Personal Effects: An Alliance of Killers
By Francisco Letelier
When I read that General Augusto
Pinochet, the 89-year-old former leader of Chile, had been placed under house
arrest earlier this week and declared competent to stand trial for his many
crimes, it was no abstract issue for me. This was a man, after all, who had a
tremendous influence on my life, who robbed me of my father, who tore my family
apart.
I met him first in the days before the
military coup that put him in power. He was a guest for dinner at our home in
Santiago, Chile. I was 14 years old. I can see him now in my father’s
study, the Andes visible in the windows behind him. He looked strangely
disconcerted in my father’s study, amidst the bookcases and leather-backed
tomes. But then, perhaps he was already making plans for the future.
During the time my family lived at the
Chilean Embassy in Washington DC in the early 70’s. Henry Kissinger
dropped by for a cocktail reception. I was only twelve, and had only a vague
notion of who he was. During these affairs my brothers and I would peek over the
edge of the second floor balconies and catch glimpses of the guests. I remember
listening for Kissinger’s voice, and peeking down towards the glitzy
looking crowd.
I remember big hands and
cologne, polite questions and encouraging chuckles. Mr. Kissinger at that time
was just another man in a suit, but later I learned he was a clever, cruel and
devious suit.
Shaking my hand, he may
have recognized my young voice from the wire taps and surveillance instruments
that were surely in operation at the time. He may have known about the girls I
liked, my best friends, about the secrets I would innocently whisper into the
phone.
A declassified secret
memorandum of a private conversation with Gen. Augusto Pinochet that took place
in Santiago, Chile, in June 1976, shows the kind of relationship Henry Kissinger
had with Augusto Pinochet.
Released when the
former Chilean dictator was under house arrest in England for crimes against
humanity, the transcript reveals Kissinger's expressions of
“friendship,” “sympathetic” understanding and wishes for
success to Pinochet at the height of his repression, when crimes –
torture, disappearances, international terrorism – were being committed.
The document also shows that Pinochet raised the name of my father, former
Chilean Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, twice, accusing him
of giving “false information” to Congress.
In response, Kissinger said nothing,
forgoing the opportunity to defend free speech and dissent in the United States
– comments that might have deterred the act of terrorism to follow.
Sometimes I have a fantasy about Henry
Kissinger. In it, he remembers a young boy looking up at him, shaking his hand.
A disturbing worry grows in his mind. Years have passed and he has had a couple
of close calls. The Homeland Security - 9/11 - appointment did not go too well,
and those devious world justice people just won’t leave him alone. Maybe
Pinochet, after years of silence, will disclose more about his personal
involvement in Chile and Latin America. He begins to wonder about what has
happened to the young ones, whether they’ve grown up and grown teeth; a
nagging suspicion grows: maybe the problem didn’t stop with the killing of
the fathers. He cancels his Mexican vacation, the conference in Spain, and
wonders how long his actions will echo in time.
On September 11, 1973, Pinochet seized
power in a coup that ousted the democratically-elected government of Salvador
Allende. Allende died during the coup, and life was turned inside out for my
family and for my father, who had served as Allende’s foreign minister and
his defense minister.
In the days that
followed, we watched jets fly overhead, heard bombs hit, smelled the smoke.
There were bodies, shootings and tanks rolling through the streets. From the
start, Pinochet’s government relied on disappearances and secret
executions, on arbitrary arrests. Tens of thousands of people were detained,
tortured and killed during his 17 years in power. We were put under house
arrest; my father spent a year in concentration camps, enduring the tortures of
Dawson Island, a windswept rock off Antarctica.
After his release we left the country
and moved to Washington. But that was not far enough for Pinochet and the junta
he led. Because of my father’s ongoing work to restore democracy in Chile,
they determined to stop him, undaunted by the distance, or by the national
borders that lay between them and our home in suburban Maryland.
Surveillance, of course, was nothing
new for us. Such innocent details as the names of my childhood friends, notes on
my childhood pet (a sheepdog named Alfie) and the sports I participated in all
appear in the now declassified NSC ‘201’ file, US intelligence
agencies started on my father in 1960 because of his friendship with Salvador
Allende.
In 1976, a man named Michael
Townley, who worked for Pinochet, watched our family home in Maryland on orders
of the junta. He and his accomplices sat in cars near the house. I imagine
walking by them on the way to school; I imagine what they felt as I came close.
