Santiago – Chilean former dictator Augusto Pinochet became a multi-millionaire through – among other things – refining and trafficking cocaine, according to retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, who was secret police chief under the regime and one of the strongman’s most loyal subordinates.
As reported Sunday in the capital daily La Nacion, former DINA chief Contreras made his accusations in writing to Judge Claudio Pavez, who is investigating the 1992 assassination of Col. Gerardo Huber.
Contreras said that cocaine was manufactured in a chemical complex the army owned in the town of Talagante, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Santiago, by chemist Eugenio Berrios, who also belonged to DINA and was murdered in Uruguay during the 1990s.
Pinochet’s younger son, Marco Antonio, and businessman Edgardo Bathich also participated in the drug preparation and trafficking plan, said Contreras, who is currently serving prison time for murder.
The person in charge of distributing the drug in the United States and other countries and later depositing the earnings into several of Pinochet’s foreign bank accounts was, Contreras said, Syrian Monser Al Kassar, who has also been linked with terrorism.
Contreras also said that Pinochet drew from army reserve funds to enrich himself, funneling cash from them into his personal accounts and keeping the interest earned.
The cocaine made by Berrios, Contreras said, was of the kind known as “black” or “Russian,” which is undetectable with the methods traditionally used by the police.
He also told the judge that he decided to collaborate in this matter due to the esteem in which he held Huber, whose killing has been linked to an arms smuggling deal to Croatia discovered at the beginning of the 1990s during the war in the Balkans.
Among the five other army officers linked to Huber’s murder are three retired generals, who are on trial for illicit, or criminal, association.
Berrios was killed in Uruguay, where he was taken clandestinely in 1991 when he was called to testify in the trial surrounding the assassination of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier.
On trial for that crime, a process being presided over by Judge Alejandro Madrid, are two retired Chilean army majors and three Uruguayan officers extradited to Chile in April.
Pinochet himself is being investigated, along with several relatives and old collaborators, by Judge Carlos Cerda, who is probing the origin of the fortune – currently calculated at more than $26 million – he amassed in secret foreign accounts.
Contreras, who has had public disagreements with his former superior officer, is serving a 12-year prison sentence for the disappearance of Miguel Angel Sandoval, and this is not the first time that he has linked Pinochet with drug trafficking, according to La Nacion.
In 1988, the former DINA chief, who was serving a seven-year prison sentence for Letelier’s murder, tried to negotiate his legal situation with the U.S. Embassy in Santiago.
In exchange for Washington’s disconnecting him from the former foreign minister’s car-bomb assassination, which also killed Letelier’s secretary Ronni Moffit, he offered to hand over information about the drug trafficking activities of Pinochet’s son and former Chilean army Maj. Armando Fernandez Larios.
Fernandez Larios deserted from the army in the 1980s and turned himself over to U.S. law enforcement authorities, who – in exchange for his collaboration on various matters – gave him a reduced sentence and offered to place him in the Witness Protection Program.
The former major did not accept the witness-protection offer, and has tried to live a low-profile life as manager of an auto body shop in Miami.
The attempt by Contreras to work out a deal with Washington, La Nacion reported, is contained in a U.S. State Department report dated Feb. 10, 1989, which was declassified in 1991.
