Gerardo Huber Olivares (disappeared 29 January 1992; body found 20 February 1992) was a Chilean Army Colonel and agent of the DINA, Chile's intelligence agency. He was in charge of purchasing weapons abroad for the army. [1] Huber was assassinated shortly before he was due to testify before Magistrate Hernán Correa de la Cerda in a case concerning the illegal export of weapons to the Croatian army. That enterprise involved 370 tons of weapons sold to the Croatian government by Chile on 7 December 1991, when Croatia was under a United Nations embargo arising from the war in Yugoslavia. [2] In January 1992, Magistrate Correa sought testimony from Huber on the deal. However, Huber may well have been silenced to avoid implicating the Dictator, then-Commander-in-Chief of the Army Augusto Pinochet, who was himself awaiting trial on related charges. [1] [3]
Gerardo Huber graduated from military school in 1964, specializing as an engineer. [4] Ten years later, after Augusto Pinochet's coup in 1973, he began working for the DINA intelligence agency and was sent to Argentina to infiltrate groups supporting the Chilean MIR faction in its struggle against Pinochet's dictatorship. [4] When he returned to Chile, he worked with American-born DINA agent Michael Townley in producing chemical weapons, which were used against political dissidents; [4] Townley served as DINA's lead international assassin between 1974 and 1978, [5] but would eventually leave Chile and be reprimanded into U.S. custody in April 1978 for his role in the Orlando Letelier-Ronnie Monfitt assassination. [6] [7]
At the beginning of the 1980s, Huber was sent to the military chemical installation in Talagante. [4] He served as governor of Talagante Province from 1987 to 1989. [4] Colonel Huber was nominated in March 1991 to the Army's Directorate of Logistics, where he was tasked with the buying and selling of weapons abroad. [4] According to his widow, he met with Pinochet in May 1991 to inform him of various irregularities occurring in the logistics service of the Army. [1] [4] Huber's widow alleges that Pinochet's reaction was to send him to a military hospital so he could see a psychiatrist. [1] [4]
Ives Marziale, representative of Ivi Finance & Management Incorporated, a firm directed by German Gunter Leinthauser, arrived in Chile in October 1991 in hopes of buying second-hand weapons from the Chilean Army to sell to the Croatian Army. At that time, Croatia was preparing for the defense of Bosnia ahead of a Serbian offensive to capture Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. However, the UN had imposed an arms embargo on the region to try to quell the fighting, and Croatia was thus hampered in its efforts to secure weapons and ordnance. [4]
On 19 November 1991, Marziale closed the deal with General Guillermo Letelier Skinner, a close associate of Pinochet's [1] [8] and head of the Chilean Famae (Fábricas y Maestranzas del Ejército, Factories and Arsenals of the Army of Chile), the quasi-military firm in charge of producing the weapons. The agreement was worth more than US$6 million; the weaponry purchased included 370 tons of weaponry, including SG 542 firearms, Blowpipe surface-to-air missiles, Mamba anti-tank missiles, rockets, grenades, mortars, and loads of 7.62mm ammunition. [4]
The illegal arms deal was revealed in December 1991, when the weapons, disguised as "humanitarian aid" from a Chilean military hospital, were discovered in Budapest. [4] On 7 December 1991, a Hungarian newspaper published the scoop, and on 2 January 1992, General Letelier was forced to resign. Two days later, at the request of Minister of Defence Patricio Rojas, the Chilean Supreme Court nominated Magistrate de la Cerda to investigate the arms deal. [4] The magistrate called Gerardo Huber as a witness; Huber declared that he had been following orders from General Krumm, the logistics chief. [4] On 29 January 1992, Huber, who was vacationing in San Alfonso, Cajón del Maipo, "disappeared". His body was found on 20 February 1992, with the skull shattered. [9]
Chilean police at first declared Huber's death to be a suicide. In 1996, Magistrate María Soledad Espina, in charge of investigations concerning Huber's case, categorically excluded the possibility of suicide. [4] Despite this, the case remained dormant until Magistrate Claudio Pavez took over the case in September 2005; he subsequently found the death of Huber to be a homicide. [4] Pavez has since accused the civilian police of obstruction of justice in relation to the investigation. [10]
