Unpublished: The brutal training of the secret CNI group that operated at the Telephone Company 22.08.2017

For 13 years, Andrés Lübbert investigated what was hidden behind his father's flight from Chile in 1978. He delved even into the archives of the Stasi, the intelligence service of the GDR. And he uncovered a secret box until today: a CNI group that operated at the former CTC (Compañía de Teléfonos), where people were tortured, murdered, and other young men were trained to kill.

He captured this in the documentary "The Color of the Chameleon," which has just premiered in Chile. This is the unpublished story of that search, unknown episodes involving Deputy Rosauro Martínez, General Guillermo Ramírez, and civilians who have never been questioned.

For the Stasi, the powerful intelligence service of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Chilean Jorge Lübbert was a DINA agent. For the community of Chilean exiles in the GDR, the 21-year-old who arrived there in September 1978 was a victim of the dictatorship.

For his son, the documentarian Andrés Lübbert, he was a total stranger: -My father was someone who was absent. Our relationship was silent. We talked, but we had no intimacy or dialogue.

Andrés sensed from a young age that something strange was happening in his family history:

-When we were children, my mother told us that my dad had been in prison in Chile, but that he hadn't done anything wrong. I always wanted to have a different relationship with him. And I discovered at one point that the relationship that didn't exist had to do with his past—he recalls today, sitting in a café in Ñuñoa, while recounting his story.

Andrés arrived at that certainty and became obsessed. His first trip to Chile was when he was 19 years old. -I came to Chile because I wanted to know where my father came from. I made a short 40-minute documentary: "My father, my story." I didn't speak Spanish, it was very complicated.

And there my uncle and my grandfather told me things I didn't understand, that something had happened and that, because of that, my dad had left Chile. That he started working at the Compañía de Teléfonos and that he had problems there. And they told me more things that I couldn't manage to understand.

That documentary was the first of four that Andrés Lübbert, now 32, has made to understand his father's history. It is not strange that he translated his doubts into films. In his family, it is common to pick up a camera and film.

His uncle, the renowned filmmaker Orlando Lübbert, was the one who opened a window to the past for him. On his second trip to Chile, he gave him a testimony that his dad gave in 1979, shortly after arriving in Europe, as part of therapy. A very intimate account where he reveals the true reasons that led him to escape from Chile.

In that testimony, his father recounts details of the training he was forced to undergo while working at the Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile (CTC), when he was 21 years old. In those pages, he relates how they taught him to intercept phones, to spy on his colleagues, to shoot, to torture.

There, his father reveals the functioning of a group that until today has remained in a black box that no one had opened. Never has any of the men that Jorge Lübbert was able to identify been questioned by the justice system or by anyone. A group integrated by agents from one of the most secret compartments of the dictatorship and which was dedicated to preparing young men to do the dirty work.

A story that has its breaking point in August 1978, when the then-Army officer Rosauro Martínez punishes him for having spoken about the "training." He beats him, insults him, puts the barrel of a submachine gun in his mouth, and threatens him while continuing to beat him.

Until, in one moment, Jorge Lübbert becomes desperate, kicks him in the face, and breaks his lip. Rosauro Martínez loses control: "Do you want to see blood?" he screams; and he ties him up and places him half-naked under a grill.

This is how Jorge Lübbert himself would recount that breaking point, in the only testimony he gave of what he lived through in Chile in 1978: "He went into another room and from inside a large drawer, he took out a corpse of a guy who was naked, bleeding from the mouth, from the face, he was slashed all over, totally mistreated, very thin, the hair..., he only had tufts of hair, as if he had had an illness, as if his hair had fallen out.

He looked like a young guy but very aged... I spent a whole night underneath him. He put the corpse on top of the grill and I was underneath, I spent the whole night seeing that. I wanted to die there.

It was terrible, the only thing I had movement in was my head and I was hitting my head, I wanted to end it, I didn't want to know any more about this, I couldn't, it was desperate, the blood was falling onto my face."

Jorge Lübbert knew that same day that the man who tortured him was the then-Army officer Rosauro Martínez: "This same guy arrived early in the morning. He was covered in blood. He was hysterical, and he took me out of there.

I didn't want anything... I was totally screwed. It caught his attention that I was like that, he laughed, he took me and said: 'Have this drink.' He threw me out of the warehouse where other guys who worked there cleaned me, washed me, offered me breakfast, and gave me some pills. 'So you relax,' they told me. 'We are your friends, this guy is crazy!

