Manuel Contreras

Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda (4 May 1929 – 7 August 2015) was a Chilean military officer and the former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Chile's secret police during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. As head of DINA he was the most powerful and feared man in the country, after Pinochet. In 1995 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for the murder in Washington, D.C. of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, which he served until 2001. Until his death in August 2015, he was serving 59 unappealable sentences totaling 529 years in prison for kidnapping, forced disappearance and assassination.

Operation Condor

From 1973 to 1977, Contreras led the agency on an international hunt to track down and kill the political opponents of the Junta, particularly members of the Communist and Socialist parties and the former guerrilla group and political party Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). According to the report "CIA activities in Chile" released on September 19, 2000, the US government policy community approved CIA's contact with Contreras from 1974 to 1977 to accomplish the CIA's mission in Chile in spite of his role in human rights abuses. By 1975 American intelligence reporting had concluded that Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Pinochet government, but the CIA was directed to continue its relationship with Contreras, even giving Contreras a one-time payment in 1975. The CIA became concerned with Contreras' role in the assassination of former Salvador Allende cabinet member and ambassador to Washington Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Karpen Moffit in Washington, DC, on 21 September 1976. The CIA was said to have gathered specific, detailed intelligence reporting alleging Contrera's involvement in ordering the Letelier assassination, but the purported material remains classified and has been withheld at the request of the US Department of Justice (CIA, 2000) CIA contacts with Contreras continued until 1977.

“It cost me four years to pacify this country.”

—Manuel Contreras, September 10, 2013.

After Orlando Letelier's assassination, tensions between Contreras and Pinochet grew over the course of his tenure, and the DINA was closed down in 1977 and replaced with a new apparatus, the National Intelligence Center (CNI). By 1979, Contreras was retired from the army at the rank of General, a rank he held until his death.

Prison sentences and court investigations

On 13 November 1993, a Chilean court sentenced Contreras to seven years in prison for the Letelier assassination. He was freed on bail following the conviction, but the Supreme Court of Chile confirmed the sentence on 30 March 1995. Contreras rebelled against the sentence, fleeing to the South, and then to a military regiment and later a military hospital. After two months, seeing his support from the army vanish, he resigned and was sent to a military prison, where he completed his sentence on 24 January 2001 and was freed.

In May 2002, Contreras was convicted as the mastermind of the 1974 abduction and forced disappearance of Socialist Party leader Victor Olea Alegria. He received 15 years in prison on 15 April 2003 for the disappearance of tailor and MIR member Miguel Ángel Sandoval in 1975, although the sentence was reduced on appeal to 12 years. Also in 2003, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the 1974 disappearance of journalist Diana Frida Aron Svigilsky. While he was amnestied in 2005, the Supreme Court overturned that decision and confirmed the judgment against Contreras on 30 May 2006. Contreras received another 15-year prison sentence on 18 April 2008 for the disappearance of political dissident Marcelo Salinas Eytel.

Contreras was also convicted by an Argentine court in connection with the assassination of former Chilean army chief Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires in 1974. An extradition request by Argentina was denied by Chile, but on 30 June 2008, a Chilean court gave Contreras two life sentences for the assassination of General Prats and his wife, along with a 20-year sentence for conspiracy.

Contreras was subsequently sentenced on 23 September 2008 to seven years in prison in connection with the disappearance of Spanish priest Antonio Llidó Mengual. He was ordered to pay 50 million pesos to compensate for the 1974 abduction of Felix Vargas Fernandez and received another 15 years in prison in a March 2009 sentencing. On 6 July 2012, he received an additional 10 years in prison over the detention and disappearance of ex-militants José Hipólito Jara Castro and Alfonso Domingo Diaz Briones in 1974. In total, his sentences over the years added up to more than 500 years in prison.

In September 2013, under the orders of President Sebastián Piñera, the luxurious Penal Cordillera in eastern Santiago was closed, and Contreras was transferred back to Punta Peuco in Tiltil, north of the capital.

On 13 May 2005, Contreras submitted to Chile's Supreme Court a 32-page document that claimed to list the whereabouts of about 580 people who disappeared during Pinochet's rule. Human rights groups immediately questioned the information and its source, citing Contreras's years of deception and denials of responsibility for human rights abuses. Many of the details he provided were previously known, and some contradicted the findings of commissions that have investigated the disappearances. In the document he wrote that General Augusto Pinochet personally ordered these repressive measures. During the same May 2005 hearing to the Supreme Court, Contreras directly implicated the CIA and Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier.

Contreras accused Augusto Pinochet of having given the order of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and of Carlos Prats. He also declared to Chilean justice in 2005 that the CNI, successor of DINA, handed out monthly payments between 1978 and 1990 to the persons who had worked with DINA agent Michael Townley in Chile, all members of Patria y Libertad, the far-right movement which had been involved in the Tanquetazo : Mariana Callejas (Townley's wife), Francisco Oyarzún, Gustavo Etchepare and Eugenio Berríos. Assassinated in 1995, Berrios, who worked as a chemist for the DINA in Colonia Dignidad, also worked with drug traffickers and DEA agents.

Pinochet died at the age of 91 on 10 December 2006, before any court could convict him of crimes related to his military rule.

Illness and death

During his last years, Contreras underwent dialysis three times a week at Santiago's Military Hospital. On 25 August 2014 he remained hospitalized there due to kidney problems. With his condition worsening, he was eventually transferred to the intensive care unit. He died on 7 August 2015 at the hospital. The exact cause of death was not given by the hospital authorities. The announcement of his death was greeted by a demonstration of several dozen people in front of the hospital, who shouted "murderer!" and toasted his death with champagne. There were also celebrations by hundreds of people at Plaza Italia, a square in downtown Santiago.