| Project Andrea | |
|---|---|
Proyecto Andrea | |
| Part of the Chilean Army | |
| Chile | |
 DINA logo | |
 Manuel Contreras, director of the DINA | |
| Coordinates | 33°26′26″S70°38′08″W / 33.44063°S 70.63546°W |
| Type |
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Project Andrea (Spanish : Proyecto Andrea) is the code name of an effort by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to manufacture sarin gas [a] for use as a weapon against its opponents. [1] [2]
At the beginning of the period of the Military Regime, an electronic and chemical warfare laboratory was installed in the house of Michael Townley and Mariana Callejas in Lo Curro , located at Via Naranja 4925, Vitacura, Chile. The government of Augusto Pinochet had given them that house – three floors, almost 1,000 square meters of building and 5,000 of land – located in the upper part of Santiago, in return for services rendered to the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). [3]
A voluminous concrete cube, rather ugly, with something of an orphanage, hospital, or other public building.
Legally it was not theirs, as it had been acquired by then Army Major Raúl Iturriaga and a DINA lawyer who died in strange circumstances in 1976 under a false identity. [3]
The idea was for it to serve as housing for the married agents and their children, but mainly – because it was not an unconditional gift – for the barracks to operate there, from which subsequent terrorist operations abroad would be prepared. In the DINA this barracks house was called Quetropillán. It had two permanent agents, who served as drivers and assistants, and a secretary, who kept the accounts and assisted the homeowner in administrative tasks. In addition, the team included a gardener, a cook, and two chemists: Francisco Oyarzún and Eugenio Berríos, alias Hermes. [4] The latter two spent the day locked in a laboratory, experimenting with the lethality of sarin gas on mice and rabbits. [3]
The sarin gas was first manufactured by the DINA in Santiago, and then began to be made in Colonia Dignidad, with its logistical support. It was exported and used to assassinate opponents of the regime both in Chile and abroad. The victims presented the symptoms of a heart attack.
Sarin manufactured in Chile was used for the first time by Michael Townley against two Peruvian citizens. [5] Townley revealed to Judge Alejandro Madrid that in Chile not only real estate conservator Renato León Zenteno (1976) and Army corporal and DINA agent Manuel Leyton (1977) were murdered with sarin, but also other people whose deaths were made to appear as suicides or strange deaths. [1] Some of these people, according to Townley, were involved in the storage and transport of containers of sarin in the 1970s and early 1980s. One of them would be a doctor or assistant who participated in the autopsies of Renato Zenteno and Corporal Leyton. [5]
Townley told the judge that the Protocol Director of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Guillermo Osorio, had not committed suicide – as was officially announced in October 1977 – but had been killed. [1] [5] Osorio was in charge of granting passports with false identities so that Army officers – among them, Armando Fernández Larios – could travel to the United States to prepare the attack against Orlando Letelier and two others (Rolando Mosqueira and René Riveros), to try to mislead American intelligence about the authorship of the attack and cover for the DINA. The sources maintain that Townley affirmed that Osorio was another victim of sarin, even though he had been shot once in the head. [5]
Eugenio Berríos played a role in the death of Carmelo Soria, a CEPAL official who was kidnapped by a DINA operative in July 1976 and taken to Townley's house in Lo Curro. [5] There, in the Berríos laboratory, Soria was administered sarin gas, according to the investigation, and was then tortured until his spine was broken. Later, his body was found in a car in the Canal San Carlos . [6]
This gas was probably used to murder the journalist Eugenio Lira Massi , who in June 1975 was found dead in circumstances not entirely clear, in the room he occupied in Paris, where he worked at the newspaper L'Humanité . In 1990, the journalist Edwin Harrington published in the magazine Nueva Voz that Lira was murdered by the DINA as part of a plan called Operation France after the arrival in the French capital of "Bernardo Conrads Salazar, identity card No. 4.152.556-6, official of the security service of the dictatorship." Harrington, who cited an FBI report as one of his main sources, argued that Lira's death may have been triggered by sarin gas, which Townley carried on his travels in a bottle of Chanel perfume. [4] [7]
Another suspicious death was that of Alfred Schaak, [8] a representative of Paul Schäfer in Germany in charge of arms trafficking. In 1985, two couples who fled from Colonia Dignidad publicly denounced Schäfer's pedophilia. It seems that Schaak then wanted to denounce the arms trade. To prevent this, Winfried Schmidtke and Helmut Seelbach, who were received at the airport by Schaak, who was in perfect health, would have traveled from Dignidad to Germany. A few days later, in October, Schaak died suddenly. Dr. Hartmut Hopp went immediately to Germany and brought the body of Schaak to Chile. In the assembly of settlers he said that Schaak had died of fever and that in his will he left his property to the Colony. At the same time they reported – ten months after the fact – the escape of the couples, adding that their complaints in Germany had done them great harm. [8]
The subsequent condemnation of Schäfer does not include sarin gas production in Colonia Dignidad, the Cerro Gallo Massacre , nor the Monte Maravilla forced labor camp that the colony maintained, since Judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia did not include these charges in the ruling that sentenced him to a minimum term of seven years of imprisonment for infraction of the Law on Arms Control. [8]
