A Very Quiet Horror

One drizzly morning last September, a light-blue Chevelle entered Sheridan Circle along Embassy Row in Washington, D. C. Suddenly, it erupted with a deafening explosion that blew out its roof and fatally injured Orlando Letelier, 45, the exiled former defense minister in Salvador Alleende's Marxist government in Chile. A bomb had been so carefully planted in Letelier's car that a passenger in the rear seat was barely injured—suggesting a professional assassination. Investigators suspect that Letelier was killed by a right-wing Cuban-exile group cooperating with the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret-police arm of the military junta that has ruled Chile since Allende was killed and his government toppled more than three years ago. Indeed, known DINA agents had been seen in U. S. airports shortly before Letelier was killed.

Orlando Letelier was an economist and a Socialist. He had also served as Allende's foreign minister and interior minister. When Allende was overthrown by military coup on September 11, 1973, Letelier was made a political prisoner and spent 364 days in eight Chilean prisons—including concentration camps in subarctic south Chile.

Scores of concentration camps and prisons today dot the landscape of Chile from the arid desert in the north to the desolate vastness of Magallanes Province in the far south. For over three years, these camps and prisons have been the home of thousands of Chileans regarded by the ruling junta in Santiago as its ideological enemies. As of 1976, there were perhaps as many as 4000 political prisoners. They are tortured and brutalized in a fashion that the United Nations Human Rights Commission described as "barbaric sadism." The junta's security services, the UN report added, has "a number of well-trained, professional torturers on the payroll."

Chile has effectively been turned into a "Gulag South," the Western Hemisphere equivalent of the Soviet prison system that Alexander Solzhenitsyn portrayed in chilling detail in his "Gulag Archipelago." If anything, conditions in the Chilean Gulag South show more horrifying disregard for human rights than do those in the Soviet camps.

All this is happening in our own hemispheric back yard, in the Americas, and there can be no question that the United States bears much responsibility for it. Not only did the Nixon Administration support Allende's ouster but, through the Central Intelligence Agency, the U. S. has provided the junta with political advice. A Senate report on "Covert Action in Chile," published late in 1975, after exhaustive investigations, remarks that the CIA had assisted the junta after the coup "in gaining a more positive image, both at home and abroad" and had helped "the new government organize and implement new policies." Despite wholesale assassinations and imprisonments in the wake of the 1973 coup, the CIA—according to the Senate report—"assisted the junta in preparing a 'White Book of the Change of Government in Chile' ... to justify the overthrow of Allende.... It was distributed widely in Washington and in other foreign capitals."

Moreover, the United States has done little to pressure the junta to desist in its brutal domestic policies. While the Administration has authorized the immigration of nearly 150,000 South Vietnamese and other Indochina exiles to the United States, only 20 Chilean political-refugee families have been authorized to enter this country since the 1973 coup. So much for American humanitarianism.

Short of assembling a massive, Solzhenitsynlike study of the Chilean prison system, it is virtually impossible to draw a comprehensive picture of the situation in Chile. But the basic story can be told through the personal experiences of one man—Orlando Letelier.

After his release from prison in September 1974, Letelier moved to Washington, where he had previously made many friends during a term as Chile's ambassador to the United States. He was reluctant for some time to recount publicly his prison experiences. Several months before his death, however, he agreed to be interviewed by me and my wife. The result was an eight-hour taped conversation, in Spanish, in which Letelier guided us step by step through his yearlong Gulag nightmare. In our questions, we sought to bring out not only the actual story of his imprisonment, tortures and humiliations but also his emotions, as he could recall them, during his ordeal. At no time during our interview did Letelier, a soft-spoken and remarkably unembittered man, raise his voice or display anger. He was disturbingly low-key.

What he told us was a quiet tale of horror.

Letelier's story begins during the night of September 10, 1973, when Allende and his associates became aware that a military coup against the government was in the making. Letelier left Allende's home at two A.M. on September 11—the president and his top advisors had decided to get a few hours' sleep before facing the events they knew were coming. Letelier remembered that at lunch that day, Allende had "serenely" remarked, "I shall remain the constitutional president of Chile for my entire term—unless they kill me." Those were prophetic words: Letelier never again saw Allende alive after leaving him that night.

At 6:22 A.M., Letelier was awakened by a telephone call from Allende, who informed him that the Chilean navy had rebelled at the Valparaiso base, an hour's drive from the capital. Allende said he was going to his office at the Moneda Palace; Letelier decided to rush to the Defense Ministry, just across the street from Moneda, to determine whether the situation could still be controlled, whether any military units remained loyal to Allende. Letelier left his house in his official car about 7:30 A.M. His wife, Isobel, and their four sons stayed behind. Arriving at the ministry building, Letelier saw that it was surrounded by troops; the officers and some armed civilians in the area wore orange scarves, the insignia of the rebels. The ministry's doors were locked, but after some insistence, Letelier was allowed to enter. That moment marked the beginning of his nightmare.

