Operation Colombo, or the Case of the 119, was an operation undertaken by the
DINA (the
Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in western South America. It is the southernmost country in the world and the closest to Antarctica, stretching along a narrow strip of land between the Andes, Andes Mountains and the Paci ...
an
secret police
image:Putin-Stasi-Ausweis.png, 300px, Vladimir Putin's secret police identity card, issued by the East German Stasi while he was working as a Soviet KGB liaison officer from 1985 to 1989. Both organizations used similar forms of repression.
Secre ...
) in 1975 to make political dissidents
disappear. At least 119 people are alleged to have been abducted and later killed. The objective of the operation was to deceive national and international public opinion—through the publication of false information in media outlets in Chile and abroad—that the disappeared had died in clashes with foreign security forces or had been victims of internal purges.
Most of those killed were members of the
Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). However, there were also militants from the
Communist Party (PC), the
Socialist Party
Socialist Party is the name of many different political parties around the world. All of these parties claim to uphold some form of socialism, though they may have very different interpretations of what "socialism" means. Statistically, most of th ...
(PS), the
Popular Unitary Action Movement
The Popular Unitary Action Movement or MAPU () was a small Left-wing politics, leftist political party in Chile. It was part of the Popular Unity (Chile), Popular Unity coalition during the government of Salvador Allende. MAPU was political rep ...
(MAPU), the Communist League of Chile, as well as some people without political affiliation. In 2006, the Chilean College of Journalists confirmed the role and the numerous breaches of professional ethics that the newspapers
El Mercurio
(known online as ''El Mercurio On-Line'', ''EMOL'') is a Chilean newspaper with editions in Valparaíso and Santiago. is owned by El Mercurio S.A.P. (''Sociedad Anónima Periodística'' 'joint stock news company'), which operates a network of ...
,
La Segunda
() is a Chilean afternoon daily newspaper, owned by El Mercurio SAP.
Their tendency is conservative, is the first Chilean newspaper to disclose information that occurred in the morning because it is evening. Its time distribution is from 14:00 ...
,
Las Últimas Noticias and
La Tercera
(), formerly known as (), is a daily newspaper published in Santiago, Chile and owned by Copesa. It is s closest competitor.
is part of Periódicos Asociados Latinoamericanos ( Latin American Newspaper Association), an organization of fourte ...
had in the framework of the Colombo operation.
[https://ciperchile.cl/wp-content/uploads/fallo-colegio-de-periodistas.pdf]
Background
By late 1974, the military dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet was already being openly questioned internationally for the systematic human rights violations—including arbitrary detentions, torture, and the existence of hundreds of disappeared detainees—reported since September 11, 1973. In November, the United Nations General Assembly had approved a resolution calling for the "restoration of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms in Chile," and a month later, the final report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States was released—prepared after a visit to Chile by a group of investigators from that organization—which found that the military regime had committed "extremely serious human rights violations."
At the same time, knowledge of the role played by the United States
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...
(CIA) and the numerous allegations of torture and disappearances began to generate opposition to the military dictatorship within the US Congress. As a result of these continuous revelations, in October 1974, the United States Senate, at the initiative of Democratic Senator
Ted Kennedy
Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts who served as a member of the United States Senate from 1962 to his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic Party and ...
, rejected military assistance to Chile for more than $20 million. Later, in January 1975, it created the
Church Committee
The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence ...
to investigate the CIA's covert actions over the past decades, including its role in the
coup against
Salvador Allende
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (26 June 1908 – 11 September 1973) was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until Death of Salvador Allende, his death in 1973 Chilean coup d'état, 1973. As a ...
.
In this context, during the first months of 1975, the DINA began organizing a strategy to convince national and international public opinion that the number of disappeared detainees did not exist or was minimized. This consisted of attributing the disappearances to internal political disputes within the left, specifically the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). The purpose of reproducing these reports in the Chilean press was to support the government's position: that there were no disappeared detainees, but that the people sought by their families had fled the country.
Operation Colombo
The disinformation campaign was organized by Álvaro Puga Cappa, Director of Civil Affairs for the Military Junta and Head of Psychological Operations at the DINA, who was responsible for providing national and international journalists with press reports to cover up the crimes committed against the 119 disappeared detainees.
Puga was also a columnist for La Segunda at the time, under the pseudonym "Alexis."