Before dawn one morning in
mid-September, when I was 17 years old, Townley, acting on orders from
Pinochet’s secret police, attached plastic explosive to the underside of
the Malibu Classic parked in our driveway. To this day, I think of him as an
evil tooth fairy, coming at night, prowling, crawling beneath the car just a few
feet away from my bedroom window.
Everyone in my family used the car. I
had driven it to my senior prom. On September 21, any one of us could have been
in the car with my father. As it happened, he drove it into Washington with his
colleagues, Ronni Karpen and her husband Michael Moffitt.
At 9:30 a.m., the bomb shattered the
peace of Embassy Row, in what was at the time the most brazen international
terrorist act ever committed in the nation’s capital. It severed my
father’s legs; he bled to death in the charred wreck. Ronni escaped onto
the sidewalk and drowned in her blood, a piece of metal lodged in her neck. Only
Michael Moffitt survived.
The
investigations began immediately, but proceeded at a snail's pace, even in the
face of overwhelming revelations about the extent of the conspiracy. Townley
eventually turned state’s evidence and served three years and four months
in prison. He confirmed that the order for the assassination had come from
Santiago.
In 1985, Chile’s Supreme Court found
Manuel Contreras, the director of the Chilean secret police, guilty of ordering
the assassination of my father. He served seven years and was released.
Declassified documents show that Contreras received a “one-time payment of
$5,000,” through which the CIA hoped to gain leverage over him. To date,
the CIA has not been directly connected to the assassination, though many
questions remain unanswered about the agency’s role in Chilean
politics.
Several other men conspired
in the assassination but have continued to elude justice. One of these was
Guillermo Novo, who was convicted in Washington of conspiracy in the killings
and was sentenced to 40 years but whose conviction was overturned on a
technicality. He later went to prison in Panama for his role in a plot to
assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but in August, as the U.S. presidential
election was approaching, Novo was released from custody. With three other known
terrorists, he boarded a plane to Miami, where he was admitted to the country by
U.S. officials and welcomed by Florida’s Cuban exile community.
And Pinochet? Last August, 31 years
after the coup, the Chilean Supreme Court made a historic decision to strip him
of his immunity from prosecution. Pinochet and others under his command have
been accused of participating in “Operation Condor,” a South
America-wide intelligence-sharing network used by the dictatorships of that era
to eliminate dissidents. My father’s murder was a Condor mission.
Amidst revelations by US Senate
investigators that Pinochet had up to $8 million stashed in bank accounts abroad
in cooperation with officials of Riggs Bank in Washington DC, Pinochet has been
declared fit to stand trial.
In
December, Chilean judge Juan Guzman ordered the house arrest of the former
dictator on human rights charges. The judge charged Pinochet over the kidnapping
of nine dissidents and the killing of one dissident during his brutal 17 year
regime.
“It is not a part of
American history we are proud of,” conceded Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell in 2003 when asked to comment on the U.S. role in Chile in the 1970s. The
Pinochet regime created Operation Condor in November 1975. CIA documents
acknowledge an awareness of its existence in March 1976, describing it in
favorable terms as a “cooperative effort by the intelligence/security
services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and
subversion.”Kissinger’s top aide for Latin America, Harry
Shlaudeman, informed him that the South American military regimes were planning
to use Condor “to find and kill terrorists . . . in their own countries
and in Europe.” He informed Kissinger that through Operation Condor, the
Southern Cone military regimes were “joining forces to eradicate
'subversion,' a word that increasingly translates into nonviolent dissent from
the left and center left.”
Until
the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism was, for many Americans, something they
watched on television. Now there are many more people who, like me, have lost
members of their families to terrorism. We continue to search for a long-awaited
measure of justice. Our heroes emerge from courtrooms, from smoldering wreckage
and fallen towers.
Justice in these
cases must go beyond the incarceration of individuals. The true historical
record should be made public and U.S. foreign policy must reflect the lessons
learned.
I hope that a public trial of
Augusto Pinochet will serve as an important step, and that it will lead to the
re-energizing of the long-dormant Letelier case in the United States. It is here
in this country where the facts remain shrouded and where individuals involved
in the tragic murders of my father and Ronni Karpen remain
untouched.
Portions of this
OP/ED article appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 2004, under the title
of “My Case against Pinochet.” Francisco Letelier is a Venice artist
and neighborhood council officer.
Posted: Sat
- January 1, 2005 at 07:00 PM