Letelier: As I entered the building, I felt a gun in my back and I saw myself surrounded by ten or twelve highly excited men in army uniforms pointing their submachine guns at me. Pushing me violently, they took, me to the ministry's basement. They searched me, took away my necktie and my belt and threw me against the wall in a small room. I demanded to see a senior officer, but the officer who escorted me said, "Look, sir, if you insist on this, we'll proceed immediately to execute you." After an hour in the basement, I was taken in a car with armed guards to the headquarters of the Tacna infantry regiment in southern Santiago.

After a few hours of detention in the officers' mess, Letelier was moved to a small room on the second floor of the barracks. The shutters on the window were boarded up, but Letelier found a chink in one of them looking onto the courtyard below.

Letelier: Starting at three or four o'clock in the afternoon, large numbers of men with their hands behind their necks were brought to the courtyard. The soldiers made them lie down on the ground for hours. And I could hear the sounds of firing very close by. At one point, there were some 1500 persons in the Tacna barracks. Some prisoners were brought by troops, others by civilians with orange scarves. In the evening, I was offered a meal, but I decided to go on a hunger strike until I was allowed to see a senior officer. Around four A.M., I heard my name called out over a loud-speaker, along with the names of other leaders of our government. Presently, I realized that the loud-speaker was listing persons to be detained. Of course, I didn't sleep that night. They had taken away my cigarettes, which was a real tragedy. Then I heard the loud-speaker issue instructions to the personnel of the Tacna regiment that anyone who opposed the armed forces would be executed on the spot. Then I heard shots, but they weren't shots from the outside; they didn't sound like firing by soldiers. They were dry, single shots. I couldn't see who was firing, but I could see persons being taken to a corner of the courtyard that was outside my line of sight. They would stay there six or seven minutes, then I could see bodies being carried back. They must have executed 20 persons there that night.

Just before five A.M., I heard voices saying, "Now it's the turn of the minister." A half hour later, the door to my room was opened and a sergeant told me to come along. There were six soldiers surrounding me. We walked along the corridor, then down a flight of steps. One of the soldiers was carrying a small towel and I realized that it was a blindfold. Immediately, I had the feeling that I was being led away to be executed. You know, it's curious what one reads and hears about what human beings think before an execution.

[Q] What were you thinking?

[A] Letelier: I didn't think back on my life, about the past, about my family; I was thinking about very immediate things. I was thinking that I didn't want to be made to kneel, mat when I arrived downstairs, I would tell them that I didn't want to be blindfolded. I was counting the meters as we walked. It all seemed very unreal that it was happening to me, but I had a clear, rational notion that I would be executed. Yet it seemed so impossible that I went through something like transposition, as if I had already left my body. I felt no sense of horror, no fear. Perhaps fear reaches such a point that one begins to see oneself, as it were, from the outside.

[A] We were going down the stairs. When we reached the bottom step, I realized that there was an officer behind (continued on page 114)Very Quiet Horror(continued from page 108) us, asking, "What's happening here?" The sergeant told me to halt. A more senior officer appeared and a discussion went on for some minutes. I heard him say, "I'm the one who gives orders here...." Then an officer shouted from the courtyard that I should be taken up stairs again. One of the soldiers said to me, "You're lucky. They won't give it to you, you bastard." I was taken back to my room. The degree of arbitrary behavior was incredible there. If you ask me why I wasn't shot and others were shot, I couldn't even tell you that it was for political reasons. It was bureaucratic, because it was this captain, in this corner of the courtyard, who decided about the lives of people. The officer in charge of another section of the courtyard could have decided differently.

[A] In the late morning, Letelier was moved from the Tacna regiment to the Military Academy in another part of Santiago. That, was where the junta assembled key personalities of the Allende government: former ministers, senators, university deans and others. Before leaving the Tacna regiment, Letelier was taken to the commander's office. The commander, an acquaintance of Letelier's, apprised him that Allende had died the previous day. Now it was September 12. In the next three days, the group at the academy grew to 37 persons, all top officials of the Popular Unity regime. Other prisoners, tens of thousands of them, were held at the Santiago sports stadium. Many were executed, including Victor Jara, a famous Chilean singer. Letelier and his companions at the Military Academy were not allowed to sleep at night; every five or six minutes, soldiers would burst into the cells, turn on lights, push the beds and strike the prisoners with rifle butts. Outside, there was heavy firing. On Friday, September 14, the men were suddenly rounded up in the dining hall during the lunch hour and taken back to their cells, pushed and insulted by guards. They were told to gather their belongings and were marched to a waiting bus.