This guy is dangerous! We were afraid of him too, try not to mess with him anymore,' they repeated to me. And that day I learned the name of the man who tortured me, because another guy arrived there and told me: 'Ah, you were with Rosauro Martínez.' Later I learned that they had appointed him as Pinochet's bodyguard.

It was said around there: 'this is going to be the one who will accompany my general even to go to the bathroom.' I think he was very trusted by Pinochet."

Years later, when that man was already a National Renewal (RN) deputy for Chillán, Jorge recognized him immediately when his son showed him a photo he took from the Internet (check here the Army file of Rosauro Martínez, where it is proven that he belonged to the DINA).

THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON

Andrés Lübbert is in Chile presenting his latest documentary, the fourth he has made about his father's story. "You have spent a whole life escaping, from us, your family, and from yourself," Andrés tells his father at the beginning of "The Color of the Chameleon," the film that officially premiered at Sanfic 2017 (see the trailer here).

It is a very personal story. And at the same time, it immerses itself in the streets of Chile, in its history, in its horrors. Andrés says that his search "was born from a very strong need to get closer to my father and to have a better relationship with him.

To understand him and help him. To understand his past. While I was investigating, I realized that it was something important. Justice and denunciation are important, but it is not a film of denunciation either." Andrés says it is the story of a father and a son.

Andrés was a witness to how his father suffered and did not speak. For years, the son asked, there were no answers, and Andrés became obsessed. He traveled to Chile and investigated. And in that journey, which included other countries and lasted 13 years, he managed to reconstruct his father's story step by step.

From when in 1977 Jorge Lübbert graduated from the Technical Drawing program at Inacap and a friend and neighbor got him an internship at the Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile (CTC). That neighbor was Gerardo Ramírez Parga, father of Gerardo and Guillermo Ramírez Chovar, two military men who occupy a leading role in this story.

-He (the neighbor) was also a manager at Banco Estado. And he wrote a letter to friends he had at the CTC recommending my father so that he could enter there to do his internship. I have seen the letter.

First, he did his internship for about half a year and everything was normal. What he did was technical drawings of the telephone lines. My dad designed the little phone logo for the CTC. Those were the things he did.

When the internship period ended, they offered him to stay there working. And later they invited him to an office (in the building where the DC operated on the Alameda) where they pressured him to sign something he doesn't know what it is.

There they told him: "We want you to work for us now." They invited him to sign a contract, but it was a blank sheet. He never knew what he signed—Andrés Lübbert told CIPER.

The testimony that Jorge Lübbert developed in his therapy provides details of that meeting. On May 2, 1978, at eight in the morning, he arrived at that office on the Alameda to interview with Jaime Letelier Montenegro, who appeared as the head of everything.

In the office of this former Navy officer, there were pennants from a center for former naval officers (which he later identified as the Club El Caleuche). Letelier asked him a couple of questions and took him to an adjoining office where a man with the surname Cano was located, who put the cards on the table.

That man lectured him about his family. He knew every detail of their activities and their lives. Cano threatened him. He stressed the links to the left in his environment. He knew that his father was a Radical militant, that his sister was a Socialist, that his mother had been part of the JAP during the Popular Unity.

He spoke to him about his brother Orlando, who was in exile, and asked him if he was a militant in any party.

"This guy got up from the table, approached me, and said to me violently: 'Do you realize that we know everything?' We, he spoke of 'we,' and I didn't know what 'we' was. I asked him who those 'we' were, the company? 'Yes, of course, the company,' he told me. 'We need you to work for us (...) you have aptitudes for the work, you have very good references'" (from the testimony written in therapy in 1979 by Jorge Lübbert).

When Jorge Lübbert had a blank contract in front of him, he insisted on knowing what it was about. He insisted a lot until the situation became violent. Cano told him that he had no problem wiping his family off the map: "Well, he said, if you don't sign, your family will feel it.

He threatened me with my father, he threatened me with my brother, with my brother who was abroad, he told me that if I didn't sign I had no other way out, that if I walked out the door now I wouldn't be safe anymore."

Jorge Lübbert signed. After that episode, they kidnapped him. One night, upon arriving at his house on Avenida Salvador with José Domingo Cañas, in Santiago, a car stopped and unknown men put him inside.

