The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA; , ) was the secret police agency of Chile during the first years of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Formed as a Chilean Army intelligence unit in the weeks after the 1973 coup d'état, it was placed on an independent legal footing by Decree Law 521 of June 14, 1974, reporting directly to the ruling military junta rather than to the armed forces' regular chain of command. It was headed throughout its existence by Army colonel (later general) Manuel Contreras, who answered personally to Pinochet and became, in the assessment of American diplomats and of DINA's own agents, the second-most-powerful man in Chile.
DINA has been described by journalists and historians as "Pinochet's Gestapo."Article Manuel Contreras, el jefe de la Gestapo de Pinochet in Spanish online newspaper El País on 8 August 2015, retrieved on 8 August 2015 Operating under the wide powers granted to the government during the near-continuous state of emergency of the dictatorship's early years, DINA agents ran a network of clandestine detention and torture centers—among them Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, the José Domingo Cañas house, and the Simón Bolívar barracks—through which several thousand political prisoners passed; hundreds more were forcibly disappeared or executed. The organization also directed foreign operations, including the 1974 car-bomb assassination of General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires and the 1976 car-bomb assassination of former minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C., and it served as the founding and leading member of Operation Condor, a intelligence-sharing and assassination network among South American security services.
From 1974 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency cultivated a relationship with DINA and, for several months in 1975, paid Contreras directly as an intelligence asset, even as U.S. officials privately regarded him as the chief obstacle to a more humane human-rights policy within the junta. DINA was dissolved in August 1977 and replaced by the National Information Center (CNI), a successor agency with a similar mission but a different organizational structure. Contreras and dozens of other former agents were later convicted by Chilean courts of kidnapping, torture, and homicide; Contreras died in 2015 while serving cumulative sentences of more than 500 years. Prosecutions connected to DINA's crimes, including the Letelier–Moffitt case, have continued into the 21st century.
Background and creation DINA had its roots in the Army's existing internal-intelligence body, the Dirección de Inteligencia del Ejército (DINE, Army Intelligence Directorate). On November 13, 1973, two months after the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende, Pinochet appointed Army engineer lieutenant colonel Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda—known within the officer corps by the nickname "Mamo"—to head DINE. Although it did not yet exist on paper, the new agency was functioning de facto by the end of 1973, absorbing officers who had taken part in the Caravan of Death, the death squad that had toured Chile executing political prisoners in the weeks after the coup.
DINA was formally created and separated from the regular Army command structure by Decree Law 521, published in the official gazette on June 14, 1974, which placed the new agency under the direct authority of the Government Junta rather than the Army high command. The Chilean intelligence community approved the proposal over the objection of Carabineros intelligence chief General Germán Segundo Campos Vásquez, who warned that it would create a body answerable to no institutional oversight save the commander-in-chief himself. Under the decree, DINA could detain, interrogate under duress, and confine individuals in its own facilities for as long as a state of emergency remained in force—a condition that persisted for nearly the whole of DINA's existence.
DINA's guiding doctrine held that the junta was engaged in an undeclared internal war against an enemy that gave no quarter—Marxist subversion, left-wing parties, and open critics of the regime—and that no method, legal or otherwise, was to be spared in winning it. From its creation the agency reported to the Government Junta, with Contreras briefing the junta periodically on its operations. American intelligence assessments described him as intensely loyal to Pinochet and dependent on the president's personal backing for his authority.
The Central Intelligence Agency assisted DINA from its earliest days: in February 1974 Pinochet personally asked CIA deputy director Vernon Walters for help during the agency's "formative period," and Walters hosted Contreras for lunch at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the following month. Despite falling under Pinochet's ultimate legal authority, American-born DINA operative Michael Townley later described Contreras as the organization's real "intellectual head." Pedro Espinoza served as Contreras's deputy for operations.