[Q] You didn't know where you were going?

[A] Letelier: No. They made us board the bus with much violence. We were forced to sit in the bus looking down; if one looked up or looked out, the soldiers told us, he would be shot. They had submachine guns. We had spent four days without changing clothes, without shaving, without a cigarette. We thought at first that we were being taken to the airport to be flown out of Chile. But we were driven instead to the military air base. There they made us get off the bus, again with considerable violence—the soldiers struck us with rifle butts.

[Q] Did they try to humiliate you?

[A] Letelier: Yes. Many of us were slapped in the face. Before being taken to the Military Academy, several ministers were forced to lie in the street for hours. There, soldiers struck them and kicked them. In some cases, prisoners were hit in the stomach with rifle butts. I saw bruises and marks of violence on many of them.

[Q] The 37 prisoners were placed aboard a DC-6, which took off immediately for an unknown destination.

[A] Letelier: Knowing Chile's geography and seeing the Andes cordillera, we realized we were flying south. We were not allowed to move aboard the plane. The soldiers, pointing their submachine guns, kept warning us that we would be killed at the slightest move. We began to suspect that we were being flown to Punta Arenas, the world's southernmost large city. That's where we landed about 9:30 P.M.

[A] Black hoods were placed on our heads. We were taken to armored vehicles, each man being led by the arm by a soldier, another soldier behind, his gun at the prisoner's back. The situation was one of terror that was being generated within the armed forces. The terror was so great that each soldier was, in effect, a prisoner of this system. Each soldier was watched by a corporal and the corporal was controlled by the lieutenant. Each man, therefore, was trying to demonstrate, because of fear, that he was the most violent. If he weren't sufficiently violent, he could be punished, too. You see, there was a verticality of terror. What concerned them most was not to appear soft, not to appear human. I thought that they would simply assassinate us inside the armored cars and dump us in the Strait of Magellan; you know, Punta Arenas is on the strait. It may seem a bit absurd, but I was thinking, All right, if they kill me, I'm going to die with dignity like a man; these people are assassins and it is my historical responsibility to act like a man. There was the overwhelming desire that we should all die with dignity, that we should act with dignity until the end and that all Chileans should know that we were assassinated.

[Q] The prisoners' destination was Dawson Island, which lies in the Strait of Magellan, above the antarctic region. Dawson was a Chilean naval station that the junta turned into a concentration camp for its most distinguished prisoners—former ministers and leading leftist politicians. One of them was Luis Corvalan, the head of the Communist Party. Dawson lies on the 54th parallel south; it is one of the world's most desolate and inhospitable spots, battered by antarctic winds. It was already spring in South America, but Dawson was still covered with snow when the prisoners arrived. The surroundings were, indeed, reminiscent of a Siberian Gulag camp in the Soviet Union.

[A] Letelier: We went ashore on a beach. We were no longer hooded and we could see powerful spotlights aimed at us. It was freezing cold. We had only our light clothing. We were formed in lines and officers took out the oldest among us to be put aboard an ancient army truck. The younger men were ordered to walk. It was snowing. We walked four or five miles in the dark until we reached Puerto Harris, a small Chilean marine-corps base with 15 or 16 structures. The marines had already put a barbed-wire fence around Dawson's first concentration camp. Inside the camp, we were herded into a large shed. The island's naval commander, Jorge Feles, addressed us briefly. He said, "Gentlemen, you are prisoners of war, you will have the rights and obligations of prisoners of war ... under the Geneva convention. You are in my custody."

[Q] The 37 prisoners would remain in the Puerto Harris camp for three months. The camp was near the shore of what was rather aptly called Bahia Inútil (The Useless Bay).

[A] Letelier: We were housed in a two-room shed. Eight of us occupied a room eight feet by fifteen. Right off, we called our room El Sheraton. The others, 29 of them, were in a larger room. They slept in three-tiered bunks on mattresses and scratchy sheets. Our morning meal was a cup of coffee and a piece of bread. The yard inside the camp was 30 by 21 feet, but we weren't allowed to go closer than nine feet from the barbed-wire enclosure. In the beginning, we were kept inside the shed most of the day. After a few days, we discovered that new prisoners had arrived from Punta Arenas, but we were separated by the fence. They forbade us to call one another by name, so that the other prisoners would not know who we were. At night, there was a strict rule against leaving the shed—even to go to the latrine.

[Q] What were the sanitary conditions?

