On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents, including CIA intelligence reports and a judicial confession of the Chilean secret police operative, Michael Townley, who constructed, placed, and detonated the car bomb that killed Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974.
Only weeks after the bombing, a friend of the Prats daughters gave them a chilling message: the Pinochet regime planned to “celebrate the coup” every September by eliminating specific persons deemed a threat to the dictatorship. This information proved to be prescient. The following September, the Vice President of the Chilean Christian Democrat Party, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife were gunned down and critically injured on a street in Rome. A year later, on September 21, 1976, a car bomb similar to the one that killed the Prats took the lives of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C.
“The first [assassination] was our parents,” Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book, Lo que tarde la justicia, published in Chile this week.
The compilation of records posted today marks an anniversary that was commemorated in Buenos Aires, where the attack took place, as well as in Chile, where the atrocities of the Pinochet era continue to cast a shadow over present-day politics. “The Prats case,” notes Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, “provides a dramatic reminder of the true terrorist nature of the military dictatorship—and of Pinochet himself.”
Targeting General Prats
The target of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism was not a renowned leftist or socialist militant but rather Pinochet’s own predecessor as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, General Carlos Prats González. A pro-constitution officer, General Prats assumed the top military position in Chile in October 1970, after his own predecessor, General René Schneider, was assassinated in a CIA-supported plot to block the inauguration of president-elect Salvador Allende.
During Allende’s tumultuous three years, Prats used his powerful position to safeguard Chile’s constitutional order. In 1972, he entered Allende’s cabinet and even held the position of vice president of the nation. In June 1973, he quickly suppressed a coup attempt—known as the “Tanquetazo”—by junior officers and the extremist paramilitary group, Patria y Libertad. In late August 1973, however, protests against Prats’ continuing support for the Allende government forced him to resign. Prats personally recommended General Augusto Pinochet to replace him as commander-in-chief, erroneously believing that he would support the constitutional order against pro-coup officers.
Only four days after the coup, General Prats and his wife went into exile in Argentina. Prats “was living quietly in Buenos Aires,” the CIA later reported. “He was not permitted to make any public appearances or statements and had faithfully carried out the restrictive instructions pertaining to his exile.”
But General Pinochet clearly considered the highly respected Prats to be a potential threat to his power. Only six weeks after the coup, Pinochet dispatched one of his top deputies, General Sergio Arellano Stark, to Buenos Aires to conduct secret talks with the Argentine military. Arellano’s top priority, according to a CIA source, was to “discuss with the Argentine military any information they have regarding the activities of General (retired) Carlos Prats. Arellano will also attempt to gain an agreement whereby the Argentines maintain scrutiny over Prats and regularly inform the Chileans of his activities.” In June 1974, Pinochet met with the director of the Chilean secret police, DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras, and ordered him to eliminate Prats.
Contreras first assigned this mission to his DINA station chief in Argentina, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, who was instructed to enlist Argentine paramilitary groups to kill Prats. When that effort failed to advance, DINA’s deputy director, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, enlisted DINA’s newest recruit, an American expatriate named Michael Townley who was an electronics specialist and had collaborated with Patria y Libertad in anti-Allende operations.
In secret testimony given to an Argentine judge in 1999, Townley recalled how Colonel Espinoza had described Prats as a potential leader of a government-in-exile and asked Townley if he could “do something” about the exiled general. Eliminating Prats “was for the wellbeing of the country,” Townley testified. “It was a patriotic request,” he stated. “So, I did it.”
Townley traveled to Buenos Aires twice; the first time he was unable to locate Prats. Accompanied by his wife Mariana Callejas—also a DINA agent—he returned on September 10, 1974, and spent several weeks plotting the assassination. At one point, Townley followed Prats into a neighborhood park and considered shooting him in broad daylight, but, he testified, “there were too many people around.” Instead, Townley fashioned a remote-controlled car bomb made of two C4 cartridges, establishing his signature modus operandi as an international terrorist. On September 29, he managed to slip into the parking garage and attach the device to the chassis of Prats’ small Fiat 125. Townley and Callejas then staked out the Prats’ building until they returned from visiting friends just after midnight on September 30. Callejas tried to detonate the bomb, “but it did not function,” Townley confessed. “I took [the detonator] from her, pressed it, and it worked.”
The Pursuit of Justice
For over thirty years, the Prats family pursued efforts to identify the perpetrators of this atrocity and prosecute them. In 1983, two daughters, Sofía and Angélica Prats, traveled to Washington, D.C., to work with Argentine lawyers requesting the extradition of Townley—then under witness protection in the United States after serving a short sentence for assassinating Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with a car bomb—to Buenos Aires. But a U.S. judge ruled that Townley’s plea bargain agreement in the Letelier-Moffitt case prevented his extradition. A Chilean judge also denied Argentine legal efforts to have Mariana Callejas extradited from Santiago to Buenos Aires to stand trial. In 1987, the Prats daughters repeatedly approached the U.S. Embassy in Chile seeking information and legal assistance in the case. Eventually, their efforts led an Argentine judge, Maria Servini, to travel to Washington in 1999 and officially depose Townley. For a number of years, his secret testimony remained sealed. (See Document 8)
“We instinctively understood that the search for justice would be a lengthy journey,” Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book. “We knew it would be arduous, beginning with a period of mourning that would last an unknown amount of time.”
Argentine authorities did eventually arrest DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, charging him first with espionage and then as an accessory to the Prats assassination. He was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades.
More than 35 years after Prats and Cuthbert were assassinated, and 20 years after the return to civilian governance, in June 2010 the Chilean courts finally convicted and sentenced former DINA chief Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza, along with several other DINA officials and operatives in the Prats case.
Pinochet himself was never prosecuted for the Prats assassination, nor for the other acts of terrorism he ordered. After he died on December 10, 2006—ironically, international Human Rights Day—the Chilean military arranged for his open coffin to be viewed by his admirers. Francisco Cuadrado Prats, the grandson of Carlos and Sofía Prats, stood in the viewing line with hundreds of Pinochetistas; when he reached the coffin, he spat on the glass covering Pinochet’s face. “It was a spontaneous act to spit on him out of revulsion,” the young Prats recalled after he was beaten by Pinochet supporters and then arrested for his sacrilegious conduct, “because he had my grandparents murdered.”