On 7 March 2006, Magistrate Pavez indicted five retired high-ranking military officers on charges of conspiracy to cover up Huber's assassination. [1] [4] [11] They included General Eugenio Covarrubias, head of the Dirección de Inteligencia del Ejército (DINE, or the Military Intelligence Directorate, DINA's successor) in 1992; General Víctor Lizárraga, then Deputy-Director of DINE; General Krumm; Brigadier Manuel Provis Carrasco, then head of the Batallón de Inteligencia del Ejército (BIE, or the Military Intelligence Agency); [10] and Captain Julio Muñoz, a friend of Huber and former member of the BIE. [4]
General Krumm testified to Magistrate Pavez that the arms deal had been directly approved by President Pinochet. Following statements made by Captain Pedro Araya, Krumm confirmed a meeting was held prior to the deal. According to Araya, Richard Quass, director of Operations of the Army; General Florienco Tejos, chief of War Materiel; General Jaime Concha, Commandant of Military Institutions; General Guido Riquelme, Chief Commandant of the 2nd Army Division; General Guillermo Skinner; and General Krumm all attended the meeting.[ citation needed ]
Captain Araya, who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his involvement in the arms deal, turned state's evidence in 2005 and declared that he had acted under orders from the military hierarchy. [1] He also stated that Pinochet "had full knowledge of this sale, since he was in close communication with the director of Famae and made available on the army's part the arms that were sold by Famae." [1] Further, official documents state that money from the arms deal was funneled into Pinochet's personal bank accounts abroad. Evidence presented suggested that Famae head General Letelier may have been complicit in laundering the funds.[ citation needed ]
Another witness and defendant in the case, Jorge Molina Sanhueza, testified in March 2006 that on 22 January 1992, shortly before Huber's assassination, he had a private meeting with Pinochet upon returning from a trip to Israel. [10] [12] General Lizárraga, the number two man at DINE, had previously denied this meeting took place. [10] Eventually, both General Lizárraga and General Covarrubias admitted to the magistrate that Pinochet personally headed the BIE, which the former dictator declared his nescience of.[ citation needed ]
According to Pavez' investigations, between his "disappearance" and the discovery of his corpse, Colonel Huber had been detained in a secret military installation operated by Chilean intelligence. [1] Pavez has suggested that Huber had been kidnapped by BIE agents and transferred to a secret detention center of the Escuela de Inteligencia del Ejército (EIE, School of Army Intelligence) in Nos, which was also the location of the Laboratorio de Guerra Bacteriológica del Ejército (Bacteriological Warfare Army Laboratory). The laboratory was headed in 1992 by General Covarrubias. [4] Along with Manuel Provis, one of the main suspects in the Huber assassination, Covarrubias also allegedly detained DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos in September 1991 before sending him to Argentina and then Uruguay. [4] Covarrubias was also indicted for the kidnapping and murder of Berríos, who was killed in Uruguay in 1995. [13]
Investigations into the murder officially ended in July 2007. [11] Following their trial, on 5 October 2009 a civilian court convicted Generals Lizárraga and Krum and Colonels Provis and Munoz of the murder of Huber. [14] [15] Lizárraga and Provis were also convicted of conspiracy, receiving ten and eight years' imprisonment respectively. [15] Krum was convicted of conspiracy and received 541 days imprisonment. [15] [16] Munoz was sentenced to 600 days in prison for murder. [15] [16] General Covarrubias was found not guilty of all charges. [16] This brought to a close the proceedings against the officers, as well as others; eleven men had already been convicted and sentenced by a military court in June 2009 for their part in the arrangement of the arms deal. [14] The identity of the actual gunman was not disclosed by the court. [15]
The Berríos murder case, involving the DINA biochemist found dead in Uruguay, has been linked by investigating magistrates to the Huber case. In both cases, the DINE was involved. Like Huber, Berríos probably was seen as knowing too much, as he had been implicated both in the Letelier case and in production of black cocaine and sarin for Pinochet. Berríos escaped from Chile in 1992, assisted by a Special Unit of the DINE known as Operación Silencio (Operation Silence). [1] Furthermore, Main Cargo, the firm which worked with Famae to export the weapons, was owned by Marianne Cheyre Stevenson, the sister of Juan Carlos Cheyre. Stevenson also owned the restaurant Les Assassins, where Berríos met with drug-dealers and former DINA agents in the early 1990s. The Cheyres are distant relatives of Juan Emilio Cheyre, Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army from 2002 to 2006.
Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar was a Chilean economist, politician and diplomat during the presidency of Salvador Allende. A refugee from the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Letelier accepted several academic positions in Washington, D.C. following his exile from Chile. In 1976, agents of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Pinochet regime's secret police, assassinated Letelier in Washington via the use of a car bomb. These agents had been working in collaboration with members of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, an anti-Castro militant group.
The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional or DINA was the secret police of Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The DINA has been referred to as "Pinochet's Gestapo". Established in November 1973 as a Chilean Army intelligence unit headed by Colonel Manuel Contreras and vice-director Raúl Iturriaga, the DINA was then separated from the army and made an independent administrative unit in June 1974 under the auspices of Decree 521. The DINA existed until 1977, after which it was renamed the Central Nacional de Informaciones or CNI.
Carlos Prats González was a Chilean Army officer and politician. He served as a minister in Salvador Allende's government while Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. Immediately after General Augusto Pinochet's September 11, 1973 coup, Prats went into voluntary exile in Argentina. The following year, he and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, were assassinated in Buenos Aires by a car bomb planted by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional.
Juan Manuel "Mamo" GuillermoContreras Sepúlveda was a Chilean Army officer and the former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Chile's secret police during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In 1995, he was convicted of the murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, and sentenced to seven years in prison, which he served until 2001. At the time of his death, Contreras was serving 59 unappealable sentences totaling 529 years in prison for kidnapping, forced disappearance, and assassination.
The Caravan of Death was a Chilean Army death squad that, following the Chilean coup of 1973, flew by helicopters from south to north of Chile between September 30 and October 22, 1973. During this foray, members of the squad ordered or personally carried out the execution of at least 75 individuals held in Army custody in certain garrisons. According to the NGO Memoria y Justicia, the squad killed 97 people: 26 in the South and 71 in the North.
Michael Vernon Townley is an American-born former agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police of Chile during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. In 1978, Townley pleaded guilty to the 1976 murders of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, Letelier's co-worker at the Institute for Policy Studies. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, serving 62 months. As part of his plea bargain, Townley received immunity from further prosecution; he was not extradited to Argentina to stand trial for the 1974 assassination of Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires.
The Fatherland and Liberty Nationalist Front was a Chilean fascist, political and paramilitary group that fought against the democratically elected Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, in Chile.
General Augusto Pinochet was indicted for human rights violations committed in his native Chile by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón in 1998. He was arrested in London six days later and held on house arrest for a year and a half before being released by the British government in 2000. Authorised to return to Chile, Pinochet was subsequently indicted by judge Juan Guzmán Tapia and charged with several crimes. He died in 2006 without having been convicted. His arrest in London made the front pages of newspapers worldwide; not only did it involve the head of the military dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990, it marked the first time judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed in a country by former heads of state, despite the existence of local amnesty laws.
On 21 September 1976, Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, was assassinated by car bombing, in Washington, D.C. Letelier, who was living in exile in the United States, was killed along with his work colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who was in the car with her husband Michael. The assassination was carried out by agents of the Chilean secret police (DINA), and was one among many carried out as part of Operation Condor. Declassified U.S. intelligence documents confirm that Pinochet directly ordered the killing.
