Pinochet suspects arrests ordered

[dipsydoodle]

Source: BBC News

A Chilean judge has ordered the arrest of nearly 100 former secret police and soldiers over rights abuses committed under General Augusto Pinochet.

The round-up is one of the biggest of its kind since the military leader's rule ended 18 years ago.

The 98 detentions are part of an probe into Operation Colombo, a 1975 plot to murder left-wing opponents of Pinochet.

More than 3,000 people were killed or "disappeared" during military rule in Chile between 1973 and 1990.


Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7420796.stm

---

Further information: Chile under Pinochet and Operation Condor

The Caravan of Death, an Army death squad, roamed Chile beginning in October 1973, following Augusto Pinochet's American backed coup which overthrew the regime of President Salvador Allende. In particular, members of Chile's Socialist and Communist Parties were targeted, including two infantrymen and several Army officers. Of these included: Brigade General Sergio Arellano Stark; Lieutenant Colonel Sergio Arredondo Gonzalez, later director of the Infantry School; Major Pedro Espinoza Bravo, an Army Intelligence officer, later operations chief of the DINA secret police; Captain Marcelo Moren Brito, later commander of Villa Grimaldi, the torture camp; Lieutenant Armando Fernandez Lario, later a DINA operative and mastermind behind the assassination of Orlando Letelier and others. The group traveled from prison to prison in a Puma helicopter, executing political prisoners with small arms and bladed weapons. The victims were then buried in unmarked graves. In June 1999, judge Juan Guzmán Tapia ordered the arrest of five retired generals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_squad#Chile

Brief info. on Operation Condor here : http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB125/index.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. This is really big, isn't it? Went to look for more on Operation Colombo. What I found is truly ugly

Operation Colombo

~snip~
BOB GARFIELD: The disappearances began between 1973 and 1975. At one point, 119 Chileans were murdered by the regime and were reputed to have been found in Argentina. Tell me about this. It's what they called Operation Colombo.

PETER KORNBLUH: The regime had already disappeared hundreds of Chilean leftists. And now they faced this issue: how to make the disappeared reappear. And that was the crux of Operation Colombo.

And essentially, it involved planting bodies on the streets of Buenos Aires, bodies that could not be identified - the hands were burned off, some of them were headless, or their faces were burned – with IDs on them identifying them as several of the Chilean disappeared.

BOB GARFIELD: And the idea was to suggest that they had been killed not by Pinochet's secret police but by their own fellow travelers. And they planted stories in the Argentine media, but they went to great lengths to do that.

PETER KORNBLUH: Worse than planting stories in the Argentine media, they simply created their own magazine. They called it Lea, which in English means "read." It was a magazine that was only published once. It ended up on the newsstands of all the kiosks in Buenos Aires three days after several of these bodies were found.

And it basically was an article that said that Chilean leftists had come to Argentina, they were fighting among themselves and killing themselves, and it gave a list of 60 Chileans, all of whom were disappeared in Chile, but now, according to this article, had been killed in fighting among each other in Argentina.

One week later, another propaganda piece appeared in a newsletter in Brazil, and it said the same thing, that they'd been fighting among themselves, simply killed one another.

BOB GARFIELD: It's phenomenal. And these stories were deemed sufficient enough evidence for the Chilean media to cite them as evidence that the leftists indeed were behind these murders.

There's one extraordinary headline in a Chilean paper. Tell me about it.

PETER KORNBLUH: In La Segunda, which was one of Chile's most leading newspapers, owned by Agustin Edwards, printed a headline that said, "Miristas exterminated like rats." Miristas is the name of the leftist group that Pinochet claimed all of these individuals belonged to.

Well, you have to understand that it wasn't just the disappeared in the press. A DINA agent, a secret police agent of Chile, carried these stories to the press. And then El Mercurio, the leading newspaper in Chile, printed a whole editorial basically that could have been written by the Chilean secret police itself, and this is what it said, quote:

"The politicians and foreign newsmen who ask themselves so many times about the fate of these leftists and blame the Chilean government for the disappearances of many of them, now have the explanation that they refuse to accept. Victims of their own methods, exterminated by their own comrades – every one of them demonstrates with tragic eloquence that violent people end up falling victims to the blind and implacable terror that they provoke."

So it was a whole manipulation of the truth of what had happened, but many Chileans, particularly upper-class Chileans, read this and said, ah-hah, we knew all along that, you know, the left kills each other. Pinochet is clean. He would never do such a thing.