Upon seeing the driver of the vehicle, Jorge calmed down a little. He knew him: José Miguel Pavéz Ahumada, the brother of one of his classmates at the Instituto Nacional. He remembered him as a young man of the left, one who had a portrait of Mao in his room and who later joined the Army and was assigned to Antofagasta.

Pavéz also recognized him and tried to go unnoticed. It was not possible. That first time, Pavéz told him to be calm, that he was going to work with them, not to worry, and that they would contact him again.

Andrés specifies the details of his father's second meeting with José Miguel Pavéz's group:

-They take him to Pavéz's house in the Villa Olímpica. There was a Nazi flag there, and the house was full of small military figures. There were also two statues, one of Hitler and another of Erwin Rommel, the famous Nazi field marshal.

Pavéz's alias was "Balmaceda," who had unique characteristics in his clothing. Leather boots up to the knee, military boots, German ones. And he used a riding crop, with which he hit himself on the boots. He always had it with him. In that house, they tell my father that now he has to do tasks for them, that they are the Security Service of the Telephone Company.

His father's direct boss at the CTC was Alfredo Ugarte Salcedo, who gave him instructions on what to do. He was his link to the "CTC Security Service." His father told him that Ugarte always treated him in a special way, that he invited him to have coffee and told him about his adventures.

In one of those conversations, he revealed to him that he was from Patria y Libertad. Good treatment and orders. Jorge Lübbert portrays him as an intellectual, as a man convinced of his cause.

Andrés says that his investigation points to the fact that Gerardo Ramírez Parga, Jaime Letelier, and Ugarte were friends. History connects them. Ramírez sent Letelier the letter of recommendation so that his father could enter the CTC.

And Ugarte and Letelier belonged to the Club Naval El Caleuche; there, during the government of Salvador Allende, the first conspirators of the 1973 Coup d'État met.

-The first thing Ugarte asked him to do was to spy on CTC coworkers to see if they had subversive material. For my father, it was strange; he says that at one point he found something, but that he did not hand over the product of his finding.

For that, he had to check the drawers when the workers were not there and things of that type. Something "innocent" for what was happening in those days, but it was a step to involve him, to see if he could do it—Andrés tells CIPER.

That something his father found was a cassette he found in a drawer of Pedro Córdova, who had been a union leader. It was an audio sent to him by an exile with information about what was being done abroad. Jorge Lübbert says in his testimony that he made that tape disappear: "I said, damn, if I give them the cassette, they'll liquidate this guy."

The testimony of Andrés's father continues by recounting how, little by little, the supposed CTC security team involved him more and more: "The head of the division, Jaime Toro, called me one day to his office (...), he knew that I was working in the security service, he told me totally openly: you as a draftsman are the optimal person to clean up all these things.

They were sketches of organizational charts of the company's security service, with all the names, and I had to clean them up as a draftsman on special paper. This person put a table for me to work in his office and I was working there for more or less a week, making organizational charts, work guidelines, and they gave me a lot of work that they said was special for me, they praised me a lot, they told me: how beautiful this turned out."

From then on, the special assignments turned into training in other facilities. Far from the hangar in Carrascal where the Technical Control Office and the Sub-directorate of Workshops of the CTC operated at that time.

TRAINED IN HORROR

Jorge Lübbert recounts in his testimony some passages of the instruction to which he was subjected. One day they took him to the morgue along with other young men whom he says he did not know. In the auditorium of the place, he faced three corpses: "A very tall guy came out, he was a black beret with a rubber apron and rubber gloves, he made us enter a large room with tiles, where there was a very unpleasant smell, of chemicals, and three corpses.

The guy with a scalpel took the testicles of one of them and cut them off. There my stomach started to turn, I was totally pale. The guy approached me and handed me a part of a corpse, its jaw, and put it in my hands, and there I think I lost consciousness because I fainted.

The guy made me wake up and told me: 'That's enough, you have to get past this stuff, you have to get used to death, you have to know these things.' Violently he grabbed the piece, brought it close to me, and rubbed it on my face."

That part of his testimony is narrated in the documentary The Color of the Chameleon by an actor. Jorge Lübbert, Andrés's father, says on camera that he does not want to go into details, out of respect for the dead.

But there are other episodes that were not included in the film, and that Andrés told CIPER: -Curfew. Sunday night at 2:00 in the morning. They take my father and other military men to San Bernardo, on the outskirts of Santiago, and tell them that by their own means they must arrive at 5:00 at the General Cemetery (Recoleta).

