Reply #8: This was only a small part of what went on in Chile, Orlando Leteilier [View All]

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was the first to be arrested. He and about 30 others close to Allende were sent to Dawson Island in the far south of Chile with only the clothes on their back to ward off the Antarctic winds. It was described as very much like Nazi concentration camps the only thing missing was the gas chambers. Here's a bit about Letelier's account of Dawson.

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On Dawson Island, Orlando Letelier recuperates in the Antarctic cold. His fingers have been re-broken. A fellow prisoner, José Toha, is reported suicide. Toha, the former minister of the interior, is one of Orlando's closest friends. In the months on Dawson Island, Toha has lost 40 pounds and becomes the subject of drug experiments. He allegedly commits suicide by hanging himself by his belt from a steampipe. No one can explain why Toha, so weak that he can hardly move, should have needed a belt for his patient's gown. Chile is now nothing more or less than a fascist dictatorship. Those who had hoped that the generals would restore the Christian Democrats to power are mistaken. The generals kill, torture, jail even Christian Democrats.

September 10, 1974, Buenos Aires
SL:Orlando is released from Dawson island and deported to Venezuela. A month later another Chilean exile, General Carlos Prats, and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, are murdered in Buenos Aires. Prats, who had commanded the armed forces under Allende, was writing a book about the coup and about Pinochet, who had succeeded him as a commander. Prats was a military man but was also fiercely loyal to the constitution; he refused to participate in coup discussions. Prats had recommended Pinochet as his successor on the grounds that he was dull but loyal. Prats and his wife are blown to bits when a bomb explodes in their car. The Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), the Chilean secret police, are accused of the murders. Prats' papers are stolen from his home. No one is arrested. It is the beginning of a string of murders of Chilean exiles.

http://www.tni.org/letelier-docs/timeline.htm


Letelier being arrested and led out of the Defense Ministry in Santiago.