SANTIAGO, CHILE — A member of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal secret police who’s been accused of murder taught for more than a decade at the Pentagon’s premier university, despite repeated complaints by his colleagues about his past.
Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in
criminal court in Santiago with being the mastermind in the execution-style
slayings of seven people in 1973, according to court documents. McClatchy also
interviewed an accuser who identified Garcia Covarrubias as the person who
sexually tortured him.
Despite knowing of the allegations,
State and Defense department officials allowed Garcia Covarrubias to retain his
visa and continue working at a school affiliated with the National Defense
University until last year .
Human rights groups also question the
school’s selection of a second professor, Colombia’s former top military
commander.
Some Latin America experts said the
hirings by the William
J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies reflected a continuing
inclination by the U.S government to overlook human rights violations in Latin
America, especially in countries where it funded efforts to quash leftists.
But those experts were especially
troubled by Garcia Covarrubias’ long tenure at one of the nation’s most
renowned defense institutions.
“His hiring undermines our moral
authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,” said Chris Simmons, a
former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer from 1982 to
2010 who specializes in Latin America. “If he is in fact guilty of what he is
accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell other countries how they
should be fighting terrorism?”.
To his supporters, Garcia Covarrubias
is a brilliant thinker with a Ph.D. and purveyor of leadership skills. To his
alleged victims, he’s a sadistic torturer with a penchant for horsewhips and
perversity.
A 2008 Chilean military document
reviewed by McClatchy identified Garcia Covarrubias as a member of the
Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the feared spy agency known by its acronym
DINA.
“DINA was simply the most sinister
agency in Latin America,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive,
which secured the release of U.S. government classified documents underscoring
the complicit relationship between the U.S. and Pinochet. “Anyone associated
with that agency should never have been allowed into this country, let alone
given this job.”
Officials with the Pentagon, the State
Department and the school refused to comment.
Garcia Covarrubias is now back in
Chile, ordered by an investigative judge in January 2014 to remain in the
country while an inquiry continues into his alleged role in the deaths of seven
people in Temuco weeks after the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup on Sept. 11, 1973.
His case is one of 108 involving
tortured, disappeared or murdered supporters of the deposed elected president,
Salvador Allende. More than 3,000 people died at the hands of the regime, and
in 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell offered regrets for U.S.
involvement in the coup, calling it “not a part of American history that we're
proud of.”
Garcia Covarrubias’ attorney, Jose
Luis Lopez, declined to make his client available for an interview. He also
refused to respond to a detailed list of questions or to provide a description
of the jobs Garcia Covarrubias held under Pinochet.
“The problem is that the info and
questions are based on erroneous information and totally biased against Jaime
Garcia,” Lopez, who is based in Santiago, wrote in an email.
The center’s officials who hired and
renewed Garcia Covarrubias’ contracts say he was a highly qualified professor
and minimize the allegations against him.
“We made inquiries with people in the
region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about
Jaime,” said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. “He was vetted
by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn’t have
anything either or he wouldn’t have been hired.”
McClatchy, however, located one of his
alleged victims, who described being brutalized by him.
“They submitted us to torture, twice a
day. We were submerged in feces,” Herman Carrasco, who’s now a real estate
agent, told McClatchy in Chile. “They stuck rifle barrels in our anuses.”
According to Carrasco, the torture
unfolded in October and November 1973 – lorded over by the horsewhip-wielding
Garcia Covarrubias – and included electric shock administered to eyelids,
genitals and other sensitive areas of the body.
“He was the person who tortured us,
with his face shown,” said Carrasco, who added that he’d known Garcia
Covarrubias from social events before the coup. “He forced us into sexual acts,
which shows that besides ferocious cruelty there was a level of psychopathic
behavior.”
When
Garcia Covarrubias was hired in 2001, and through his first three-year contract
renewal, his name was not publicly linked to the feared DINA.
But in 2008, the Chilean military
presented a list of 1,097 DINA members to Chilean Judge Alejandro Solis.
Although his name was on it, Garcia Covarrubias told an Argentine newspaper in
2010 that he only taught in the national intelligence school.
“I never was an operative,” he said,
citing his low rank at the time. “As a lieutenant, I was never an instructor of
torture techniques.”
The DINA link matters. DINA was
disbanded and reorganized into a new agency in 1977, a year after Chile’s
ex-Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American aide were killed in a car
bombing on Washington’s Embassy Row.
The killings and other assassinations
outside Chile were attributed to DINA. The Nixon administration’s support of a
regime that relied on rampant torture helped galvanize the human rights
movement in the United States.
Garcia Covarrubias also has denied working
late in the regime as a speechwriter for Pinochet, saying he was just an
official in the secretariat of the presidency.