DINA took advantage of media outlets by publishing false stories with the intentions of misleading the public. DINAs goal was to convince the public that they had a foreign enemy who were responsible for the kidnapping and killing of Chileans. These fabricated stories included names of missing victims and stories about how they were killed in clashes between Argentine security forces. However, days later the Chilean church-sponsored committee for peace published a comprehensive report detailing direct evidence that seventy-seven individuals on the list of the missing 119, had been last seen detained by Chile security personnel before they disappeared.
Rightist media outlets in Chile published stories containing evidence and details of mutilated corpses resulting from Operation Colombo. These stories contained the names of the victims and included details of how the victims had died in internecine battles within the Chilean Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (movement of the revolutionary left-MIR). The bodies of victims were discovered with handwritten signs that read “executed by the MIR” meaning these individuals had been members of the revolutionary left movement and had been killed as a result of an internal struggle.
First montages
On April 16, 1975, a mutilated body was found on Sarmiento Street in Buenos Aires. It contained an identity card identifying him as Chilean chemical engineer David Silberman. Silberman was a member of the Communist Party and had been general manager of Cobre Chuqui until the 1973 coup d'état. He was serving a thirteen-year prison sentence in the Santiago Penitentiary for violating the State Security Law after being tried by a court martial when he was kidnapped on October 4, 1974, by DINA agents. Since then, his whereabouts have remained unknown. Years later, former agent
Enrique Arancibia Clavel
Enrique Arancibia Clavel (13 October 1944 – 28 April 2011) was a Chilean DINA security service agent who assassinated General Carlos Prats and his wife in 1974.
Arancibia was convicted of the assassinations in Argentina. After spending 20 y ...
would confess that Silberman's alleged appearance in Buenos Aires had been an operation—dubbed "Colombo"—commissioned by Raúl Iturriaga Neumann to lure a "Chilean subversive" into the world of Argentina.
In the following months, Chile's major newspapers began publishing stories about "alleged missing persons" who were believed to be alive outside of Chile. On June 13, La Tercera published an article titled "Chilean Extremists Train in Tucumán," which highlighted that "among the extremists are a large number of members of the Mir and other Marxist groups who are publicly listed as missing,"
while media outlets such as El Mercurio published headlines such as "Chilean Extremists Train in Guerrilla Action" (La Segunda, June 12), "Armed Miristas Cross into Chile" (El Mercurio, June 16), and "Extremists Cross the Border" (Las Últimas Noticias, June 16).
Clashes and Purges
In early July, the Military Junta suddenly canceled the visit to Chile of the UN Commission on Human Rights, scheduled for July 11, which was intended to investigate allegations of human rights violations. According to the government, it was not a cancellation, but rather a "postponement until a more opportune moment." That same July 11, the day the commission was originally scheduled to arrive, two charred bodies appeared in the city of Pilar, north of Buenos Aires, inside a car, with the identifications of Chileans Jaime Robotham and Luis Guendelman, members of the MIR, detained and disappeared since 1974. Over both bodies there was a banner that read: "Discharged by the MIR. Black Brigade." Eight days later, another body appeared, this time with the alleged identification of Juan Carlos Perelman, also a member of the Mirista movement, detained in Santiago and missing since February 20, 1975.
The Buenos Aires magazine Lea, for its part, published on July 15 a list of 60 "Chilean extremists eliminated by their own comrades in struggle" in Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, and France. Lea only had one issue, with a circulation of 20,000 copies, printed by the Codex Editorial, which depended on the Ministry of Social Welfare of Argentina, headed at that time by
José López Rega
José López Rega (17 November 1916 – 9 June 1989) was an Argentine politician who served as Minister of Social Welfare from 1973 to 1975, first under Juan Perón and continuing under Isabel Perón, Juan Perón's third wife and presidential ...
. Following direct instructions from
Isabel Perón
Isabel Martínez de Perón (, born María Estela Martínez Cartas; 4 February 1931) is an Argentine politician who served as the 41st president of Argentina from 1974 to 1976. She was one of the List of elected and appointed female heads of s ...
, López Rega founded the
Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance in 1973, a death squad responsible for numerous human rights violations between 1973 and 1976. Previously, on June 25, the Curitiba, Brazil, newspaper Novo O Día had reported the murder of 59 Miristas in "clashes with Argentine government forces in Salta."
