Minister Jorge Zepeda issued an indictment in the investigation into the aggravated kidnapping of Pedro Juan Merino Molina, which occurred beginning on September 14, 1974, in the city of Coronel, Bio Bio region.

The magistrate indicted Sergio Rigoberto Aplazaba Rojas, Manuel Rioseco Paredes, Orlando José Manzo Durán, Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Paul Schäfer Schneider, Fernando Gómez Segovia, and Gerd Seewald Lefevre as responsible for the aforementioned crime.

The magistrate determined that the victim: “after being detained by State agents in the early hours of September 14, 1974, at the home he occupied in the Yobilo Dos neighborhood, Calle Aconcagua No. 817, in the city of Coronel, was taken to the “Lo Rojas” Carabineros station and immediately driven to Parral, specifically to the clandestine detention center of the former Colonia Dignidad, where a record was kept of the interrogations conducted by German colonists acting in conjunction with State agents belonging to the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA; with whom the former cooperated in the persecution, deprivation of liberty, and elimination of civilians for political or ideological reasons; said agents proceeding to keep the aforementioned victim deprived of liberty, causing him to be forcibly disappeared to this day.”

Source: lanacion.cl, July 17, 2009

The mysterious lost archives of Manuel Contreras

Declassified documents, press reports, and statements indicate that Contreras’s archive is somewhere, perhaps in the south of Chile. With his death, Manuel Contreras took with him the key to a series of enigmas that still surround the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and that, in one way or another, could have served to solve pending human rights violation cases.

Perhaps the main one of those enigmas is the location of the DINA archives. In addition to the safe containing documentation that Contreras managed in his office at the DINA’s Belgrano barracks, the former PS militant and later agent of Pinochet’s secret police, Luz Arce, recounts in her book El Infierno (Hell) that there existed an archive called “LIDES,” an acronym that is actually very simple: “LIsta de DESaparecidos” (List of the Disappeared).

Certainly, some years ago, at the time of the Valech Report, Contreras handed over a list with nearly 500 names and the alleged locations of the bodies, but, as was proven, many of the details were false.

The true “LIDES” is not known to exist, but its fate is quite logical: “I believe that Manuel Contreras took that information with him when he handed over command of the CNI,” opined Luz Arce in her biography, in which she would add a key piece of information: the person who managed “LIDES” for Contreras was a non-commissioned officer of his absolute trust, Manuel Lucero Lobos.

However, it is impossible to know anything more about it, because in a statement given in 2004 before the visiting judge Jorge Zepeda, Arce recounts that Lucero “died mysteriously,” the same thing that happened to several members of the DINA, such as agent Miguel Ángel Becerra, who tried to desert from Colonia Dignidad, where he was being held, and DINA corporal Manuel Leyton, both murdered with sarin gas.

The bundles In 1978, when the dictatorship was under strong pressure from the United States to extradite those involved in the crime of Orlando Letelier in Washington (starting with Contreras), a curious note appeared in the evening newspaper La Segunda, directed at that time by Hermógenes Pérez de Arce.

As recalled by a declassified cable from the United States Department of State (DE), said newspaper reported that in April of that year, Contreras had sent 12 containers “of documents” by ship from Punta Arenas.

In a subsequent note, on November 10, La Segunda reported on three other packages that had been sent by Contreras to Europe between May 22 and 25. According to what the newspaper reported, the CIA had found out about it and had passed the information to the FBI, which supposedly intercepted the packages in New York, making copies of some of the documents.

After the publication, the American cable continues, Manuel Contreras’s lawyer, Sergio Miranda Carrington, came out to deny La Segunda, asserting that although the former head of the DINA had been in Punta Arenas in April 1978, he had only done so to greet his old friend Pedro Espinoza, who at that time resided there and whose head was also being demanded by the White House.

Despite the denial, the newspaper persisted in its version, stating that its sources had even specified that the documents sent in May referred to the Letelier case. According to this version, the packages had been shipped on a Braniff flight, bound for Germany with a stopover in New York.

Still based on the same source, La Segunda claimed that the packages were somewhere in Europe. The cable was signed by George Landau, the then U.S. ambassador to Chile. He commented at the end that he had no background on the veracity of this information and even asked if the United States Department of Justice could shed any light on the matter.

