CHILE PRESIDENT CONFIRMS HAITI CHIEF’S LINK TO SECRET POLICE

Government officials acknowledged Gen. Eduardo Aldunate’s service as an agent for the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Chile’s former secret police during the military dictatorship, on Sunday. Gen. Aldunate is the second-in-command of the United Nations (UN) international peacekeeping mission in Haiti.

The government’s statement came a week after Carmen Soria, the daughter of Carmelo Soria, a UN official murdered in 1976 by agents from the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), met with Defense Minister Jaime Ravinet where she alleged that Gen Aldunate was a member of the DINA and may have played a role in the murder of her father.

The DINA was the intelligence agency responsible for thousands of tortures and executions in the first several years of Gen. Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The agency was replaced by the CNI in 1977 after Gen. Pinochet lifted the state of siege enforced by the regime following the 1973 military coup.

The newly created CNI then assumed all information collection responsibilities from the DINA as well as broadening their powers to become the equivalent of the United States’ CIA, FBI, and Secret Service all rolled into one.

Soria’s accusations were summarily dismissed by the Defense Minister, who followed the meeting with an interview on Sunday in La Tercera, a major national newspaper in Chile, where he accused Soria of “manipulating an old crime for malicious reasons.” When asked if Gen. Aldunate could have been a member of DINA without the government knowing about it, Ravinet replied, “This has been totally denied.”

Soria’s accusations stem from a speech given in 1993 by Carlos Labarca, an ex-official of the DINA, who claimed that Gen. Aldunate was a member of the DINA’s Mulchen Brigade, the group found responsible for the murder of Sorias’s father.

After Ravinet dismissed Soria’s allegations, Diario Siete, another Chilean newspaper presented officials at the presidential palace with a number of documents proving that Aldunate was a member of the CNI, that he took an active role in the 1973 invasion of La Moneda, and that later he published numerous articles and opinion pieces defending Pinochet’s repressive policies.