They have no identification or anything, they must bypass every police checkpoint. It was a test. My dad manages to reach the cemetery via Avenida La Paz, but he had to enter. And he sees that someone is climbing to enter: a military man who was with him in the instruction is climbing the wall when from a Carabineros patrol they shoot him and he falls. My dad got scared and left.

That person who was shot and whom Andrés's father saw fall was Guillermo Ramírez Chovar, one of his neighbors. One of the sons of the man who recommended Jorge Lübbert to do his internship at the CTC. They were also training him.

The shot pierced his collarbone and he had to be admitted to the Military Hospital. Later, they congratulated Ramírez for having fulfilled the orders to the letter. In contrast, they punished Andrés's father by locking him up for an entire weekend for not having fully completed the mission.

The training continues. They take Andrés's father at night to an old mansion, with a hood so he doesn't know where he is going. The reconstruction of events that Andrés performs in his documentary The Color of the Chameleon concludes that it is the mansion on República where the Salvador Allende Museum currently operates.

There, a man with a "gringo" accent explained to his father how to intervene in telephone communications, how to transform a radio into a microphone, and also sabotage techniques. In that mansion, the CNI had the machinery installed to intervene in the telephones. There, the man who instructed him told him that he had to learn to use those machines.

The power of the group that provided the instruction to Jorge Lübbert seemed to have no limits in that year 1978. For a 21-year-old technical draftsman, some of the boxes they opened before his eyes left him perplexed, insecure, and fearful.

This is how he recounted in his testimony another of those surprising sessions: "They took me to a room in the CTC Computing Department. But in a smaller office, which only the people from the security service could enter -and they explained that to me there-, they had a computer head that came out of the INE, which was located at Vicuña Mackenna with Diagonal Paraguay.

This head, they said, worked with all the data that the main machine of the INE had. They handled the data and information of everything they want to know about Chile and its people that way. All that information –they told me– was in those heads.

The other head they had very close to the INE, half a block from a CNI headquarters. And they left me in the CTC Computing office. They taught me how to locate names, something very simple, with a television screen with numbers and keys.

They also gave me some codes to be able to extract information. And they told me: 'Stay here, do whatever you want.' The first thing that came to my head was to put my name. After a while, my full name, studies, my relatives appeared...

And they were all there; all my data and a small summary of my life. That scared me. I pressed other buttons and all the information about my father, my mother, my siblings appeared... Even a trip my father made to Germany appeared there and another one my sister made to the United States."

There was also military instruction in that "training." He received it in El Alfalfal, in the middle of the Cajón del Maipo. Andrés Lübbert described it to CIPER like this: -There were many military men and my father went as an invited civilian.

They took him several times for two or three days to learn to shoot, climb the mountain, war simulations with shots, a classic of military training. There he did have special treatment. There were people who invited him to have coffee and he had different treatment than the military. He also had long hair, never a military cut.

There is an image rescued, no one knows how, from those trainings. A photo where his father is seen manipulating an FAL (light automatic rifle), with an Army flag in the background. Jorge Lübbert does not remember where that photo came from. His son says he took it many years ago from a box of memories that his father treasures.

The instruction included many practices. In a section of The Color of the Chameleon where Andrés's father's testimony is paraphrased, he describes José Pavéz Ahumada -the Army officer and brother of his classmate at the Instituto Nacional- as a sadist.

One of the scenes in which he portrays him is in his testimony: "Pavéz entered violently and grabbed me by the arms, that I had to pass the test too, that everyone had to pass it. He said he had the endurance record, he put electricity on himself until he fainted.

He told me that when he regained consciousness it was a nice, precious feeling and that now he felt stronger. I told him that I didn't need it to feel stronger, and there he got angry and put electricity on me until I fainted."

It was not the only act of violence that Pavéz starred in and that Jorge Lübbert kept in his memory. There were other episodes where he saw him applying electricity and hitting detainees with his riding crop.

Andrés recounts other trainings that his father had to go through. There is one that stuck with him, when they buried his father alive in the cemetery so that he would temper his resistance. Or the execution simulations they practiced by mixing the trainees with detainees in torture centers.

On those occasions, he says that his dad saw Guillermo Ramírez Chovar, the other son of his military neighbor, who tried to help him.

Jorge has told his son that three other people recurrently participated in the training courses if similar to him, of whom he only knew their aliases: Hippie, Fanta (not the executioner from the "Degollados Case"), and Peineta.