Following the reports from the two foreign publications and the UPI news agency cables that had reported the discovery of the charred bodies in Buenos Aires, the main Chilean media outlets began to replicate the news of these alleged clashes in the following weeks, with headlines such as "Massacre between MIR members reveals crude maneuver against Chile" (La Tercera, July 16), "Bloody internal "vendetta" within the MIR" (Las Últimas Noticias, July 16), "Ferocious struggle between Chilean Marxists" (La Segunda, July 18), "60 murdered MIR members identified" —with the caption "Executed by their own comrades"— (El Mercurio, July 23), "The MIR has murdered 60 of its men" (La Tercera, front page of July 23) and "Bloody The MIR's struggle abroad" (Las Últimas Noticias).
The evening paper La Segunda, based on the publication of Novo O Día, headlined on its front page on July 24, 1975, "Exterminated like rats," accompanied by the caption "59 Chilean MIR members killed in military operation in Argentina."
A few days later, El Mercurio wrote on its editorial page:
The foreign politicians and journalists who so often questioned the fate of these MIR members and blamed the government for the disappearance of many of them now have the explanation they refused to accept. Victims of their own methods, exterminated by their own comrades, each of them points out with tragic eloquence that the violent ones eventually fall victim to the blind and implacable terror they provoke, and that, once they follow this path, nothing and no one can stop them.
Questions to the official version
Despite the intense coverage of information, as the days passed, strong questioning of the information published by the national media quickly began. Due to the fact that the magazines O Día and Lea were unknown, that the lists were made up of missing persons who had been the subject of amparo appeals, that there were no bodies and the lack of new information, at the same time that the main countries involved began to deny the existence of armed confrontations with guerrillas.
International media such as La Opinión of Argentina, Time magazine and the New York Times questioned the official version maintained by the Military Junta.
In parallel, relatives of Robotham and Guendelman, after traveling to Buenos Aires, denied that the bodies found in the Argentine capital were theirs.
El Mercurio, in a new editorial published on August 3, reluctantly validated the questions, stating: "Is it Is the information being provided credible as a whole? Apparently not; and at the very least, a clarification or precise confirmation from the authorities should be expected at this point.
On August 1, the Pro-Peace Committee filed a request with the Supreme Court to appoint a visiting minister for the people detained and disappeared during their arrests. They insisted on knowing the whereabouts of these individuals due to the new information that emerged from the alleged information about 119 Chileans killed in Argentina. This request was denied two months later by the Supreme Court.
Despite the doubts, the Military Junta insisted on its version of the clashes and criticized the questions as a smear campaign abroad against the military regime. It was not until August 20, during a ceremony in San Bernardo for the birthday of Bernardo O'Higgins, that General Augusto Pinochet officially addressed the case of the 119. On that occasion, he announced an investigation into the matter, but it was never carried out.
On December 1, 1977, two years after the false publications, the Chilean ambassador to the UN,
Sergio Diez, denied before the United Nations General Assembly the existence of disappeared detainees and insisted on the government's version that many victims corresponded to internal purges within the MIR, or that other people simply did not legally exist, or were dead or exiled.
Aftermath
Years after the Colombo operation was discovered, secret DINA files were discovered in the Buenos Aires office and home of Arancibia Clavel that included lists and identity documents of the 119 missing Chileans and reports that discussed the modus operandi of Operation Colombo.
Arancibia Clavel was the only defendant that was indicted
for the assassination of Carlos Prats and Sofia Cuthbert. In September 2004, Guzmán Tapia indicted sixteen former members of the
DINA for Operation Colombo. In November 2005, Judge
Victor Montiglio indicted Pinochet for his role in Operation Colombo, and in May 2008, he indicted ninety-eight DINA leaders and former agents for the abductions and forced disappearances of sixty victims of Operation Colombo. All listed victims had been abducted and held in various clandestine detention centers in Chile.
See also
*
Caravan of Death
*
Operation Condor
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 fo ...
*
Dirty war
The Dirty War () is the name used by the military junta or National Reorganization Process, civic-military dictatorship of Argentina () for its period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983. During this campaign, military and secu ...
References
External links
Pinochet and ex-police-chief meetPinochet found fit
{{coord missing, Chile
1975 in Chile
Cold War
Dirty wars
Political and cultural purges
Operation Condor
Massacres in Chile
Anti-communist terrorism
Political violence in Chile
Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional