Manuel Contreras, the former head of Chile’s notorious secret police, the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), is accusing more than 200 former torture victims of slander. Even though Contreras has been convicted on three separate murder charges and is facing prosecution for torture and murder of hundreds of political detainees during the military dictatorship, he claims that testimony against him amounts to slander.
The specific charges involve 200 counts of false testimony against survivors of the regimes most notorious torture center, Villa Grimaldi, as well as one charge of false testimony against Inspector Rafael Castillo, Chile’s police chief of the Division of Organized Crime and Special Affairs, one charge of exceeding authority filed against Commissioner Sandro Gaete, former chief of the Police Special Affairs and Human Rights Brigade. Contreras has also charged detectives of the Police Investigations department of petty theft of a cellular phone and a document in Jan. 2005.
The testimony in question concerns hundreds of specific accusations of torture and human rights abuses against Contreras during the time he was in charge of the DINA between 1973 and 1977. Contreras was in charge of collecting information on Chile’s left wing political activists and neutralizing threats to Pinochet’s military government. The 1991 Retting Report that the DINA, under Contreras’ command, was responsible for thousands of human rights abuses, including torture, kidnapping and homicide.
Villa Grimaldi was the DINA’s most important detention and torture center. Located inside Santiago, it was used from mid-1974 onward to torture approxmitaley 5,000 political detainees. Former inmates report that among the most common torture technique was electrical shock, consisting of a metal rack to which the naked prisoner was tied and then electrical current would be applied to sensitive parts of his or her body. Hanging, partial asphyxiation and the torture of family members was also a common method of extracting information from detainees.
The charge of theft comes from Contreras’ 2005 arrest when detectives seized his cell phone and a statement of last intents after the former general reached for a gun when police detained him at his home. The document was later published in several national newspapers.
Contreras is currently facing charges of human rights abuses in the Operation Colombo case where 119 left-wing activists were murdered and for tortures at the Villa Grimaldi prison.
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