Pascale Bonnefoy's Notebook:

Peru accuses Chile of spying

Peru has accused Chile of paying a Peruvian Air Force non-commissioned officer to spy for us. The supposed spy is Victor Ariza, and Peru says he was paid thousands of dollars by Chile to provide sensitive information. He has been imprisoned in a high security prison in Peru for several weeks, but only this past Monday did the news break out.

When it did, the presidents of both countries were at an APEC summit in Singapore. Peruvian President Alan Garcia abruptly ended his stay and returned to Lima, canceling a bilateral meeting with his Chilean counterpart Michelle Bachelet.

The Chilean government has denied any espionage and believes the Peruvian accusation is part of an artificial escalation of a two-pronged conflict that has strained relations between the two countries in recent months: For one, Peru has taken Chile to The Hague over claims to territorial waters, and more recently, it learned that the United States had authorized the sale of weapons to Chile. Peru believes this — and Chile’s ongoing weapons purchases over the past decade — upsets the military balance in the region.

Peru claims that Ariza’s liaisons were two Chilean air force officers, but Chile’s Defense Ministry has said the two men were not members of the military.

Throughout the week, Garcia and Bachelet have been sending each other acid messages through the media. Garcia said that “only those who feel weak” resort to spying. Bachelet said Garcia’s statements were “offensive and bombastic.” Garcia retorted that “our country progresses and grows, and that’s why they are jealous and spy on us to find out what our secret is.”

Peru’s foreign minister has announced that if Chile continues to deny the accusations, “the entire relationship with Chile will have to be reassessed.” On Wednesday, Peruvian members of Parliament asked Congress to review the free trade agreement with Chile.

Yesterday, Peru delivered what is says are 2,000 pages of evidence of the espionage to the Chilean embassy in Lima on Wednesday. No details of their contents have yet been disclosed.

Four batteries and a tape

This is a not so uncommon story about the plight of an impoverished elderly man in the public health system in a country that is one step away from joining the exclusive club of the OECD.

The other day, kids started shouting outside my home crying for help. An elderly man, about 70, was lying face down on the sidewalk. Several boys gathered around him and we all tried to figure out if he was drunk or had suffered some sort of attack.

The man barely lifted his head and asked one of the boys to get an inhalator that was in his knapsack, which had fallen a few feet away. The man began inhaling and another boy rushed from a house with a glass of water so he could take a few drops of medicine he had with him.

They helped him get up and the old man explained: the day before, he had been hospitalized and submitted to a series of exams prior to replacing his pacemaker. But the hospital needed his bed because beds in public hospitals are always scarce and so he was asked to kindly surrender it.

Besides, there was one more exam to go, a halter test, but they couldn’t go ahead with it until the patient brought with him a 90-minute cassette and four double-A batteries. He didn’t have them, and he didn’t have money to buy them either.

So this elderly man we found lying on the street had crossed town to our neighborhood and had been walking the streets for hours in search of any odd job that could make him enough money to buy the tape and batteries. Perhaps fortunately, no one accepted his offer to clean up yards, sweep or whatever, because he would have probably collapsed even worse.

I gave him a virgin tape I had at home in a box full of old and new tapes and we went around the corner to a store and bought him the batteries. Such common and simple things to have around, and such sacrifice the man was going through to get them.

He refused to accept money to take a bus home. He said he would walk the many kilometers back home, because at least now, he had a tape and four double-A batteries. Now all he has to do is wait for someone else in the hospital to surrender a bed and hope he makes it there before his old pacemaker begins to fail.

My day in court 2

I didn’t get to see my accuser. I went to court yesterday with my witnesses and my lawyer, accompanied by friends, attorneys, representatives of the Journalists Association, union leaders, torture victims and media, all ready to face an alleged human rights abuser who is accusing me of slander for having revealed his name.

My accuser is Edwin Dimter, a former army officer who was known as the “Prince,” a brutal repressor at the Chile Stadium when it was used to hold political prisoners after the September 1973 military coup.

But nothing happened. To our surprise, the trial had been rescheduled for January, and the court, in an act of supreme negligence, had failed to notify either of the parties involved.

What had happened was that one of Dimter's witnesses, his former boss at the Superintendent of Pensions where he worked at the time of my article, couldn't make it that day. The law here allows the president on down to regional governors and including superintendents to testify in a place other than the court, and at a time they are available. So the court had rescheduled the entire trial for Jan. 14 and didn't tell anyone about it.

Needless to say, we were all very uspet. There was a small rebellion in the court's hallway, but it was a losing battle.

Dimter's attorneys had also arrived, and were equally angry. The lawyers from both sides went in to negotiate with the judge. They even offered to withdraw the superintendent as their witness, but the judge wouldn’t change his mind, even though the entire problem was caused by the negligence of his staff. A higher ruling had already set the new date, and besides, there wasn't a chamber or a judge available for us anymore.

So I'm still waiting to see my accuser.

My day in court

A man who I wrote was a notorious human rights abuser is taking me to court on Wednesday. The world has turned upside down, people tell me. This army officer has sued me for slander because I published an article accusing him of being "the Prince."

His name is Edwin Dimter, a former army lieutenant. I identified him a few years ago as the infamous “Prince,” the officer who terrorized thousands of political prisoners held in the Chile Stadium after a military coup ousted President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973.

The prisoners started calling him “Prince” because he looked like one — tall, blond and good looking — and because, as they recall, he told them that he didn’t need a microphone for the 5,000 detainees in the stadium to hear him because he had the “voice of a Prince.”