[A] Letelier: Bad. Our drinking and washing water came from a canal that flowed past the camp. But our shed was on lower ground than the sheds housing the Punta Arenas prisoners. Guards awoke us at six A.M. and we were taken in groups of three to the canal to fill our buckets with water for drinking and washing. But, because we were below the other camp, the buckets often came up filled with the excrement of the other prisoners. We selected a spokesman to inform the military of this situation and the health hazards involved. Presently, we were permitted to hook up a hose in the canal above the other sheds, so that our water didn't have to go through the area where (continued on page 182) Very Quiet Horror (continued from page 114) the upper latrines were located. We helped improve the canal while we stayed there. At the very outset, all of us came down simultaneously with bad colds; we had no warm clothing. They let us light wood fires in the yard; it helped a bit to keep warmer.

[A] We all lost weight at Dawson: I lost 30 pounds in the first three months. Daniel Vergara, who had been shot in the arm, didn't get the bullet removed for a full month: They took him to a Punta Arenas hospital only when gangrene developed. Inasmuch as we were kept indoors most of the time, we had to use buckets for our bodily functions.

[Q] Was there forced labor at Dawson?

[A] Letelier: At first, they didn't want us to work outside. We asked permission to build latrines, cut down some trees and build a bypass for the canal. Finally, they let us do it. But after about 25 days in the camp, the military decided to subject us to forced labor, even though we were never tried or sentenced. First, they made us walk around the island in terrible wind, with gusts up to 80 miles per hour. It's the antarctic wind, sometimes blowing stones and pieces of ice into one's face, slashing it.

[A] Under the forced-labor system, we worked from seven A.M. until seven P.M., or later. First, we built the latrines. Then, we had to erect telephone poles between our camp and a small naval station, some 14 miles away. Every 150 feet, we had to dig a hole in the ground; sometimes it was rock.

[A] You know, fascism is a rather negative thing, but fascism combined with economic underdevelopmeut is really incredible. So there were no tools for this work, there were no shovels—that's how underdeveloped this place was. Sometimes we had to dig the postholes with our hands. You'd work four or five hours and you had dug down four or five inches. And much depended on the sergeant in charge of the detail. Some sergeants would let us rest for five minutes every two hours; others made it every three hours. But then we could relax and smoke. We had been authorized some time earlier to receive packages from home, so finally, we had cigarettes. And we had to reinforce the barbed wire and cut firewood. Because of the cold on Dawson, the military wanted to stock up on firewood for the winter. So we had to cut down tall trees, with hand axes, naturally. I didn't have the slightest idea how to use an ax.

[Q] What did they feed you?

[A] Letelier: At first, it was coffee and bread in the morning, then lentils that were brought to us at noon at the worksite. Later, they gave us some potatoes. But they gave us no meat and no fruit, which is why we developed a generalized condition of malnutrition. José Toha, one of our group, was so terribly affected that he lost 70 pounds. And even the lentils we ate were mixed with pebbles. Sometime in November, we started occasionally receiving pieces of fat, which for us was the most welcome thing, because we needed it so badly in that climate. Often it rained so hard that we were soaked even before we started work. On occasion, a prisoner would become virtually frozen. Then the guards would let us light a fire and put the man next to it. We would keep slapping him to keep up his circulation.

[Q] How did you all hold up psychologically?

[A] Letelier: Naturally, this whole situation created a very strong psychological pressure on us, but it's really astounding how important it is to be together. Each man wants to be an example to the others. This sense of unity, of collective support, allowed us to survive all that time. And there were all kinds of things. At night, for example, the guards would yank prisoners out of their sheds and simulate executions, then send them back to their cots. We heard the shots.

[Q] The original Dawson group of 37 was increased to 44 late in September with the arrival of seven prisoners who had been leading government officials in Valparaiso. All seven had been severely tortured during their initial detention aboard the Chilean navy's training ship Esmeralda, which had been turned into a prison after the military coup. (Protest demonstrations were staged against the Esmeralda when the Tall Ships gathered in New York harbor on July fourth last year. The ship's master denied that it had been used as a prison.) The Valparaiso prisoners had been subjected to electric shocks to the genitals and to the tongue. Letelier heard their stories in detail and, saw the marks on their bodies.

[A] Letelier: Sergio Vuskovic, who was mayor of Valparaiso, had his tongue completely burned from electric shocks. The same thing happened to Andres Sepulveda, a former congressman. The navy's interrogators had developed their own techniques. They always kept the prisoners blindfolded. Routinely, the first questions were about arms; where were the arms? Then came the tortures, the electric shocks, the beatings. Aboard the Esmeralda, prisoners were lashed naked to a mast and beaten. Then they were taken below deck for electric-shock treatment to obtain confessions. Vuskovic, for instance, had several ribs broken and could hardly stand up. In other cases, flesh wounds were inflicted on the prisoners, then the wounds were rubbed with salt. One prisoner was forced to rub salt with his feet into the wounds of another prisoner.

