Montevideo – Over the objections of its armed forces and some political sectors, Uruguay extradited to Chile on Tuesday three colonels accused there in the kidnap and murder of a chemist and ex-agent of the Pinochet dictatorship spirited away and slain to keep him from providing damning testimony about atrocities.
Retired Col. Tomas Casella and active-duty officers Wellington Sarli and Eduardo Radaelli arrived in Santiago aboard an Uruguayan air force plane, accompanied by Gen. Luis Perez, diplomats and representatives of the Montevideo office of Interpol.
Perez was appointed by the army commander, Lt. Gen. Carlos Diaz, to coordinate the officers’ legal defense in Chile and to monitor the conditions of their incarceration pending trial.
Uruguayan military sources said that Diaz has ordered the use of army funds to underwrite the trio’s legal costs.
The army chief had dispatched a high-ranking aide to Chile weeks ago to scout defense attorneys and negotiate with the Chilean judiciary on where Casella, Sarli and Radaelli will be held.
It is very rare, if not unprecedented, for one Latin American nation to turn over its military personnel to another for trial on rights abuse charges.
The three officers extradited Tuesday have been indicted by Judge Alejandro Madrid for criminal conspiracy and kidnapping in the disappearance and subsequent death of Eugenio Berrios, a veteran of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s notorious DINA secret police.
A chemist by profession, Berrios was spirited out of Chile in 1991, right before he was due to testify in the investigation of DINA’s 1976 assassination in Washington of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, a member of the Salvador Allende administration toppled by Pinochet in 1973.
Berrios, whose work for DINA included formulating sarin gas for use against Pinochet’s foes, was last seen alive in November 1992, when he went to a Uruguayan police station to report that he had been abducted and brought to Uruguay.
The police handed over Berrios to Uruguayan military officers who had followed the Chilean to the station house. His body – bound and with a bullet in the head – washed up in April 1995 on a beach near Montevideo.
Chilean prosecutors wanted to interrogate Berrios about a number of abuses committed under the 1973-1990 regime, including the mysterious death in 1982 of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, who succumbed to an infection after undergoing minor surgery.
According to a theory first advanced by the late president’s children, Sens. Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle and Carmen Frei, Berrios prepared a bacteria for the purpose of infecting their father.
Frei Montalva, who governed from 1964-1970, was a Christian Democrat. Though his party opposed the Socialist government ousted in 1973 by Pinochet, it likewise opposed the junta, and with the restoration of democracy in 1990, the Christian Democrats teamed up with the newly centrist Socialists to form an alliance that has won four successive presidential elections, one of them under the leadership of Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle.
Madrid’s investigation indicates that Berrios may have played a role in the death of Frei Montalva, and the latter’s offspring have expressed hope that the Uruguayan officers accused of killing the DINA agent can shed some light on their father’s death.
Under Montevideo’s current extradition treaty with Chile, Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez could have blocked the extraditions, but he decided instead to allow the Supreme Court’s ruling to stand.
Organizations of retired military officers, backed by several politicians, had urged the Socialist head of state to prevent the officers’ being handed over to Santiago.
Conservative opposition lawmaker Daniel Garcia Pintos has demanded that Defense Minister Azucena Berrutti appear before Congress to explain the rationale for the government’s stand.
The move has even generated argument within Vazquez’s Broad Front coalition, with Sen. Eleutelio Fernandez Huidobro, chairman of the defense committee in the upper chamber, blasting the extraditions as an “attack on national sovereignty.”
Fernandez Huidobro, a former leftist guerrilla, pointed out that two separate Uruguayan judicial probes had failed to find grounds to charge anyone in connection with Berrios’ murder.
“In reality,” the senator said last month, “we should seek the extradition of many Chileans to come here and answer for what they did in Uruguay.”
He was alluding to Operation Condor, also known as Plan Condor, a coordinated campaign by Southern Cone military dictatorships of the 1970s and ’80s to eliminate dissidents. As part of that effort, agents of one of the participating regimes – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay – would sometimes target individuals at the behest of a Condor partner.
Fernandez Huidobro, who has also described the extraditions of Casella, Sarli and Radaelli as “seeking vengeance for Plan Condor by conducting a Plan Condor in reverse,” suggested that any quest for accountability should focus on people higher up the chain of command.