REVIVING A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

After Jorge Lübbert could not withstand the "class" at the morgue, he was punished. They took him to a large house in Tobalaba. Andrés's investigation determined that this house could have been Villa Grimaldi, one of the DINA's secret prisons.

The scene that Jorge Lübbert describes in his testimony seems taken from the film A Clockwork Orange. From that scene where Alex is forced to watch images of brutal violence:

“They left me alone there for a while, in the kitchen. A person arrived with a white apron and the face of a doctor, with glasses, a bit old; he saw me, looked at me for a while, he kept watching me, and well, I asked him what’s happening, what’s happening… The guy looked at me as if I were a strange bug (…) A while later, another person arrived; he was a bald guy, a private, he was wearing soldier’s pants and one of those white t-shirts.

He was more or less burly; he grabbed me and took me to a room where he sat me in a very special chair, with straps… You ended up as if plugged in, as if stuck, you couldn't move. The thing is, he tied my head there and I couldn't move it.

After that, this person left and the other one arrived, looking like a doctor, and inside a little thing he brought some little devices. He put them here in my eyes, he stuck them inside my eyes and I couldn't close them; it was a truly unpleasant matter (…) The guy told me to stay calm, not to worry, that now I was going to see what’s good, and that if I passed this test, I would be saved.”

“Suddenly, there wasn't a single light left, total darkness, and a very soft music started to be heard coming from behind, a classical music, and it kept rising in tone, but very slowly… I don't know if it was a long time, if it was a lot or if it was just a moment, but I relaxed well.

And these devices that hurt me a lot, that made my eyes itch and from which tears were constantly coming out, and I couldn't do a single thing, a totally terrible sensation… Well, suddenly, the music, which was already at an unbearable tone—I didn't want to listen anymore—and abruptly they cut the music; you could see there were movements behind, I felt something, and they started to show slides, photos… The first one I always remember… The first photo they put in front of me was of my family, and I wasn't in the photo.

My whole family was there and I don't know why I wasn't. They left it there for a moment and I started to look and I didn't understand (…) Later, they showed them to me very quickly, almost so I couldn't see the photos.

I started to see images of different types; people playing, children playing, beautiful things, a couple holding hands on the beach, photos that were very typical, everything very tender (…) Suddenly, the tone of the slides started to change, they were no longer in color… They were all brown, brown, brown, and in the end, they all ended up in black and white, the same photos… And more and more marked, that is, the total contrast, there was already black and white… And when these photos started, they began to insert others of the war in Vietnam, in black and white, also very contrasted, very strong, very fast, one after the other, where decapitated Vietnamese appeared, Americans with the heads of Vietnamese. There were photos of mutilated bodies, of wounded Americans.”

“They were minutes where they showed me hundreds of slides. I couldn't stand the pain in my eyes anymore, I couldn't take it anymore. I tried to close my eyes a little because they had put the music back on at full volume, and at certain moments they would lower the volume, it made me uneasy, and I started to get disoriented, and I became a bit violent, I didn't want to look, I tried to look the other way, I couldn't look, my gaze was fixed forward, and then, the last one, they started to put photos in color, very pretty… in very beautiful colors, but some horrible photos where mutilated bodies appeared, a guy with a shaved head, with an arm, a piece of an arm, eating it… Suddenly they cut this and a color movie starts, it was dubbed in Spanish. I was very tense, I didn't want any more, I felt bad, bad, bad… I remembered my family a lot because of the photo they had shown me.”

The movie they showed Jorge was about the Vietnam War. The scenes of the Americans were in color, and those of the Vietnamese were in black and white. The scenes that followed showed a torture session where the Asians drove knives into the body of an American soldier.

Andrés's father says in his testimony that he began to feel the pain of the tortured soldier as his own. The movie progresses and the soldier escapes. He manages to reach his country, his home, with his family. Everything seems happy. But they knock on the door, two guys enter, they slit his daughter's throat, kill his wife, and they strip him and cut off his testicles.

ROSAURO AND THE ESCAPE

Several months have passed and Jorge Lübbert is still in training. Andrés's father has a friend. A supposed friend, someone who talks to him during the instructions. Someone who one day takes him to the Paseo Ahumada, invites him to a gallery where they sell watches, guides him to the second floor, and leaves him alone with another man, who begins to dictate his results in the "training" courses.

He tells him he is well evaluated. He is the first person to speak to him directly about joining the National Intelligence Center (CNI).

