The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet

Chapter 7. Justice Delayed

137 S E V E N Justice Delayed I The most feared man in Chile, retired army general Manuel Contreras, was beginning to have fears of his own. Since organizing and directing the Pinochet regime’s secret police agency, the DINA, he had amassed a vast network of contacts throughout the country and was used to calling in favors or resorting to blackmail to achieve his goals. After leaving the regime and retiring from the army in 1978, he had formed his own private security agency, Alfa Omega, and had served as a board member of several businesses, including a private telephone company with an exclusive contract to provide service in an eastern Santiago neighborhood.1 The Frei government’s future defense minister, Edmundo Pérez Yoma, 138 B u i l d i n g D e m o c r a c y who was running a construction firm during this period, happened to meet the former DINA chief when Contreras contacted his office to offer Alfa Omega’s security services. Many Chileans suspected that Contreras continued to freelance for the regime, but it seemed to Pérez Yoma that the former DINA chief’s security company was a legitimate business. “Contreras came across as an intelligent, affable man,” he recalled. “But even Pinochet was afraid of him.”2 The case against Contreras and his former operations chief, Pedro Espinoza, for the 1976 Letelier-Moffitt car bomb assassinations had been slowly moving through the Chilean judicial system since 1991. That year the Aylwin government renewed charges against the two officers after managing to push through a law giving civilian courts jurisdiction in cases involving the military if Chile’s relations with another country were involved. Of the nineteen judges on the Chilean Supreme Court, only one—Adolfo Bañados—had been appointed by Aylwin; the rest were holdovers from the Pinochet regime. Bañados painstakingly put together an indictment, using evidence collected by the FBI, while Contreras employed a formidable team of lawyers who argued that the regime’s amnesty law for crimes committed prior to 1978 should be applied and left no legal stone unturned. But on January 25, 1995, the Supreme Court indicted Contreras and Espinoza, much to the surprise of many observers. Several military officers, including the commander of the Santiago garrison, attended the proceedings in a show of support for the two former regime officials and were not pleased to find television cameras inside the courtroom as the ruling was announced.3 And now the court would now decide a sentence. Earlier that month Chile’s congress approved the construction of a $2.7 million special detention facility for human rights offenders. The prison, the first of its kind in Latin America, was located twenty-five miles north of Santiago in the farming town of Punta de Peuco. The prison had ninefoot -high walls, television surveillance, plus state-of-the-art metal and bomb detectors. A staff of sixty, including two dozen noncommissioned army officers guarding the interior, would oversee the incarceration of one hundred inmates. This last provision came at Pinochet’s insistence , according to Pérez Yoma. “Once Pinochet realized that Contreras’s J u s t i c e D e l a y e d 139 imprisonment was absolutely inevitable he began to negotiate the way in which he would be kept—where to put him?” he said. “An army general could not be held by gendarmes, whom Pinochet regarded as socialists, but had to be in a military installation. In a way it was a delaying tactic, but it was also a completely unfamiliar situation: there had never before been an intelligence chief jailed in his own country.”4 Getting the Punta de Peuco prison project through the Chilean congress had not been easy. Some left-wing politicians objected to what seemed like a luxury facility for torturers and murderers; human rights campaigners said that the prison would at the very least incarcerate these offenders, who otherwise would be held at military installations, which would allow them more freedoms. The Frei government bargained hard with its right-wing opponents, securing their support for the prison in exchange for promising that there would be no be no more modifications to the military justice code, which gave military courts jurisdiction over judicial cases involving military officials. The court finally issued sentences of six years’ imprisonment for Espinoza and seven...