Enrique Arancibia Clavel was a Chilean DINA security service agent who assassinated General Carlos Prats and his wife in 1974.
On 11 March 1990, Chile the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet ended and was replaced by a democratically elected government. This transitional period lasted roughly two years although some processes may have lasted significantly longer. Unlike most democratic transitions led by either the elite or the people, this democratic transition process is known as an intermediate transition – a transition involving both the regime and the civil society. Throughout the transition, as the regime increased repressive violence, it simultaneously supported liberalization – progressively strengthening democratic institutions and gradually weakening that of the military.
FAMAE is a Chilean state-owned firearms manufacturer. Its products are used by the Chilean armed forces and the Carabineros police force. The company produces the FAMAE CT-30 carbine, the FAMAE SAF submachine gun, the FAMAE FD-200 sniper rifle, the SLM MLRS, and the FAMAE revolver, among other types of weaponry.
Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann is a Chilean Army general and a former deputy director of the DINA, the Chilean secret police under the Augusto Pinochet military dictatorship. He was in charge of a secret detention center known as La Venda Sexy and La Discothèque—because of the sexual abuse inflicted on blindfolded prisoners as loud music masked their screams. An aide to General Manuel Contreras, head of the DINA, he was in charge of several assassinations carried out as part of Operation Condor. He has been condemned in absentia in Italy for the failed murder of Christian-Democrat Bernardo Leighton, and is wanted both in Spain and in Argentina. In the latter country, he is accused of the assassination of General Carlos Prats. He was later found to have played a prominent role in the assassination of Spanish-Chilean United Nations diplomat Carmelo Soria as well.
Eugenio Berríos Sagredo was a Chilean biochemist who worked for the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). Berríos was charged with carrying out Proyecto Andrea in which Pinochet ordered the production of sarin, a nerve agent used by the DINA. Sarin gas leaves no trace and victims' deaths closely mimic heart attacks. Other biochemical weapons produced by Berríos included anthrax and botulism. Berríos also allegedly produced cocaine for Pinochet, who then sold it to Europe and the United States. In the late 1970s, at the height of the Beagle Crisis between Chile and Argentina, Berríos is reported to have worked on a plan to poison the water supply of Buenos Aires. Wanted by the Chilean authorities for involvement in the Letelier case, he escaped to Uruguay in 1991, at the beginning of the Chilean transition to democracy, and what has been identified as his corpse was found in 1995 near Montevideo.
Carmelo Soria was a Spanish-Chilean United Nations diplomat. A member of the CEPAL in the 1970s, he was assassinated by Chile's DINA agents as a part of Operation Condor. Augusto Pinochet was later personally indicted over this case.
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean army officer and military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. He was the leader of the military junta from 1973 to 1981, and was declared President of the Republic by the junta in 1974 and thus became the dictator of Chile, and from 1981 to 1990 as de jure president after a new constitution which confirmed him in the office was approved by a referendum in 1980. His time in office remains the longest of any Chilean ruler.
The Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia (ANI) is the Chilean government national intelligence agency. Created in 2004, its mission is to coordinate, and advise the President on, intelligence. It is attached administratively to the Ministry of the Interior. Its current director is Gonzalo Yuseff Quiroz. The previous director was Gustavo Villalobos, who was also the last director of Directorate of Public Security and Information. ANI's budget is approximately US$4 million.
Project Andrea is the code name of an effort by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to manufacture sarin gas for use as a weapon against its opponents.
The National Information Center was the political police and intelligence body which functioned as an organ of persecution, kidnapping, torture, murder and disappearance of political opponents during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The predecessor of the CNI, the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), had been dissolved due to pressure from the United States government as a result of the assassination of Orlando Letelier in exile in Washington in 1977.
