Pubdate: Wed, 12 Jul 2006
Source: Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Copyright: 2006 Sun-Sentinel Company
Contact:  http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/159
Author: Larry Rohter, The New York Times
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

PINOCHET ACCUSED OF DRUG DEALS

Ex-Spy Chief Says Dictator Also Embezzled

SANTIAGO, Chile   Gen. Augusto Pinochet's former intelligence chief, 
now one of his bitterest enemies, has implicated the disgraced 
dictator and one of his sons in a cocaine manufacturing and smuggling 
scheme and contends that it was one of the sources of Pinochet's 
illicit $28 million fortune.

Gen. Manuel Contreras, who ran the Directorate of National 
Intelligence, the Chilean secret police, during the 1970s, made the 
charges in a document submitted last week to an investigating 
magistrate here. He also accused Pinochet of embezzling money from 
secret government accounts that the dictator controlled during his 17 
years in power, which ended in 1990.

According to Contreras' account, the cocaine was processed with 
Pinochet's authorization at a Chilean Army chemical plant in 
Talagante, south of here, during the 1980s. Pinochet's son Marco 
Antonio and one of his business partners then arranged for the drugs 
to be transported to Europe and the United States, with payoffs going 
into secret bank accounts the Pinochet family held abroad, Contreras' 
account said.

The accusations were first reported Sunday in the Chilean newspaper 
La Nacion. Contreras has been in jail since January 2005 in 
connection with human rights abuses and was not available for 
comment. But his lawyer, Fidel Reyes, and judicial officials 
confirmed Monday that the account published Sunday accurately 
reflected the written statement Contreras supplied to the magistrate.

During the 1970s, when the worst of the military dictatorship's human 
rights abuses occurred, Contreras was one of Pinochet's closest and 
most trusted associates. But the two men have fallen out in recent 
years, with Contreras contending that he is being made the scapegoat 
for human rights violations for which Pinochet should take responsibility.

In 1993, a Chilean court sentenced Contreras to seven years in prison 
for his role in the 1976 assassination in Washington of Orlando 
Letelier, a former foreign minister of Chile. He has also been 
convicted of kidnapping a Socialist Party leader in 1974, and 
convicted in Argentina of the 1974 bombing assassination of a former 
Chilean army chief opposed to Pinochet.

Contreras said, according to the account, that the drug manufacturing 
effort was overseen by a secret police chemist named Eugenio Berrios, 
accused by human rights groups of developing poisons to kill 
Pinochet's political opponents. Berrios disappeared in 1991, as he 
faced questioning about the making of the bomb that killed Letelier, 
and was found dead on a beach in Uruguay four years later.

Spokesmen for Pinochet, who is now 90, ailing and reviled even by 
many who once supported him, and Marco Antonio Pinochet, on Monday 
angrily denied Contreras' accusations, which the Chilean army said it 
would investigate.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman