CNI AGENTS CONFESS TO MURDERS

Two Pinochet-era secret police agents confessed last week to the murder of four Pinochet opponents immediately after the Sept. 7, 1986 attempt on Gen. Pinochet’s life. The executions were part the government’s effort to seek revenge against political opponents in the wake of the failed assassination attempt.

But for the timely intervention of the police, Ricardo Lagos, then a political leader, may well have been the group’s fifth victim.

Jorge Vargas and Iván Quiroz, former agents of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Chile’s secret police, confessed to the murders of José Carrasco, Felipe Rivera, Gastón Vidaurrázaga, and Abraham Muskatblit.

The murders came after the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FMPR), a left-wing opposition group, attacked Pinochet’s motorcade as it traveled through the Maipo River canyon, just outside of Santiago. The group killed 5 of Pinochet’s guards but failed to assassinate the general.

According to the killers’ confessions, Gen. Humberto Gordon, then director of the CNI, called a meeting of the heads of CNI security operations teams to coordinate the military regime’s response to the attack. Following the meeting, Álvaro Corbalán, CNI operations chief, and Manuel Provis, then chief of the Army Intelligence Battalion (BIE), gave a list of names to Vargas and Quiroz of opposition members to be executed.

Of the four men murdered, José Carrasco has received the most attention because of his prominent role as a journalist and editor. The agents arrived at Carrasco’s home the morning of Sept. 8, 1986 at 4:15 a.m., barging through his front door off with a police van. They then dragged him out of the house in front of his entire family and took him to a nearby cemetery, where they shot him in the back.

Felipe Rivera and Gastón Vidaurrázaga were also murdered that night and executed in a similar fashion to Carrasco. Abraham Muskatblit was seized in the middle of the night two days later; his dead body, found a few hours later, was littered with more than a dozen gunshot wounds.

Another person on the list – Luis Toro, an attorney with the Catholic Church’s human rights organization, the Vicaria of Solidarity – escaped execution because his house was well barricaded and because neighbors bravely intervened from their own homes, turning on lights and calling out to the secret police operatives.

President Ricardo Lagos also might have been killed immediately after the Pinochet assassination attempt, were it not for the intervention of police officer Hilario Muñoz, a former student of Lagos. According to Muñoz, as soon as he saw the list of names of those that were to be executed, he sent a team of police officers to Lagos’ house to bring him into the station for “investigation.” Lagos remained jailed for four days.

After seizing Lagos, the police went to the other homes, only to find that the CNI had already been there.

Following the confessions, President Lagos last week acknowledged that he had come very close to losing his life in 1986 and expressed remorse that the police arrived late at the houses of the other murdered men.