Former Chilean Intelligence Chief Commits Suicide

By PASCALE BONNEFOY

Published: September 28, 2013

SANTIAGO, Chile — A former director of a Pinochet-era intelligence agency killed himself on Saturday, officials said, days after the government announced that it would close the exclusive military prison where he was being held for human rights crimes and transfer the inmates to a less privileged detention center.

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The former intelligence chief, Gen. Odlanier Mena, 87, shot himself at home, officials said, where he had been allowed to spend weekends since mid-2011. At that time, he had completed half of a six-year sentence for the 1973 murder of three leftists while he was commander of an army regiment in Arica, in northern Chile. General Mena, who retired from the army, was director of the National Information Center intelligence agency from 1977 to 1980.

The Cordillera Detention Center in eastern Santiago, where General Mena had been serving his sentence, was set up on the grounds of the army’s telecommunications command center in 2004. At the time, the Supreme Court was abandoning its practice of applying a 1978 amnesty law in human rights cases, and the government feared that Punta Peuco, a special military prison created in 1995 to hold human rights offenders, would not suffice.

General Mena’s lawyer, Jorge Balmaceda, blamed the recent government decision for his client’s suicide. “In the last letter he sent me he expressed concern for the eventual transfer, which would cause him serious moral, physical and psychological harm,” Mr. Balmaceda said in an interview with TVN, the Chilean national television station.

On Thursday, after news reports about the preferential treatment of the Cordillera inmates prompted a public outcry, President Sebastián Piñera announced that he would close the prison and transfer the 10 inmates there to Punta Peuco, on the outskirts of the capital, Santiago.

The president’s decision came after a televised interview with Gen. Manuel Contreras, former director of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s National Intelligence Directorate, which was responsible for systematic human rights violations in the first few years of General Pinochet’s military dictatorship. In the interview with CNN Chile on Sept. 10, one day before the 40th anniversary of the coup that toppled President Salvador Allende, General Contreras denied that the directorate had been responsible for any torture or crimes and expressed no remorse. He was also imprisoned at Cordillera, serving a sentence of nearly 360 years for multiple murders and disappearances.

The Cordillera inmates, who range in age from 68 to 86 and include top commanders of the National Intelligence Directorate, lived in five cabins — each with a private bathroom — on grounds that include a tennis court, according to a court report on a visit to the prison last Monday. They were assisted by nutritionists, kinesiologists, doctors, psychologists, social workers and a physical education professor, the report said.

Despite the suicide, the government announced Saturday that it would go ahead with the transfer, and the nine remaining inmates were taken to Punta Peuco overnight.