The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile

FIVE: The DINA in Action (1974–77)

85 F I V E The DINA in Action (1974–77) The DINA aimed to resolve a set of political and organizational problems that the dictatorship faced during the first few months after the coup. During this early period—the bloodiest of the dictatorship—detentions, torture, and summary executions were carried out in relatively public view, a practice that became increasingly costly in political terms for the regime. Compounding this problem, there were serious differences inside the regime concerning such basic questions as whether the crisis meant that the country was in a state of war, and such differences resulted in uneven patterns of repression across the country. The Arellano mission signaled that efforts to harmonize repression from within the existing institutional structure had largely failed. In this context, by taking over the bulk of repression, the DINA proposed to radically restructure how it was practiced. It would be applied in a more consistent and targetedfashion,andanewmodusoperandi—thedisappearances—would provide the regime with much-needed plausible deniability for the killings it was committing. In return, the regime gave the DINA wide leeway to operate outside the standard military hierarchy, as well as to oversee and in some cases direct the activities of the other branches. In short, although these purposes were not described as such at the time, with the creation of the DINA the regime aimed to decrease external monitoring of its repression, as well as to increase the internal monitoring necessary to implement repression more evenly and consistently. Did the DINA achieve these goals? Unfortunately for the members of the junta, as this chapter will show, the DINA achieved only a marginal increase in internal monitoring and little overall reduction in levels of external monitoring. Indeed, the main instrument to try to achieve the latter (the disappearances) had the opposite effect, sparking a backlash 86 The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile against the regime by the general public, the domestic and international media, and foreign governments. The DINA’s failure to achieve its goals contributed to its eventual demise. The DINA Becomes Official The DINA was formally constituted as an independent organization— separate from the army—by means of D.L. No. 521, in June 1974. Article 1 of this decree described the DINA as a “military body of technical professional nature, under the direct command of the junta. Its mission is to be that of gathering all information from around the nation and from different fields of activity in order to produce the intelligence needed for policy formulation and planning and for the adoption of those measures required for the protection of national security and the development of the country.” Even though the DINA was placed under the “direct command” of the junta, in practice this was not enforced. The rise of the DINA is intimately connected with Pinochet’s consolidation of power in the regime,1 and the relationship between Pinochet and Contreras was strong from the beginning. Colonel Contreras reported on a daily basis only to Pinochet and only indirectly to the junta. The Informe Rettig points out that the DINA removed itself from the scrutiny of the junta “so as to be protected from investigation or interference” (Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation 1993, 475). Article 4 of D.L. 521 stipulated that the director of national intelligence could obtain, under penalty of law, any “reports or information” from any other state body or employee at any level deemed necessary to carry out his tasks. The same law also contained three articles (9, 10, and 11) published in an annex of the Diario Oficial with limited circulation .2 Although the contents of the other articles were made public, Articles 9–11 effectively remained secret to all but a few top officials. An important clue to their contents, apart from how the DINA operated, was found in D.L. 1009, published in the Diario Oficial on May 8, 1975. Its first article stipulated the following: “During the state of siege, the specialized organizations that ensure the normal development of national activities and keep the constituted institutional structure, when The DINA in Action (1974–77) 87 they proceed—in the exercise of their faculties—to detain preventively those persons presumed guilty of putting the state’s national security in danger, will be obliged to give notice of the detention, within forty-eight hours, to the members of the detainees’ immediate family...