Organization and personnel By mid-1974 DINA numbered roughly 600 full-time military agents and civilian contract personnel; by 1977, on the eve of its dissolution, its ranks and network of informants had grown to an estimated several thousand, penetrating most sectors of Chilean society. In 2012, a roster of some 1,500 former agents was made public, including Cristián Labbé, who later served as mayor of the Santiago comune of Providencia from 1996 to 2012. Separately, in 2008 the Chilean Army presented a list of 1,097 DINA agents to Judge Alejandro Solís.Article Piden desafuero de diputado Rosauro Martínez por asesinato de tres miembros del MIR en 1981 in Chilean online newspaper El Mostrador on 23 May 2013, retrieved on 23 May 2013
The agency was organized under Contreras into three subdirectorates—Interior, Exterior (Foreign), and Administrative. The Foreign Subdirectorate was headed by Air Force colonel Mario Jahn Barrera, while a separate Foreign Department, run by Army lieutenant colonel Arturo Ureta Sire, handled agents stationed abroad, including José Octavio Zara Holger, Christoph Willike Floel, Alejandro Paulino Campos Rebhein, Ana María Rubio de la Cruz, and Carmen Hidalgo; in Buenos Aires, DINA maintained embassy attachés Víctor Hugo Barría Barría and Carlos Hernán Labarca Sanhueza, along with civilian agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel. A distinct Foreign Division ran the agency's covert operations outside Chile, including the 1974 killing of General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires.
DINA drew many of its field operatives from the special-forces units of each branch of the armed forces and Carabineros: the Army's Cobra Commandos, the Navy's tactical divers (UBC), the Air Force's special commandos, and the Carabineros' special-operations police commandos, along with marine-infantry personnel. Many operatives, including those posted to the Army's later special units, had trained at the U.S.-run School of the Americas; the agency's early campaign of repression was directed above all at Allende's personal security detail (the GAP), which lost about 60 members, and at the leftist Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party, which the Spanish-language sources credit with roughly 400, 400, and 350 dead members, respectively.
Repression and human rights violations Decree Law 521 empowered DINA to detain any individual for as long as a state of emergency remained declared, a condition that covered nearly the whole of the Pinochet government's early years. Torture and rape of detainees were routine practice inside DINA's facilities:
Chilean human-rights groups that examined DINA's methods identified electric-shock torture (most often applied to the genitals), beatings, broken limbs, cigarette and acid burns, and suspension by the wrists or ankles as characteristic physical techniques, alongside psychological torture such as mock executions and threats against detainees' relatives. A 1974 fact-finding mission by the Organization of American States documented severe distress among detained women it interviewed, many of whom described physical and sexual abuse they had suffered during interrogation, and recorded similarly detailed accounts of electric shock, burns, mock executions, and threats against family members from male detainees.
According to a coalition of European human-rights researchers, the government's own 1991 truth commission (the Rettig Commission) documented 2,279 people killed or forcibly disappeared for political reasons; a 1996 update raised the total to roughly 3,197, including some 1,102 people still unaccounted for. A separate 2004 commission chaired by the Catholic bishop Sergio Valech found that 27,255 people had been arbitrarily detained for political reasons, the great majority of whom reported having been tortured. DINA was directly responsible for a large share of the secret arrests, torture, and disappearances carried out during the dictatorship's first four years, before responsibility passed to its successor agency.
Secret detention centers DINA operated dozens of clandestine detention and torture facilities in Santiago and elsewhere, of which Villa Grimaldi—a requisitioned estate on the capital's outskirts, officially designated "Cuartel Terranova"—was the largest and best known. An estimated 4,500 prisoners passed through Villa Grimaldi between 1974 and 1978, and hundreds of them were killed or forcibly disappeared. Other major DINA facilities included the Londres 38 townhouse in downtown Santiago, the José Domingo Cañas house, the Simón Bolívar barracks used against Communist Party members, and "Venda Sexy," a house on Irán Street notorious for the systematic sexual abuse of blindfolded prisoners.
Role of Manuel Contreras Although he answered nominally to Pinochet, Contreras exercised broad personal control over DINA's operations and is generally credited with having built the organization from the ground up. As DINA's leader and one of Pinochet's closest confidants, Contreras became, in the words of American diplomats, the second-most-powerful man in the country. In a March 1978 letter to Contreras written under the alias "J. Andreas Wilson," Townley addressed him deferentially as "Don Manuel" and acknowledged the authority Contreras held over him. Discussing the Letelier–Moffitt assassination years afterward, Townley described how Contreras had managed to keep Pinochet from learning the full truth of the operation.
Contreras also directed DINA's covert financial apparatus and, according to several former subordinates, cultivated ties to prominent businessmen for off-the-books funding of the agency's operations (see below). He remained head of DINA until its dissolution in 1977, when he was replaced as head of the successor CNI by General Odlanier Mena.
Relationship with the CIA