It was a time when military officers were nameless and rankless and could exercise indiscriminate power and abuse over their captive prisoners. So the name the prisoners gave him stuck, as did his face. No one there ever forgot him. All that was missing was his real name.

I found it out through military informants. In 2006, Dimter was called in to testify about the murder of folk singer Victor Jara, who was executed in the stadium and whose body was found days later on the street, riddled with more than 40 bullets.

When his former colleagues in the army learned of this, they began discussing how “unfair” it was that some military officers were being sentenced and jailed for human rights crimes and others had come away scot-free, like Dimter, the “Prince.”

Years earlier, I had been asking around about this famous “Prince” for another investigation I was doing at the time, so when word of his identity got around to the right military circles, I got a phone call from a friendly retired officer. And then another one.

I did some research and found out that Dimter had participated in a first coup attempt against Allende in June 1973, and was arrested and held in a military base until the day of the coup that succeeded in toppling Allende.

That day, Dimter was released and returned to his unit. He was then sent on a mission to the Chile Stadium, which was already filling up with political prisoners. The “Prince,” as I allege he was known then, was notoriously aggressive, according to a vast collection of testimonies from former prisoners about his brutality in the stadium. Some say he was responsible for Jara’s murder, but that has not been proven in court nor have there been any direct witnesses to testify to this.

Dimter had been discharged from the army in 1976 and at the time of my investigation held a high-ranking job at the Superintendent of AFPs (pension fund system). He had also applied and obtained government-issued social security benefits as an “exonerado politico,” claiming he had lost his job (in the army) for political reasons after the coup. This legal status is supposed to apply to military opponents who actually did lose their jobs for political motives.

I obtained photos of Dimter at the time of the coup and another more recent one, and checked with a great deal of former prisoners, asking them if they recognized him. They did. I also ruled out other potential “Princes” because of their age, physical attributes or because they were elsewhere at the time.

I published my article on May 26, 2006, in several media outlets, the first one in Stockholm and in the days that followed, in Chile.

Meanwhile, a human rights group had conducted its own investigation and mounted a demonstration (funa) in his office building downtown, taking him by surprise while 14 floors down, hundreds marched on the streets with banners accusing Dimter of being Victor Jara’s murderer.

After the article and the funa, Dimter was fired from his job and the social security benefits he obtained as an “exonerado politico” were taken away. Then he sued me and the director and editor of "El Siglo," one of the papers that had published my article.

The case was closed and reopened twice, and now, three years later, the trial date has finally been set.

So I’m taking a group of former stadium prisoners to testify this week. They will tell the court what the “Prince” was doing in September 1973 in the Chile Stadium, now renamed Victor Jara Stadium.

Chilean fugitive calls for creation of death squad in Paraguay

A Chilean cattle farmer in Paraguay is calling to organize a paramilitary death squad to “eliminate communists”. The man, Eduardo Aviles Lambie, has been fugitive from Chile since 1970, when he participated in the murder of Chile’s former army chief, Gen. Rene Schneider.

Aviles had sent an email to his associates in the San Pedro Regional Division of the Rural Association of Paraguay, which was leaked to the Paraguayan newspaper Ultima Hora and published October 26.

“How long do we have to wait to combat these communists sons of bitches who want to destroy our beloved Paraguay, just like Allende’s people did in Chile from 1968 to Sept. 11, 1973, or convert us into a new Colombia,” Aviles wrote.

Eduardo Aviles has been living in Paraguay since January 1971, after fleeing from Chile in November 1970, a month after participating in the Schneider murder.

Aviles, then a Catholic University student in Santiago, was part of a group made up of conservative students, members of the ultra-right paramilitary group Patria y Libertad and common criminals who conspired with right-wing politicians, military officers and business leaders, with the financial and logistical support of the CIA, to impede socialist Salvador Allende from assuming the presidency that year.

Allende had won the presidential elections in September 1970 with a relative majority, and Congress had to vote to ratify him or the next runner up to assume the presidency that November. That vote was scheduled for October 24, but before then, the conspirators planned to kidnap Schneider, known as a “constitutionalist” who would abide the congressional vote, while at the same time wreak havoc through terrorist bombings and attacks to prompt a military coup and have the elections annulled.

The kidnapping attempt on Oct. 22 backfired when the men who were to abduct Schneider as he was driving to work shot him and left him mortally wounded. He died three days later.

One of the men who participated directly in the murder, as confirmed by a Martial Court ruling, was Eduardo Aviles. He and at least four others fled the country after the assassination while other members of the group were tried and sentenced in Chile. A military court reopened the investigation in 1977 after the four were eventually arrested, but Aviles was safely in Paraguay and would never come back to face justice.

According to witnesses at the time, Aviles had fled to Argentina three weeks after the murder, and in January 1971, entered Paraguay. Three months later, he was provided with a Paraguayan ID card under a false name. He has lived in Paraguay ever since, now as a cattle farmer and polo lover.

He continues to be a fugitive of the Chilean justice.

Now, Aviles is trying to create the Paraguayan Anticommunist Commando, CAP.

In his letter to the Rural Association of Paraguay, Aviles says he wants to gather funds to buy weapons to combat what he calls “the advance of the guerrilla” made possible by President Fernando Lugo and his followers.

“This is the only way we can defend ourselves, because if we don’t, they’re going to kill us all,” he says.

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