The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile

FOUR: The Rise of the DINA (1973–74)

68 F O U R The Rise of the DINA (1973–74) At the beginning of 1974, observers noticed a new coercive organization whose agents, in civilian clothing and unmarked cars, would round up people and detain them in a variety of new locations. The DINA would not receive official status until June 1974, but its detentions had become apparent several months before. As the DINA became increasingly active , it took over the bulk of operations from the other branches of the armed forces and imposed a radically new pattern of coercion. During the first several months after the coup, large numbers of people from a wide range of backgrounds had been rounded up in military and police operations and either detained or summarily executed. But by early 1974 the number of victims decreased sharply. The military and police stopped practicing large-scale and broadly targeted sweep operations. Instead, fewer victims were taken, and repression was much more selectively targeted toward communists and other members of the far left, such as the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). Moreover, information about those who were detained during this time became increasingly rare. Indeed, human rights workers began to notice that while the number of people imprisoned and killed decreased, the new detainees were taken to new and secret locales both inside and outside Santiago . Moreover, information on those who were detained during this time became increasingly rare. Prisoners were no longer held in large detention centers, where they could be attended to by national and international humanitarian aid organizations like the Red Cross; instead, they were taken to smaller, more secret locations. They were almost always brutally tortured, and many simply disappeared.1 While disappearances had been carried out during the first several months after the coup, under the DINA the disappearances became a much more systematic The Rise of the DINA (1973–74) 69 and deliberate tool of coercion. What explains the rise of the DINA and the resulting shift in how the military government organized and applied coercion? Why was there a shift at all? To explain the rise of the DINA, analysts and observers generally refer to variations on three basic arguments, which are often interwoven in accounts of the history and evolution of the regime. The first characterizes it as a natural development in the evolution of the regime, the second as a tool for Pinochet’s power consolidation, and the third as the principal mechanism for its director, Colonel Manuel Contreras, to wage an ideologically driven war of counterinsurgency. I will show that while each of these accounts explains some aspects of the DINA’s creation and operation, it also leaves crucial questions unanswered. A better explanation for the DINA requires taking into account the politics associated with the costs and benefits of different patterns of organizing coercion , which I have presented in the previous chapters. The DINA was not simply a vehicle for Pinochet’s or Contreras’s ambitions, nor was it a necessary or natural development in the evolution of the regime. Indeed , the DINA emerged despite the serious objections to it from within key sectors of the military leadership, including members of the junta. As we shall see, they had good reason to fear it, principally because it decreased their own power. The DINA’s creation, in other words, is puzzling from a pure power politics perspective, which cannot explain why powerful actors would willingly act against their own self-interest and constrain their power. Any account for the DINA has to explain why, however reluctantly, these sectors might have agreed to what essentially amounted to the creation of a powerful secret police beyond their control , run by men whom most junta members did not trust. The Standard Explanations The view that the creation of the DINA and the shift from random and haphazard coercive practices to more centrally planned, targeted, selective , and more effective coercive practices were part of the natural institutional evolution of the military regime has been advanced by Padilla Ballesteros (1995). It is essentially a functionalist explanation of how 70 The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile authoritarian regimes must follow specific patterns of coercion to survive . At first, they must impose a harsh regimen of widespread repression to eliminate all potential enemies and display their strength. After this initial stage, leaders must inevitably become more selective in the use of coercion to strategically balance the need...