[A] There also were women prisoners aboard the Esmeralda and they, too, were tortured. They received electric shocks. They were forced to parade naked in front of other prisoners and sailors. They were raped by sailors.

[A] All that was heard aboard that ship was screams.

[Q] Was there any improvement in your lives at Dawson as time went by?

[A] Letelier: Well, I told you about the psychological pressures; these went on the whole time. We would hear a great deal of shooting during the night, and the next morning, soldiers would tell us that they had been firing right next to our shed. The soldiers and the sailors were being told by their officers that foreign submarines were about to land at Dawson to rescue us. The idea was to keep the troops excited and hostile toward us.

[Q] By late September, some 300 new political prisoners had been taken to Dawson from Punta Arenas. Increasingly, the Letelier group was allowed to develop contacts with them at worksites. The military no longer tried to keep secret the identity of its high-level prisoners. But forced labor became harder and harder.

[A] Letelier: We were ordered to fill big sacks with stones from the beach and to run with them as far as possible. The stones were for the new house the island's naval commander was building for himself. Our legs would collapse under us; some of the men would just faint from sheer exhaustion, falling on the ground in blinding rain. Working on the beach, we sometimes saw ferries taking prisoners to Punta Arenas for interrogation, then returning them ten or twenty days later. We'd watch them come off the boats, many of them with broken ribs, tongues burned from electric shock and their bodies covered with wounds.

[A] The interrogation system at Punta Arenas was to keep them incommunicado for five or six days; then the prisoners were released in a yard where the military kept huge mastiffs that were let loose on them. Afterward, the prisoners were pushed against a tree we call calafate that is covered with thorns; after a few moments, their bodies were full of thorns. Next, the men were forced to eat excrement, were beaten and given electric shocks. Only then, interrogation started. They were forced to sign confessions blindfolded, not knowing what they were signing. Back in camp, they were given some time to recover. We knew all about them, because there was a physician in our group of prisoners, Arturo Giron, who was often called by the military to treat the detainees. Sometimes, Giron would be called out at midnight or three A.M., when a ferryboat with tortured prisoners returned from Punta Arenas.

[Q] At Puerto Harris, officials from the International Red Cross were allowed to visit the prisoners. Prior to the visit, the men were kept working until three A.M. painting a new shed, so that the inspectors would not find them in the cramped conditions of the other shack. In the morning, they were taken to a bench, given a soccer ball and ordered to play. Letelier vividly recalled this incident.

[A] Letelier: Suddenly, a jeep arrived at the beach, carrying Red Cross officials. This was theater, this was a show to demonstrate to the Red Cross that the prisoners practiced sports. However, Red Cross officials insisted on private conversations with individual prisoners. They could see that persons still had torture marks, including Carlos Gonzales, an excongressman, on whose back a huge letter Z had been slashed with a bayonet. Z was the alleged secret plan of the Allende government to murder the chiefs of the armed forces and the formal excuse for the coup. Curiously, however, I was never asked about Plan Z in interrogations during my year of incarceration, although I had been the defense minister and presumably would have known about such a plan. The junta used Plan Z to keep up the morale in the armed forces; there were posters in army barracks throughout Chile, saying, Remember Z—You Were to Die in September.

[Q] Were there reprisals against prisoners who talked to Red Cross officials?

[A] Letelier: No. The Red Cross people were very discreet; they never passed on to the Chilean military the names of the prisoners whom they interviewed—so it was impossible to determine who had said what to the Red Cross. But the Red Cross mission did write a report about tortures, and after that, it was not allowed to inspect Dawson. However, from the time of the visit, we began receiving mattresses, blankets, food, chocolate, and so on, from the Red Cross. The excuse for keeping the Red Cross out of Dawson after the first visit was that we had hidden weapons and were preparing an uprising. But how could we have had arms in that inaccessible, frozen hell that was Dawson?

[Q] On December 20, 1973, after three months at Puerto Harris, the Letelier group was removed to another concentration camp on Dawson Island—the Rio Chico camp—some seven miles away.

[A] Letelier: In April 1974, a colonel arrived at Rio Chico; he lined us up and told us that weapons had been discovered in the camp. We were locked up for a day in a shed and subjected to a search. Some of us had little pieces of metal, made from barbed wire, which we used to make engravings on stones to be sent to our families via the Red Cross. There was less forced labor in Rio Chico, because we were too far from worksites and they had no trucks to take us. So we had more free time and we could work on the stone engravings. But now they took our little tools away. We were stripped naked for the search. The colonel informed us that the presence of "arms" among us was an act of rebellion and that punishment would be applied.

