Chile Government Tarnished by Police Scandal : Opponents Call for Mass Protests, but Pinochet Claims to Be in Firm Control

A jarring note has crept into President Augusto Pinochet’s familiar themes of nationalism and anti-communism. On a speaking tour of southern Chile this week, Pinochet referred to rumors of an anti-government plot.

“A coup?” Pinochet said. “By whom, I ask? By nobody. The only one who could rise up in rebellion would be I.”

His opponents found it significant that Pinochet would publicly acknowledge a whisper of instability that had swept Santiago a few days earlier. Less comforting to the opposition was the recognition that Pinochet is probably correct. The rumor has faded. Pinochet stays on as president, and he insists that he will be in office for at least another four years.

Nevertheless, his government’s scheduled Sept. 11 observance of another anniversary of its 1973 coup is tarnished by a scandal that has shaken the Carabineros, Chile’s uniformed national police force.

Police Called Disaffected

Fresh impetus to opposition clamors for Pinochet’s departure has been furnished by the alleged involvement of Carabineros, who are organized along military lines and whose top officer is a member of the ruling junta, in the kidnaping and killing of three Communist Party members. These opponents are now actively calling for mass protests against Pinochet, beginning Sept. 4.

Since the scandal broke, the Carabineros, who number 35,000, are if not rebellious at least disaffected, Chilean sources say. They think they have been made a scapegoat, the sources say.

Gen. Cesar Mendoza, the Carabineros’ commander and a member of Pinochet’s junta for 12 years, resigned in disgrace. A Carabinero intelligence unit has been dissolved. More than two dozen other senior officers, including five generals and 17 colonels, were eased into retirement.

Jose Canovas, an appellate court judge, is weighing specific charges against 12 Carabineros, including two colonels, who have been implicated in the slaying. Two junior officers are charged with falsifying the flight log of their police helicopter as part of an attempted cover-up.

Trio’s Throats Slashed

A number of other human rights charges are pending against individual Carabineros in courts around the country, but the Santiago case that Canovas is investigating cuts deepest.

It involves three Communists who were kidnaped in daylight on March 29 by armed men. The abducted men were Manuel Guerrero, a teachers’ union leader and perhaps also a member of the proscribed party’s political commission; Jose Manuel Parada, a human rights case worker for the Roman Catholic Church, and Santiago Nattino, a cartoonist who is thought to have held a propaganda post in the party. The next morning, the three men’s bodies were found near Santiago’s international airport, their throats slashed.

Gen. Mendoza promptly blamed “international communism,” and denied any Carabinero involvement, even after evidence began piling up against members of a Carabinero intelligence unit.

What fuels Carabinero resentment now is that the unit, at the military’s behest, had shared anti-subversive duties since 1983 with a military-controlled intelligence service called the CNI, the Spanish initials for National Information Central, which Chileans know as the secret police. Yet it was the CNI, commanded by an army general who reports directly to Pinochet, that provided key evidence to Canovas after the Supreme Court named him to investigate.

Who Ordered Killings?

Still not clear is who gave the killers their orders. One supposition is that the killings were not the act of an institution but rather a hot-headed, individualistic act of vengeance, carried out by friends, or perhaps relatives, of Carabineros killed by terrorists with links to the Communist Party.

Carabinero installations and patrols are the most frequent targets of the terrorists, who have killed 19 policemen in the past two years. Over the same period, 65 civilians have been killed by Carabineros, most of them in anti-Pinochet street demonstrations.

After an abortive attempt to control the damage, Mendoza resigned. Some sources insist that Pinochet intended to replace him with an army general but that the Carabineros would not stand for it. Instead, the new commander--and new junta member--is Gen. Rodolfo Stange, a 59-year-old professional policeman who was Mendoza’s deputy.

Kidnapings Continue

Human rights advocates see it as ominous that the kidnapings continue, kidnapings said to bear the trademark of the security services. There have been 72 in the past five months, eight of them since the Carabineros’ intelligence unit was disbanded, according to documents filed with the Supreme Court this week by church lawyers. Typically, the victims have been young women close to so-called Christian base communities in Santiago’s slums. They are usually kidnaped in daylight, interrogated under torture, then released, the lawyers said.

Human rights spokesmen for the church say that the kidnapings are calculated to terrorize the opposition. They are mindful, however, that on his speaking tour, Pinochet promised “drastic measures” to deal with Chile’s Communists, who are the most intransigent of his foes. Thursday night, 14 youths arrested in a street demonstration earlier this month were sentenced to three months of internal exile in the remote southern part of the country.

In the past, Pinochet has used mass arrests, particularly in slum areas, to short-circuit budding protests, and massive police presence in the streets to stifle demonstrations once they have begun. To do this, he needs the Carabineros, who have prided themselves on being Latin America’s most professional police force.

As a result of the scandal, Chile appears headed for a new political confrontation, with Pinochet’s allies trying to soothe the Carabineros, and his foes, particularly the violent left, trying to aggravate them.