Alexei Jaccard, age 25, was arrested in Buenos Aires on 16 May 1977, along with two other communist militants, by agents of the Argentine dictatorship and the DINA. [9] At that time all traces of them were lost. Despite the efforts made by his family to learn his whereabouts, both in Argentina and in Chile, they only turned up false leads. This changed when three agents, who did not lose their memory or declare themselves insane as their former boss Augusto Pinochet had, gave the judiciary unequivocal information about what happened with Jaccard and the two militants, Ricardo Ramírez Herrera and Héctor Velásquez Mardones. The testimonies coincide in that the three detainees, from Buenos Aires, were taken to the La Reina barracks by "Don Jaime" (alias of Captain Germán Barriga, who committed suicide in 2005) and his agents of Dolphin Group, an elite squad that operated inside the Lautaro Brigade . [10] The director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, always stated in private and in public that Jaccard, Herrera, and Velásquez were arrested by Argentine intelligence, which had made them disappear by throwing their bodies into the Río de la Plata. [11] But the former agents Eduardo Oyarce Riquelme, Héctor Valdebenito Araya, and Guillermo Ferrán Martínez, all prosecuted for the crimes committed in Simón Bolívar, deny that version, and confirm the passage of Jaccard and his companions through that barracks. [11] Former agent Oyarce recalls another relevant piece of information:
They were eliminated with sarin gas, but I can not say who applied it. [9]
On 23 July 2007, Judge Alejandro Madrid undertook "two resolutions that mark milestones in the trials for human rights violations" and that are related to the Andrea Project: "He affirmed that the murder of the ex-Army corporal Manuel Leyton was carried out using sarin gas, and prosecuted thirteen former DINA agents for this crime. He proceeded to prosecute the former Army auditor, Fernando Torres Silva, for conspiracy in the case of the murder with the chemical that produced the poisonous element in the security services, Eugenio Berríos." [12]
The FBI has evidence confirming that Augusto Pinochet accumulated large amounts of poison gas, [13] according to Saul Landau, the US investigator for the Orlando Letelier murder. The FBI investigated the sarin, and its conclusions were condensed in a report indicating that it was manufactured in an amount sufficient to kill the entire Peruvian Army twice over. [13]
The explicit orders were to locate Letelier's residence and place of work and contact the Cuban Nationalist Movement (MNC) group so that we could eliminate him with sarin, by running him over or other accident, by any method, but for Letelier, the Chilean government wanted him dead.
— Michael Townley [13]
In 2012, Javier Rebolledo published La danza de los cuervos (The Dance of the Crows), a book describing the atrocities committed in the Simón Bolívar barracks. He then premiered the movie El Mocito, in which the experiences of a boy who worked in the Simón Bolívar House of Extermination are related. It details the torture and suffering of the political abductees, and mention is made of the use of sarin gas to exterminate the prisoners. [14] [15] [16]
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 in a car bombing. These agents had been working in collaboration with members of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, an anti-Castro militant group.
Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America, involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers in South America which formally existed from 1975 to 1983. They were backed by the United States and, allegedly, France, Venezuela, and Colombia, who were collaborators and financiers of the covert operations. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to the Army War Academy in Santiago, Chile. The operation ended with the fall of the Argentine junta in 1983.
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.
Charles Edmund Lazar Horman was an American journalist and documentary filmmaker. He was executed in Chile in the days following the 1973 Chilean coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the socialist president Salvador Allende. Horman's death was the subject of the 1982 Costa-Gavras film Missing, in which he was portrayed by actor John Shea.
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.
Colonia Dignidad was an isolated colony established in post-World War II Chile by emigrant Germans which became notorious for the internment, torture, and murder of dissidents during the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s while under the leadership of German emigrant preacher Paul Schäfer. Colonia Dignidad has been described as a "state within a state".
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 Sofía Cuthbert 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.
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 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 6 October 1975, an assassination attempt in Rome, Italy, was carried out against Bernardo Leighton, a former Chilean Christian Democratic vice-president, then in exile. The assassination attempt seriously injured Bernardo Leighton, and his wife, Anita Fresno, leaving her permanently disabled.
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.
Gerardo Huber Olivares 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. 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. 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.
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean military officer who was the dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. From 1973 to 1981, he was the leader of the military junta, which in 1974 declared him President of the Republic and thus the dictator of Chile; in 1980, a referendum approved a new constitution confirming him in the office, after which he served as de jure president from 1981 to 1990. His time in office remains the longest of any Chilean ruler.
Mariana Inés Callejas Honores was a Chilean writer and member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) who participated in several terrorist attacks, including the murder of General Carlos Prats and his wife, which was perpetrated in 1974 in Buenos Aires. She was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison by courts of the first and second instances, though her term was later reduced to five years.
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.
Hartmut Wilhelm Hopp was the doctor of the religious sect and commune called Colonia Dignidad in Chile and the right hand of its leader Paul Schäfer, and follower of the teachings of William Branham. Hopp was sentenced by a Chilean court to five years in prison for complicity in child abuse committed by Paul Schäfer, but he fled the country for Germany and, as a German citizen, was not extradited to Chile by the Federal Republic.
The Calle Conferencia Case I and II refer to two covert operations conducted by the DINA, General Pinochet's political police force, aimed at dismantling the leadership of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) between May and November–December 1976. Both of these operations were orchestrated by the secretive Lautaro Brigade, whose existence remained concealed until 2007, despite the disputes between Manuel Contreras, the head of the DINA, and former dictator General Augusto Pinochet.