[A] A few days later, a special marine unit arrived at Rio Chico. We were no longer allowed to walk; we had to run all the time. We had to run on the beaches, carrying stone-filled sacks. Prisoners were fainting all the time. Whenever we were addressed by the marines, we had to reply with shouts. All this was intended to maintain a high degree of nervous tension among us. They wouldn't let us sleep: We would be yanked out of bed in the middle of the night and forced to stand in the rain. We were thrown to the ground in the mud. Then we were made to run in the rain. Some of us were placed in solitary confinement.

[Q] Were you ever afraid that you might make a soldier angry and be shot? Did you think they were trigger-happy?

[A] Letelier: Of course. This was especially true of the special repression group—the marines—who were composed largely of professional psychopaths. There was a sergeant who kept telling us, "I've already killed 12 of you...." Then he would make us lie on the ground, hit and kick us in the face and provoke us in every way to see whether he could produce a reaction justifying an execution. We really thought they wanted provocation to kill us. They would suddenly turn off the lights in the dining hall and tell us not to move. If there was the slightest noise, the sergeant would say, "Now we've got you, now we're going to take care of you." Then shots would be fired and we'd think, Well, this is it.

[Q] Were you allowed any contact with your families?

[A] Letelier: We were told we could write a letter a week home, but we were permitted to receive letters only once a month or so. Our wives' letters were censored to the point where sometimes only one or two lines were left on a sheet of paper. They crossed out the rest and added, instead, dirty, filthy words. We were allowed to receive photographs of our families, but, in my case, I returned them to the camp officials. You see, the fundamental thing at that point was to survive, to resist day by day, and for me, that kind of contact with the outside world, the fact that I could see pictures of my family, was very damaging to me. I thought that it would weaken me psychologictlly; I had to concentrate on my life as a prisoner. Every night, I thought, Well, I'm still alive, I've won an extra day from the fascists.

[Q] You thought that if you thought of your family, you couldn't resist?

[A] Letelier: Yes. And the only way to be reunited with my family was to remain alive and sane. My obligation was to return home sane. Of course, I had moments of psychological collapse: The situation of a political prisoner in this nightmare was one of total uncertainty. One day they take you somewhere to be interrogated, the next day they announce that they will execute you; there are no rules; it is complete uncertainty in relation to everything. If, at least, they tell you that you'll be in prison for, say, three years, you can organize your life as a prisoner around these three years. But there was nothing like that at Dawson. It was only present—no future.

[Q] Did you ever feel sorry for yourself for having lost so much—your family, your position?

[A] Letelier: You see, as a political prisoner, facing all this irrationality, one wonders, How is it possible that the world allows these things to happen? ... How is it possible that in this century, with all the concepts ruling civilized men, so much brutality, injustice, immorality could be happening to one? One wonders about the value of international organizations, the value of all the declarations of human rights, if all this is being destroyed and nobody cares. Perhaps a political prisoner feels more strongly than a common prisoner the psychological phenomenon of injustice. A political prisoner is a man who, whatever his past position, thinks that he has given his life to serve his country. On the scale of human values, a man thinks he cannot be punished for what he thinks, rightly or wrongly. So the political prisoner doesn't think he has violated the norms of human behavior. I, as a political prisoner, never could have an attorney; a common criminal could have an attorney.

[Q] On May 8, 1974, Letelier's group was removed from Dawson back to the Chilean mainland, probably because winter was approaching and the prisoners would not have survived on the island. But the departure from Dawson was marked by final touches of brutality.

[A] Letelier: We left our sheds at four A.M. We were led on a forced march from Rio Chico for about 12 miles until we reached an airstrip. On the way, we had to cross two rivers, taking off our clothes before plunging into the cold water, so that they could be dry afterward. We made a human chain to cross the rivers, to make sure that nobody drowned. The whole time, the guards were pointing their guns at us. Five hours later, at nine A.M., we reached the airstrip. There we were ordered to lie on the ground. They kept us for a full hour in that terrible wind that slashes your skin. Finally, we boarded several small planes for the flight to Punta Arenas. In Punta Arenas, they placed us aboard a C-130 troop transport. Curiously, it was one of the planes I had bought for the Chilean air force when I was ambassador in Washington. As I climbed aboard, tied and manacled, I thought how ironic it was that I would be transported in that plane like a package.