To conclude, he said that the friendship between Manuel Contreras and Hermógenes Pérez de Arce was well known (which the latter has denied in recent days) and for that reason, he speculated that “it may be that Contreras is spreading these stories to disconcert Pinochet and other government leaders.” In this regard, journalist Manuel Salazar specifies in his book Contreras, historia de un intocable (Contreras, History of an Untouchable) that on April 20, 1978, the German ship Badenstein had set sail from Punta Arenas, carrying on board 23 suitcases with DINA documents, shipped by General Manuel Contreras, all of which were destined for the port of Hamburg. According to Salazar, this occurred only 12 days after Michael Townley was abruptly extradited to the U.S. for the Letelier crime. He specifies in the same book that “other mysterious bundles were sent via Lufthansa bound for New York-Frankfurt,” adding that “subsequent versions indicated that the cargo that went on Lufthansa was transferred to Braniff and intercepted in New York by the FBI. Regarding its content, nothing has been known.” It has often been speculated that the final destination of the archives was Siegburg, the small city where the headquarters of Colonia Dignidad operated in Germany, a country that Contreras had already visited between 1975 and 1976 together with arms dealer Gerhard Mertins, a former SS officer, intimate friend of Paul Schäfer, and creator of the “circles of friends of Colonia Dignidad,” the neo-Nazi enclave that Contreras used as one of his axes in the commission of human rights violations.

Contreras’s tentacles

For the Americans, the matter of Contreras’s secret archives was something much more concrete than a supposed disinformation maneuver, as Landau speculated, since a secret document from that country indicates that the bundles existed and that there were two copies of them, in addition to the original.

It is a cable belonging to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence organ of the Department of Defense, which generally possessed very accurate information, given the sources of information it maintained within various armies, including the Chilean one.

The text, titled “Contreras’s Tentacles,” apparently consisted of six pages, but after being declassified, only three remained (two and a half, in reality, since the first page of the document is almost completely redacted).

The date of the text is January 1, 1989. The report indicates that “retired Chilean General Manuel Contreras, former director of the DINA and a key figure in the Letelier-Moffitt assassination, has taken extreme precautions to protect President Pinochet from direct involvement in the decision-making/authorization process of that assassination. (Redacted).

All government files relating to the Letelier-Moffitt assassination in Washington in 1976, as well as those of the homicide of Pinochet’s predecessor as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Carlos Prats and his wife, in Buenos Aires; and the attack against the life of regime opponent Bernardo Leighton, in Rome, in 1975, were removed by Contreras from the DINA archives.” Likewise, the CIA report states that “in addition to internal DINA documents, the files include all files/meetings at the ministerial and National Security Council level regarding the three incidents.” According to the author of the report, “Contreras made two copies of each document, sending one to Germany and another to Paraguay, to keep them in safes, while the remaining material he retains stored under his control, in the south of Chile.”

The Germans Were they referring to Colonia Dignidad? It is most likely, given Contreras’s closeness to Paul Schäfer and the gigantic extent of the colony’s main estate in Parral (17,000 hectares), in which the remains of the nearly 30 political prisoners that various colonists acknowledge were murdered there have still not been found (they were allegedly cremated and thrown into the Perquilauquén River in the 80s), nor other evidence, because as the ruling for illicit association issued last year against Manuel Contreras and the leaders of Dignidad pointed out, inside that compound and “in order to hide the criminal activities, the superior of the villa and his closest collaborators proceeded to hide all traces of the victims on the property, hide the weapons, and bury several vehicles that disappeared along with them.” It is worth remembering that in 2005, when Schäfer’s arsenal was found, both in Parral and in the compound they possess in Bulnes, the boxes containing the 45,000 files that Judge Jorge Zepeda declassified last year were also found. Along with those documents, which were prepared by Gerd Seewald, the colony’s head of intelligence, and shared with the head of the DINA’s Southern Regional Brigade, Fernando Gómez Segovia, hundreds of empty folders and envelopes were found, with references to other files that have never been found. Several of them, according to various testimonies, such as that of former colonist Franz Bäar, were burned in the brick factory around 1997, but it is difficult to believe they eliminated them all and, especially, that they got rid of the most sensitive information. In this regard, lawyer Hernán Fernández, who began to legally pursue Schäfer in 1996, points out that it is very likely that Contreras left all or part of his archives in the hands of Dignidad, because “what has been found so far is an infinitesimal and very partial part of the information that Colonia Dignidad stored for decades and in the midst of an era in which there was an extremely close association between Contreras and Schäfer.”

Source: elmostrador.cl, August 9, 2015