More:
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2006/12/15/02

~~~~~~~~~
Kornbluh's book:
The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability



PINOCHET: A Declassified Documentary Obit

Archive Posts Records on former Dictator's Repression, Acts of Terrorism, U.S. Support

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 212

Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Yvette White

Posted - December 12, 2006

Washington D.C., December 12, 2006 - As Chile prepared to bury General Augusto Pinochet, the National Security Archive today posted a selection of declassified U.S. documents that illuminate the former dictator's record of repression. The documents include CIA records on Pinochet's role in the Washington D.C. car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, Defense Intelligence Agency biographic reports on Pinochet, and transcripts of meetings in which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger resisted bringing pressure on the Chilean military for its human rights atrocities.

"Pinochet's death has denied his victims a final judicial reckoning," said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Chile Documentation Project. "But the declassified documents do contribute to the ultimate verdict of history on his atrocities."

Most of the documents posted today are drawn from a collection of 24,000 declassified records that were released by the Clinton administration after Pinochet's October, 1998, arrest in London. Many of them are reproduced in Kornbluh's book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.

Pinochet died of complications from a heart attack on December 10, which was, by coincidence, International Human Rights Day.

More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB212/index.htm

[localroger]

9. Es verdad

Just those Washington Bullets again.

[Peace Patriot]

2. I hope we have such a "round-up" here some day.

"The round-up is one of the biggest of its kind since the military leader's rule ended 18 years ago."

------

18 years, huh? 2026. I probably won't live to see our war criminals tried. But I can dream.

[unhappycamper]

3. I wonder how many of the 100 are graduates of The School of the Americas.

That training camp has been turning out Latin American 'advisers' for a long time.

[tctctctc]

15. Why didn't Bill Clinton shut that down?

[fasttense]

4. I was hoping Milton Friedman would be one of them rounded up.

He just loved Pinochet and his hit men. Oh wait, he died.

Just like Pinochet, Milton Friedman will never get to answer for his crimes.

[pattmarty]

5. How 'bout Kissinger, he's still alive & kicking?

[yellowcanine]

6. Kissinger likely has a lot to answer for but he was good at covering his tracks.

The Allende coup and Letalier asassinations come to mind.

[heliarc]

10. Orlando Letelier

is the spelling in case anyone wants to do a search on Google and learn some things about American foreign policy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Letelier


(Added wiki on edit.)

[gratuitous]

7. Got a REAL safe place to hide, Mr. Bush?

I mean, someplace that you know will be secure until about 2040? You'd better keep a big cordon of little fish around you to throw to the prosecutors. Maybe it's time to start drinking and smoking again.

[robinlynne]

8. thinking Paraguay.....

[mitchtv]

12. Samoza tried that

didn't work.

[Judi Lynn]

11. Chilean judge orders arrest of Pinochet-era soldiers and secret policePeter Walker and agencies guar

Chilean judge orders arrest of Pinochet-era soldiers and secret police
Peter Walker and agencies guardian.co.uk, Tuesday May 27 2008


A Chilean judge has ordered the detention of almost 100 former soldiers and secret police officers from General Augusto Pinochet's regime as part of investigations into human rights abuses, according to reports.

Among the 98 held are former employees of Pinochet's notorious Dina intelligence service, which ran a series of secret prisons where leftwingers and other opponents were tortured and killed, Reuters said, citing unnamed judicial sources.

Judge Victor Montiglio ordered the arrests for alleged abuses during Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship. Montiglio is examining the kidnapping and murder of 42 people during Operation Colombo, a campaign against opponents of the regime in its early days.

"This is excellent news, because Operation Colombo was also a case in which General Pinochet's immunity from prosecution was stripped, and given the number of victims, is an emblematic case," Sergio Laurenti, the head of Amnesty International in Chile, told Reuters.

It was now important that Chile's security forces cooperate with the investigation as there had been a "lack of cooperation" from the police and military before, he added.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/27/chile

Around 3,000 people died or vanished during Pinochet's rule while almost 30,000 were tortured and about 200,000 fled.

[mitchtv]

13. among the murdered were Singer/songwriter

Victor Jara murdered in the stadium after they broke his hands and ordered him to play the guitar. He attempted to lead the fellow prisoners in song , and was shot down. They say Allende committed suicide, I doubt it. Pablo Neruda "died" then too

[tctctctc]

14. Damn, that is good news!

I know people who had their lives rip apart because of that monster. My friend had to flee the country and leave one of her children behind...they were reunited 15 yrs later.