 a Sunday, May 22, he accuses a “conspiracy of the political right with the Christian Democrats, Social Democracy, the Socialist Party, and groups like the gremialistas and others, who are doing union work at the top that allows them, under the wing of the Catholic Church, to reach the point of 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 would have 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 political leaders of the gremialismo 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 on Pinochet, when reporting on this period, the 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” is 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 lose their power entirely.

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, writes Puga, 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 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 rejected repeatedly, and in front of whom 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. That same image was used by Puga three decades later, in a series of interviews with the author of this text, when he said that since 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, something that 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 on what was happening” and “accused 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.”

LOYALTY IS OUR HONOR

In addition to being an amateur musician, a figure of the nightlife, 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 Loyalty is our honor, bordering on the motto of the Nazi SS: 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, at an event on the San Cristóbal hill in Santiago that was broadcast live by Televisión Nacional de Chile, thanks to the offices of agent Corbalán, who managed the public television broadcasts.

The event received much less attention in the press the following day. 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 ‘in gratitude for the 10 years of Government of the Armed Forces,’ on the summit of the San Cristóbal hill.”

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 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 bigwigs, who at the same time obeyed Pinochet’s orders.

Since it was a formal movement, which 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 ties 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 certain Independent Alliance that until then no one had heard of 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 that 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 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 when in the mid-eighties Jaime Guzmán was distanced from the high spheres of dictatorial power, and even when the historian Gonzalo Vial assures that the arrival of Sergio Onofre Jarpa to the government was a razzia against gremialistas, Puga’s documents show that Guzmán’s men managed to continue occupying positions of relevance.

Undersecretariats, mayoralties, service headships, technical and managerial positions in public companies that were not yet privatized. In practice, according to a report from the end of 1983, they were “hundreds of public officials whom they (the gremialistas) placed in the administration while their power lasted and who today defend it against all odds, always exercising that power in a rather mysterious way, because no one has been able to find out what the bridge is that 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, while Minister Jarpa carried out a process of opening and political negotiation.

The gremialistas also did the same, and around those same dates they created the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI). Sergio Onofre Jarpa, writes Puga, “continues to be for many supporters of the government and former supporters the key figure of the coming months, because in him they hope to find the middle ground that is required to advance the political schedule and put the country in 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 (...) that would start in the south of Chile and with which they plan to gather 1,000,000 voters.” That party, which the memorandum identifies as National Alliance, could well have been National Union, which starting in 1987 was registered under the name of National Renewal.

Although Avanzada Nacional opposed the political opening process, the group complained about being excluded from the negotiations at La Moneda. That is partly what a memorandum presumed to be from 1984 talks about, 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 only ‘is a tentacle of the CNI’.”

Whoever said that was correct. In its first board, to name the two most visible, 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, governing in the shadows, in favor of a project that according to an article in Qué Pasa magazine “rejects Marxism and traditional liberal-oriented democracy equally.”

In short, it was a movement tailored to Pinochet, who according to the former deputy and official of the dictatorship, Maximiano Errázuriz, used to entrust 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 Nationalist Front Fatherland and Liberty, who distanced himself from the dictatorship and the nationalists of his generation, who in his opinion ended up “fanaticized” by the figure of the dictator.

In fact, on July 9, 1986, in the La Tortuga gymnasium in Talcahuano, Avanzada Nacional organized a first great mass act 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

In a report by Cauce magazine, 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 today is serving a life sentence for various crimes during the dictatorship and who in 1989 came to lead the party under his real name.

In the same magazine, the testimony of a leader is collected, who acknowledges that, in addition to proselytism, Avanzada Nacional carried out attacks on parishes and actions of intimidation against opponents, so as 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 have the character of secret.”

In parallel to its secret activities, in Avanzada Nacional they gathered signatures to constitute themselves legally as a political party, so as 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 Independent Democratic Union, 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, whatever 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

Álvaro Puga’s Secret Archives Released: The First Civilian of the Dictatorship

A multimedia project carried out by Anfibia Chile magazine and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, in alliance with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, launched a series of chronicles on Álvaro Puga, where intelligence documents, espionage, propaganda, and power struggles within the Pinochet regime are revealed, 50 years after the coup d’état.

The First Civilian of the Dictatorship. The Secret Archives of Álvaro Puga is a multimedia project carried out by Anfibia Chile magazine and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, in alliance with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights.

It consists of the release of 166 intelligence documents prepared by the propagandist and advisor to the dictatorship’s repressive services Álvaro Puga Cappa in the seventies and eighties.

Along with the publication of the archives, it proposes a microsite hosted on Anfibia Chile magazine with reports and articles that analyze and contextualize the documents thematically, a narrative podcast, and a repository with a series of propaganda audiovisuals made by the dictatorship (courtesy of TVN and the National Film Archive).

Álvaro Puga’s secret archives contain speeches by Pinochet, government plans, political, intelligence, and espionage reports, as well as propaganda plans, psychological operations, and setups. They detail the rivalry of civilian officials (especially the struggle between nationalists and gremialistas) and the participation of government and opposition informants.

It will be presented on Tuesday, August 22, at 12:00 hours, in the auditorium of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. That day, the project’s creators will make a donation of the documents, in a conversation between Juan Cristóbal Peña and Francisca Skoknic (project editors), Cristian Alarcón (director of Anfibia Chile), María Fernanda García (director of the Museum of Memory), and the participation of the writer Diamela Eltit, the actor Rodolfo Pulgar (in a performative reading), and the artist Nona Fernández (who lends us her voice for the presentation video).

The activity will be broadcast through UAH TV. Free activity, limited capacity.

Propagandist, censor, screenwriter, and playwright, Álvaro Augusto Pilade Puga Cappa (1929-2015) was a multifaceted character of extremes, who represented the excesses of the military dictatorship, to which he sought to give an epic and foundational narrative.

He was there from the first hours of the coup d’état drafting military decrees, and his early closeness to Pinochet and the high military commands raised him as the regime’s first civilian advisor. From that place, he wrote speeches and intelligence reports, and designed psychological operations and setups like Operation Colombo, commissioned by the DINA and later the CNI.

Source: eldesconcierto.cl, August 21, 2023