The same "friend" who took him to the office on Paseo Ahumada, a few days later, transferred him to the Infantry School in San Bernardo. There, they took a photo of him, printed a kind of identification card for him, and gave him physical exams:

“They made me run, they took my blood pressure, they drew my blood, they took X-rays, they put some little wires here, and they told me they were going to do an electroencephalogram on me.”

The doctor who performs the exams asks him how he is. Jorge Lübbert responds angrily. He tells him he doesn't understand, he recounts every place they have taken him. He tells him what they have done to him. The doctor tells him he doesn't know what he is talking about. He informs him that he is going to make inquiries.

Two days later, his "friend" picks him up and takes him to the military facilities at Cerro Chena. They had a room ready for him, with a television, a bed, and radio equipment:

“I was told that this was going to be my workplace from now on, that I had to integrate gradually, and that I had to do my work only there, that I was going to have to check and control the entry and exit of the CNI people from the camp,” Jorge Lübbert recounts in his testimony.

But his conversation with the doctor changed the plans. A group of CNI agents put him in a pickup truck, beat him, and took him to a hangar. They accused him of having spoken to his family, of having told things. "Big mouth," they called him, and they blamed him for "screwing things up." It is in that hangar where Jorge Lübbert met the man he identified as Rosauro Martínez, who tortured him and forced him to spend a night with a warm, bleeding corpse on top of him.

The day of the breaking point…

His son Andrés believes that what happened in that shed—which he calculates could be a hangar in Cerrillos—ended up strengthening his father's will, who had already tried to flee Chile through the mountains. A military checkpoint in the Cajón del Maipo scared him and ruined that first escape attempt.

But this time it was different. As soon as he left that facility, he decided for the first time to speak with his parents. He told them some things. Not all of them. He was 21 years old. His family activated the solidarity network that operated to save lives in Chile during the dictatorship.

His father contacted the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), an organization specialized in getting persecuted people out of the country. Since the family has roots in Germany and his brother Orlando was settled in East Germany, that was his destination. He got his passport on September 1, 1978, and a day later he was already flying to Europe.

Beginning of Jorge Lübbert's testimony, written in 1979

LÜBBERT'S NEW ESCAPE

“I received a brother, but I soon realized that I was receiving a castaway. I remember that I would lock myself in a room and he would put his head here, I would hold him, and he would cry, cry, cry, and I would end up crying with him. I assumed that what was happening to him was very serious,” says Orlando Lübbert, Andrés's filmmaker uncle, who received Jorge in East Berlin.

Jorge Lübbert's arrival in Europe did not go unnoticed. As soon as he settled in the GDR, he was contacted by the intelligence apparatus of the Socialist Party—they called it the "Technical Committee"—to interrogate him. His son Andrés relates that “they told my father that what he told them would serve to help people in Chile. That is why my father was quite open and told many things.”

Jorge Lübbert's stay in the GDR did not last long. Soon after, the exile community knew his story, and various people recommended he cross to the other side of the Wall. He did so. Later, they prohibited his entry into East Berlin. In the Stasi archives, he was cataloged as an agent of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA, the repressive agency that preceded the CNI).

Jorge was standing in the middle of a dangerous limbo in the middle of the Cold War. To the rejection of the German socialist intelligence agency was added the persecution he suffered from the repressive apparatuses of Chile. His son Andrés says that one day, while his father was in a café in West Berlin, a guy with a Chilean accent appeared and threatened him:

-He told him he had to be ready to "work with us," and conveyed the message that he was still part of "them." This happened approximately seven months after he escaped from Chile.

It was not the only warning he received on the streets of West Berlin. In The Color of the Chameleon, Jorge himself narrates on camera what happened one day when entering the boarding house where he lived: a couple of guys were waiting for him, again Chileans, who beat him and insulted him.

To those attacks was added a letter from a woman, a former coworker at the CTC with whom he had an affair. In the letter that Jorge receives in Germany, she takes off her mask and for the first time speaks to him using the already known "we." That part of the story is told by his son Andrés:

– She says in her letter: we want you to return, you have to take such and such a flight, on such and such a day and at such and such a time. My father was so angry that he burned it. That letter was seen by my uncle Orlando.

After that, my father disappeared from the map. Everyone lost track of him. What happened was that between my uncle Orlando and my father, they looked for a solution. They contacted the secretary of Amnesty International in Germany, Helmuth Frenz (a Lutheran pastor who participated in the creation of the Pro-Peace Committee in Chile and was later expelled by the Military Junta; he passed away in 2011).