On his LinkedIn professional profile,
Garcia Covarrubias lists himself as director of the country’s war college and
boasts that he commanded forces.
As early as 2008, some of his
colleagues at the center were questioning his past. Martin Edwin Andersen, the
center’s former communications director, tried to talk to the school’s top
officials about the charismatic Chilean. Emails show he was repeatedly scolded
for raising the matter.
Kenneth LaPlante, then-deputy director
at the center , acknowledged receiving Andersen’s complaint
and said he personally had reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Chile in 2008 to
find out whether the allegations had any merit.
“They told us there were only
allegations but nothing had been proven,” he said.
LaPlante said Homeland Security
officials “provisionally revoked” Garcia Covarrubias’ visa in or around 2011.
But Homeland Security also granted him “parole” to remain in the country while
seeking permanent residency.
“I asked them, ‘Which is it? Should he
be in this country or not?’ ” LaPlante recalled. “I kept being told these were
just allegations and he had all the rights of a U.S. employee.”
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services, which processes applications for permanent residency, did not respond
to a reporter’s questions.
McClatchy, however, also learned that
an Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigative office authorized to
pursue criminal charges or expel foreign human-rights violators was notified of
the Garcia Covarrubias case in 2011. An ICE spokeswoman declined to say what
action was taken, if any.
Despite very graphic torture
accusations against Garcia Covarrubias, U.S. officials are rallying behind him.
Former center director Richard
Downie recalled that then-U.S. Ambassador to Chile Paul Simons was “incensed”
in 2008 that Garcia Covarrubias’ visa was in question. Simons did not respond
to McClatchy’s requests for comment.
Former deputy director LaPlante said
he’d resisted calls to remove Garcia Covarrubias because the former professor
had denied the allegations. However, LaPlante acknowledged feeling
conflicted since his friend became linked publicly to DINA.
“If I had known and I had been the one
hiring him, I can tell you it would have been a disqualifier,” said LaPlante,
adding, “But isn’t that guilt by association?”
Hayes, who hired Garcia Covarrubias,
stressed that he would have been too young to be “in any kind of command position”
in DINA. Asked whether it was a disqualifier, she said it depended “on what he
might have been doing at the time.”
“Someone who has previously worked
with the CIA might not have been excluded from hiring,” she offered.
McClatchy asked the CIA whether Garcia
Covarrubias had ever worked with the agency.
“No comment,” said Kali Caldwell, a
CIA spokeswoman.
As the center supported Garcia
Covarrubias, it pushed out Andersen in retaliation, the former communications
chief said.
Last September, Andersen filed a
complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general, with the support of then-Sen.
Carl Levin. D-Mich. An inspector general spokeswoman declined to comment.
“It’s shameful that at a time the U.S.
prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University
could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent,” Andersen said.
The details uncovered about Garcia
Covarrubias have prompted demands from several members of Congress for a
Pentagon accounting of how he was hired and retained his job.
“The American people deserve to know
that adequate vetting of such individuals would be routine,” said Sen. Patrick
Leahy, D-Vt., author of the “ Leahy Law,” which
restricts U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights.
While most of the concerns focused on
Garcia Covarrubias, the center also took heat in 2006 for hiring Colombian Gen.
Carlos Ospina Ovalle. As army commander, he turned the tables in a decades-old
guerrilla war while simultaneously crushing drug cartels. Ospina Ovalle left
the center last year and took a post at another National Defense University
school.
He was hired at the request of the
Colombian government and was popular with U.S. military leaders, recalls
Downie, the center’s director at the time.
“The Colombians wanted, for his own
safety, to get him out of Colombia,” said Downie.
“This is a guy we certainly
wanted to have as a professor.”
Human rights groups, however,
criticized the general’s hiring and continued employment at the National
Defense University. They point to his earlier command in Antioquia province,
where right-wing paramilitaries ran roughshod and were linked to the military.
“Antioquia in the late 1990s . . . is
less than one degree of separation from working with the paramilitaries,” said
Adam Isacson, a senior associate specializing in military matters for theWashington Office on Latin America.
“If he has not, it’s some miracle that he managed to be the one clean officer.”
“Having officers like that, the
implicit message is that human rights takes a backseat,” said Isacson.
*MCCLATCHY SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT HELEN
HUGHES IN SANTIAGO, CHILE, AND TISH WELLS CONTRIBUTED TO THIS ARTICLE.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/03/12/259553/chilean-accused-of-murder-torture.html
**Email: mtaylor@mcclatchydc.com,
khall@mcclatchydc.com;
Twitter: @marisaataylor, @KevinGHall.