Files May Offer Insight Into U.S. Ties to Pinochet

The U.S. government made public Wednesday thousands of classified documents concerning the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, raising hopes that new information will aid the prosecution of Pinochet by a Spanish judge and shed light on the U.S. role in Chile’s bloody past.

In a landmark move, the State Department declassified 25,000 pages of documents from its files and those of the CIA, FBI, Defense Department and other agencies covering the first five years of the Pinochet dictatorship, beginning in 1973. The documents were released simultaneously in Washington and Santiago, the Chilean capital. Much of the material will also be released on the Internet.

While it will take days for experts to wade through about 5,000 documents, Chileans and international human rights advocates hope to learn more about the role of the CIA and other U.S. agencies in Pinochet’s 1973 coup and the ensuing repression that claimed 3,000 lives and resulted in the torture and exile of thousands more.

“I don’t think we are going to find a smoking gun,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean who heads Human Rights Watch in Washington. “But high-level officials of the State Department have assured me the information is relevant and important to understand the repressive machinery of Pinochet.”

An initial review of the documents released Wednesday revealed that the CIA knew almost immediately after Pinochet seized power that his regime engaged in “indiscriminate killings” and other abuses to wipe out opposition.

“The regime shows no sign of relenting in its determination to deal swiftly and decisively with dissidents,” CIA field officers reported to headquarters Oct. 12, 1973, one month after the coup, according to Associated Press.

A U.S. congressional commission that previously studied the coup concluded that the administration of President Nixon ordered the CIA to destabilize the Chilean government in the year before the overthrow of Marxist President Salvador Allende, who died in the coup that interrupted Chile’s longtime tradition of democratic rule. But the commission did not examine direct U.S. involvement in the military uprising itself and the atrocities that followed, Vivanco said.

“There is no doubt that the CIA had the mission of undermining the Allende government, but the big question mark is whether this will contribute to understanding the U.S. role during the coup itself and the repression,” Vivanco said.

Some documents released Wednesday have been edited or withheld, U.S. officials said, because they pertain to the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation of the car bomb assassination in 1976 of Chilean exile leader Orlando Letelier in Washington. Two of Pinochet’s top intelligence chiefs were convicted in Chile of the slaying.

Pinochet is under house arrest in Britain, where he faces extradition proceedings initiated by Baltasar Garzon, a Spanish judge, on charges of torture and conspiracy to torture.

Although British judges threw out all charges in cases related to events that occurred before 1988, the U.S. documents could still strengthen the case by providing information on the dictator’s role in the repression, particularly his relationship with the Directorate of National Intelligence--the notorious secret police agency known as the DINA.

Victims of the regime also hope to learn more about the Letelier assassination and other crimes in Chile and on foreign soil, such as state terrorism by Operation Condor, an alliance of South American secret police forces in which the DINA played a central role.