He took him in at his home in Bonn. Frenz circulated a letter with false information, communicating that my father was going to Sweden. But in reality, my father went to Bochum (North Rhine-Westphalia), where he stayed for a couple of months.

From there, he traveled to Belgium. To undergo therapy with Jorge Barudy, a psychiatrist who specialized in working with people who carried trauma as a result of the violence of the dictatorship.

A key piece was missing for Andrés Lübbert to lift the veil on his father's past: reviewing the Stasi archives to investigate if his father appeared there. It is what the main character of the film The Lives of Others does, and what inspired Andrés to decide to review those documents. He searched and found a 180-page file. A true gem. CIPER was able to review some of those files.

When Jorge Lübbert arrived in the GDR, the intelligence of communist Germany was already on the trail of the group that Andrés's father was part of in Chile from May to September 1978. In fact, one of the biggest surprises was finding a photo in that thick file. In it, the entire work team of Jorge Lübbert at the CTC appears. Jorge had never seen it before (see group photo).

What is clear is that Jorge's testimony provided pieces to assemble the puzzle. In that file, Andrés found the confirmation of key parts of his investigation and much more. Despite the conclusiveness that arises from those archives, in Chile, neither the group nor the victims it may have left in its wake have ever been investigated.

Nor its members, most of them Army officers who reached the highest levels of the military hierarchy and politics (see box).

THE STASI ARCHIVE

In the file that Andrés Lübbert found about his father's history in the Stasi archive, there is a section that details the training that was given to future agents of repression. There, some contents of the theoretical instruction for clandestine work and infiltration appear ("it was taught in secret places"), and it is mentioned that the instructors were civilians and military personnel.

There was first aid instruction (through American films of the Vietnam War, among others); first measures for someone who has received electric shocks; and even training to assume a false personality. It also includes what must be done in case of facing extreme situations: suicide, killing without hesitation.

And there, in those documents, Andrés found the addresses of the places where the group responsible for the torture of Jorge Lübbert operated, which the GDR Intelligence managed to identify: the hangar at Carrascal 3420, where the Technical Control Office and the CTC workshop subdivision operated; the CTC Risk Prevention office, on San Martín street between Agustinas and Moneda; La Cañada, which would be the former DC building on the Alameda; the "Tres Álamos Contact House"; in addition to other apartments located in the Villa Olímpica on Los Jazmines street, another of the "Tres Álamos Chief" at Isabel La Católica and Manquehue (northeast corner); and two properties in the center of Temuco. Contacts in inns in the south are also mentioned: an inn on the banks of Lake Caburga, where the name of the contact appears crossed out; an inn next to Lake Todos los Santos (on the side of the Petrohué Falls); a refuge-house at Lake Caburga; and "a military sector with a landing strip through Angelmó" (review that excerpt of the Stasi report here).

In total, the Stasi file describes 50 people from Jorge Lübbert's environment at the CTC in that year, 1978. There appears Gerardo Ramírez Parga, who is identified as an Army reserve major and manager of Rationalization at Banco Estado. And also Alfredo Ugarte Salcedo, who was allegedly the head of Quality Control at the CTC.

LIVING BEHIND A CAMERA

In the midst of his therapy, Jorge Lübbert decided to settle in Belgium, a country where he started a family and made a career as a cameraman and war correspondent in the most violent conflicts of recent decades.

His son Andrés relates that his father has been in the Gulf War, in the second Palestinian Intifada, in the armed conflicts that shook Nicaragua and El Salvador in the '80s, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that he had to cover the fall of Gaddafi in Libya, among many others.

He has also worked as a cameraman for the European Community and has had to accompany diplomats on missions all over the world.

He describes him as a man without fear outside the borders of Chile. He says he has been captured by the Taliban, by guerrillas from different countries, and by the United States intelligence service, and that he has endured it well.

But in Chile, everything changes. In The Color of the Chameleon, one can observe the tics that attack his face when he tours different former torture centers he passed through with his son. In all those scenes, it is impossible for him to hide the knot that invades him when talking about his past and his experience as a hostage of the CNI.

