DINA
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:Dina.jpgDirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Spanish: National Intelligence Directorate) or DINA was the first Chilean secret police during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
From its establishment in November 1973, DINA was headed by Manuel Contreras. It was officially created in June 1974 by decree #521, which gave it the power to detain persons during a declared state of emergency which ended up lasting for almost the entire length of the Pinochet regime. It is said to be responsible for the 1976 assassination of former Chilean government member Orlando Letelier.
DINA existed until 1977, after which it was replaced by the Central Nacional de Información (CNI) (Spanish for National Information Center). Its members were trained in the U.S.'s School of the Americas, known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation since January 2001.
DINA is said to have had international agents, such as Michael Townley, who assassinated Letelier, as well as General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires, Argentina. According to a CIA document released in 2000, french OAS member Albert Spaggiari also acted as intermediary for the DINA in Europe.
DINA was involved in Operation Condor's plan, as well as Operation Colombo. In July 1976, two magazines in Argentina and Brazil published the names of 119 Chilean leftist opponents, claiming they had been killed in internal fights. Those two magazines would disappear after this lone and only issue. Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia would eventually ask Chilean justices to lift Pinochet's immunity in this case, having accumulated evidence that he had ordered the DINA to make up this disinformation plan, in order to cover up the "disparition" and murder by the Chilean secret police of those 119 persons. On September 2005, Chile's Supreme Court would accept to lift Pinochet's immunity on this case. Judge Victor Montiglio, who took up the case after Juan Guzmán Tapia's retirement a few months before, has yet to nominate the doctors who would statue on Pinochet's health and ability to be interrogated. Victor Montiglio is known as a Pinochetist, and supports military auto-amnesty laws. He has already accorded amnesty to Manuel Contreras, who was given firm prison sentence in 2004 in the Operation Colombo trial.
Michael Townley worked with Eugenio Berríos on sarin gas in the 1990's, in a house DINA had in Lo Curro. Eugenio Berríos, who was murdered in 1995, was also linked with drug traffickers and agents of DEA.[1]