[Q] The prisoners were flown to El Bosque Air Force Base near Santiago, roped to their seats aboard the plane. They were received by an army colonel who was the chief of the National Detainees Office, the Chilean equivalent of the Soviet Gulag prison administration. Each prisoner was photographed as he stood in line on the tarmac. Then, soldiers with Red Cross insignia placed hoods on the prisoners' heads before leading them to waiting trucks. (The next day, the government newspaper published a story reporting the return of the prisoners from Dawson, stressing their healthy aspect—as if they had come back from a vacation. And there were photographs of the prisoners, taken before the men were hooded.) The trucks presently reached a building somewhere in Santiago; the prisoners were made to walk down several steps and were led to a basement room. When his hood was removed, Letelier saw that there were seven of his fellow prisoners with him in the room. The building turned out to be the Chilean Air Force Academy. It and the Tejas Verdes detention camp had the reputation of being the worst torture centers in Chile. Letelier remained at the Air Force Academy from May 8 to July 20.

[A] Letelier: We were in a basement, where one really lost all sense of time. The tiny windows in the cells were boarded up. We lived all the time under artificial light. And the loud-speakers never stopped, playing martial songs as well as rock music. It went on night and day.

[Q] They didn't want you to sleep?

[A] Letelier: Obviously. The cell was relatively large, 15 by 18 feet for the eight of us. We were blindfolded when guards took us to the bathroom. There, we had to wait our turn for a long time against a wall. There were prisoners there lying on the floor. Some prisoners were kept standing against the wall, blindfolded, for two or three days, until they fainted. At night, we often heard from our cell the screams of prisoners being tortured in other cells. And there were women there, too.

[Q] Were you interrogated at the academy?

[A] Letelier: Yes. They accused me of having documents published in the United States in 1973 indicating that the International Telephone and Telegraph Company had been involved with the CIA in anti-Allende plots. They said they had proof that I had paid Jack Anderson, the columnist, $70,000, when I was ambassador in Washington, to publish these documents. But it happens that I have never met Anderson.

[Q] How did the interrogations work?

[A] Letelier: As a rule, they tried to prepare prisoners for questioning by isolating them from others; often we were tied to our beds. For example, Clodomiro Almeyda [a former foreign minister] was tied to his bed for more than 30 days in preparation for questioning. Occasionally, the guards would untie us when food was brought in. But what affected me the most was hearing what was happening in the building. And the sensation of knowing that the moment of being tortured was approaching! In my case, the preparation for being interrogated was brief, just one day—they had me tied to my bed, hooded. Yet, for some reason, I was subjected only to psychological torture.

[Q] How about your companions?

[A] Letelier: There were different types of tortures. For example, Pedro Felipe Remirez [a friend of Letelier's] was given electric shock, Pentothal, all that. There were women whom the guards first raped and then introduced rats into their vaginas. You can read about all this in the report of the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States.

[Q] Were you afraid that they might hurt you physically?

[A] Letelier: Certainly. But even back at Dawson, we discussed tortures with those who had undergone them. In the case of electric shock, for instance, it was useful to scream at a given moment. They always had doctors present to prevent people from dying. And sometimes a doctor would say, "No, this man you can go on torturing—he isn't yet about to die on you." But on many occasions, people did die while they were being tortured. Thus, among ourselves, the prisoners, we would tell one another things about torture. It increased tensions, this thing of discussing tortures all the time. But I knew that torture sessions seldom lasted more than six or seven hours, and I knew I could stay alive that long. Psychologically, then, one would try to prepare himself for an interrogation session.

[Q] So you prisoners felt that if you could prepare yourselves a little, it would be easier on you?

[A] Letelier: It did help. My interrogations were conducted with the greatest violence and insult. They would ask me, "Are you a homosexual? Are you this, are you that?" They would talk about your wife, your family, trying to destroy you psychologically.

[Q] Why would they ask you if you were a homosexual?

[A] Letelier: This is a question they asked of most prisoners. My impression is that among the torturers, who are psychopaths, there must be quite a few homosexuals. Well, this kind of question, asked with a great deal of violence, must be intended to produce emotional imbalance, so that you would say, "Why do you think this of me? What have I done to deserve this?" They talk to you about your youth; they ask, "Do you know so-and-so?" They change the subject, then they insist again, "How many American newspapermen do you know? How about the $70,000? And do you know that your wife is a prostitute?"

[A] Now, I must tell you that there was an attitude of classism: Simple workers have been tortured in the most brutal manner, including persons who were invalids. In Punta Arenas, they brutally tortured a shoemaker only because he was a member of the Communist Party. Anyway, I think that the worst time I spent during my whole imprisonment was at the Air Force Academy.

[A] Letelier spent two and a half months at the Air Force Academy. On July 20, 1974, he was moved to the Ritoque concentration camp on the Pacific coast, some 100 miles north of Santiago. And there the governor of the province, who was in charge of all the concentration camps, was Admiral Eberhard, who had been Letelier's naval attaché in Washington. The commander of the air base, the man who was directly responsible for the camp, was Colonel Enrique Ruiz, who had been his air attaché at the Washington embassy.

[Q] What was their reaction to you?

[A] Letelier: When I left the embassy the previous year to become foreign minister, they offered me a farewell dinner in Washington; they spoke of their gratitude to me for the way I had treated them. Naturally, they sent flowers to my wife, the "ambassadress," and they gave me farewell gifts. The next time I saw them was at Ritoque concentration camp. Once, we were ordered out of our cells early in the morning because there would be "an important visit." It was Admiral Eberhard. arriving in a helicopter. We were lined up to be reviewed by him. The admiral asked each prisoner what his number was, but when he reached me, he asked, "How are you?" I replied, "I'm fine." He asked, "Do you need anything?" I said, "No, I don't need anything." Then he asked me an absurd question: "How is your wife?" I answered, "My wife is not very well. How is your wife?" He said, "Oh, she's well."

[Q] Did he seem embarrassed?

[A] Letelier: I couldn't tell you. I imagine that these people have developed some sort of mental self-justification. As for Colonel Ruiz, who came with the admiral, he approached me from behind and said, "Look, I know that your wife is well. I'll be back to talk with you." Some weeks later, Colonel Ruiz visited the camp again. When we were ordered to line up, I refused and went back to my shack. Ruiz intercepted me and said, "Look, I want to talk with you; I hope that all this will end soon." My reply to him was very terse and rough, but there were no reprisals against me.

[Q] How did you feel about those officers whom you knew?

[A] Letelier: I thought that they were terrified human beings, the prisoners of a system.

[Q] Did you think they were traitors?

[A] Letelier: Yes. I thought they were traitors. Traitors to the people of Chile. I felt rather superior to them. After all these things, one no longer has any fear. I felt that they were more scared than we were—and I'm not just talking about these two officers—because of all the terrible things they had done. The repression that is being applied in Chile is a demonstration of weakness. Surely, there can be nobody more cruel than a coward, a scared man.

[Q] Do you think they realized that?

[A] Letelier: Probably. Even in Dawson, the same sergeant who had treated you brutally during forced labor would come to you and say, "Look, I'm against this sort of thing. I'm against those generals. But you know that I'm married. I can do nothing. I have a family. But the lieutenant is a fascist." Soon, the lieutenant would come and say, "Look, Señor Letelier, you hate me, don't you?" Well, I wouldn't answer. So he would go on: "You hate me, but you must realize that I'm a professional, that I have to obey orders. I have been trained to fight the enemy. I receive orders from Captain Zamora, who is in command here." Then, the captain would come, saying, "Well, Señor Letelier, surely you think that I do these things in a spirit of vengeance. I want you to know that personally I have nothing against you. I'm a professional; it is the major who gives me orders. But I do fewer bad and cruel things than he would want me to do. But if I didn't obey orders, what do you think would happen to me? I would wind up in one of these cells as a prisoner."

[Q] Did you believe them? Obeying orders is an old story.

[A] Letelier: There is great terror within the armed forces. There is an organization, the DINA, which is the Chilean Gestapo. Not all the officers belong to it. The captain doesn't know whether the lieutenant under him belongs to DINA and is watching him to denounce him if he is soft with the prisoners. Thus, they live as prisoners of the system of terror that exists among them.

[Q] Do you forgive them for their crimes because of that terror?

[A] Letelier: No. I don't forgive them. I think that there's a level of moral cowardice among them and, collectively, I cannot forgive them. But I won't tell you that all the members of the Chilean armed forces are fascists, that all of them are torturers. Often, soldiers, when they were not being watched, tried to show us little gestures of humanity. For example, a soldier would say to me, "Look, rest a little bit while they aren't watching us." And sometimes a soldier would ask you for your autograph, so that later he could say that he had been at Dawson, guarding these terribly dangerous political prisoners, as the junta would put it.

[Q] Letelier was kept at the Ritoque camp, one of at least 100 concentration and detention camps in Chile, until September 9, 1974.

[A] Letelier: In the evening, camp officials informed me that I would be moved immediately. After getting in a car, I heard an officer say to the driver: "Letelier is to go to Bustos Street in Santiago." I knew that the Venezuelan embassy was on Bustos Street. I arrived at the Venezuelan embassy at midnight under heavy escort. I guess the junta, which was under tremendous international pressure, decided to make a gesture: They issued two decrees, one liberating me on the grounds that there were no charges against me and the other expelling me from Chile. I had been imprisoned for 364 days.