Jorge Lübbert has never testified in Chile. No one has asked him to, and he has never filed a judicial complaint. A text, this time written by him for an experimental documentary he made in Belgium in the early '80s ("Day 32"), illustrates some of what he experienced when starting a journey through his past:

“Names, military personnel, unpleasant situations. My identity almost lost. The sensation and the smell of death. Tunnels, houses conditioned for torture. Animals with human figures who had the power to torment and to trample on life.

In this labyrinth was I, tortured and torturers, disappeared and reappeared. Everything perfectly camouflaged by national and transnational intelligence services… In Chile, the repressive force had tried to take away every feeling of humanity from me and depersonalize me.

I had to transform myself into one more puppet in the middle of their infernal machine… Neither the most sophisticated repression nor evil are capable of destroying our feelings and hopes. Of how difficult it is to destroy the human that lives in us.

As a testimony to this, the images-denunciation are born, extensions of my experience. That rise up against that other symbology: that of the denial of life.”

THE MEN OF THE CTC "SECURITY"

The investigation that Andrés Lübbert carried out for 13 years to unravel his father's past reveals a totally unknown chapter of the dictatorship's secret services in collusion with civilians and military personnel stationed in state companies, which were later privatized. These are the men that Jorge Lübbert managed to identify:

There was Rosauro Martínez, the Army commando, deputy, and protagonist of one of the massacres of the dictatorship that only came to be told in 2014 (see CIPER report "Neltume: the five conscripts who accuse deputy Rosauro Martínez").

In 1981, being a captain of the 8th Commando Company of the "Llancahue" Regiment (Valdivia), Martínez directed the annihilation of a detachment of MIR guerrillas in the Neltume area who had created a focus of resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship.

By then, Martínez had been in the Army for eleven years. In 1987, he left its ranks and was rewarded by Pinochet by appointing him mayor of Chillán, a seat he held until 1992, two years after democracy was recovered. From there, he would jump to the Chamber of Deputies, being elected by Chillán representing National Renewal. He was re-elected five times (1993 – 2013).

In the trial for the murder of at least three MIR members in Neltume, which caused his impeachment in May 2014, no one ever said that Rosauro Martínez had belonged to the DINA and the CNI and that he had been a bodyguard for Pinochet.

And even less that he had been part of a secret group of the repressive agencies where people were tortured and murdered. Andrés has his service records in the Army, signed by Manuel Contreras himself, the head of the DINA (see here).

Another of the men of the repressive detachment that Jorge Lübbert identified is José Miguel Pavéz Ahumada. His service record as an Army officer registers that he was part of the CNI at least between 1977 and 1978, when Jorge Lübbert claims to have seen him in meetings and torture sessions.

That qualification sheet says "National Intelligence Center" in the header and is signed by Hernán Brantes Martínez, one of the high commands of the DINA and the CNI.

The then-lieutenant Pavéz received instruction at the School of the Americas in October 1974. On the Transparent Government website, he appears today as an advisor in strategic planning for the Army with a salary of $1,300,000.

His fondness for collectible soldiers and Nazism, as Lübbert observed in his apartment in the Villa Olímpica, remains intact. On Pinterest, he has a profile where he displays images of soldiers from all over the world, including a gallery of German women from the Second World War.

The magazine Peking Review reports on a trip he made to China together with his father in September 1971, where he was with the then-ambassador Armando Uribe and was able to admire the homeland of Mao.

The investigation by Andrés Lübbert, who had the collaboration of journalist Javier Rebolledo, shed new light on the relationship his father observed between José Miguel Pavéz and the Ramírez Chovar brothers (Gerardo and Guillermo); all of them received anti-subversive instruction at the School of the Americas.

Gerardo Ramírez and José Miguel Pavéz were there together in October 1974, and Guillermo Ramírez in 1975. The latter marched in a Military Parade at the head of the commandos of the Paratrooper School, as seen in the documentary.

In 2005, being a general, he was on the shortlist that Ricardo Lagos had before him to appoint the new commander-in-chief. He was not chosen, and in 2008 he assumed the position of commander of the Army's Education and Doctrine Division.

In 2010, he was in charge of restoring order in Concepción after the earthquake of February 27. After retiring at the end of 2011, he dedicated himself to business. In 2012, he appears as an advisor at the Military Geographical Institute.

Until now, neither the Ramírez Chovar brothers nor Rosauro Martínez had been disturbed by their time in Augusto Pinochet's exclusive security group. Until now, with Andrés Lübbert's documentary The Color of the Chameleon.

Source: ciper.cl, August 22, 2017