Mariana Inés Callejas Honores (11 April 1932 – 10 August 2016) was a Chilean writer and member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) who participated in several terrorist attacks, including the murder of General Carlos Prats and his wife, which was perpetrated in 1974 in Buenos Aires. She was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison by courts of the first and second instances, though her term was later reduced to five years.
Early life Mariana Callejas was born into a middle-class family. Very early on she became interested in serious literature, claiming to have read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment at age eight.
Her life changed dramatically at age 18 – she secretly left school after her favorite teachers, the Feinsilbert couple, were thrown out. Influenced by this couple, she turned to Socialist Zionism and planned to emigrate to Israel. In order to fulfill her plan, she married a young man. One day, she told her mother about her school desertion, her marriage, and her conversion. The reaction was unexpected; her father cut her out of their life. Things got worse when soon after, Pablo, her new husband, decided to marry a classmate, and his family obtained an annulment of the marriage with Mariana. Then, thanks to the Feinsilberts' connections, she took a ship bound for Israel.
On the first kibbutz where Callejas lived, Nan Kissuphim (probably the current Kissufim), besides working, she studied Hebrew in special classes. From this kibbutz she passed to another, formed by emigrants from North and South America, in the Negev desert. Located near the border, they had to build it from scratch. Due to the danger of attacks from Egyptian and Bedouin soldiers, she had to stand night watches. There she adopted the name of Anat, because it seemed to her that Inés and Mariana sounded too Catholic.
Her first and ephemeral marriage of convenience was soon followed by a second, this time to feel protected in an environment where there were four men for every woman. She chose an American agriculture student, Allan Earnest, an idealist who had emigrated to Israel from Cornell University.
The couple left the kibbutz shortly afterward, along with a score of other residents, due to ideological differences. They settled on a moshav, where it was allowed to own a home, as well as other manifestations of individualism.
In 1952 Allan was called up, but as a pacifist, he did not want to serve in the army. In addition, he was still recovering from the injuries he had suffered when a mine exploded under his tractor. Given this situation, Allan and Anat decided to embark with their young son on a ship bound for Chile.
There, as expected, they were not well received by her father, and soon they took another ship, bound for New York City.
In the United States, they shared an apartment with Allan's mother in Washington Heights. Mariana Earnest escaped during the day to attend acting classes at different schools. At that time she dreamed of theater and also began to write stories.
The couple moved to Uniondale, a suburb of Long Island, in 1957, when they already had three small children. There she had a short experience as a waitress at the Italian restaurant Tony's, which she hated, as she also hated being a housewife. Three years later, unable to take any more, she took her three children and returned to Chile.
Callejas and Townley Callejas arrived at the doors of a maternity home in 1960 with the children; she would not let anyone tell her to go back to her husband or the United States.
She continued to write stories and soon became friends with a group of bohemian artists. Going to wait for one of them when leaving a party, she met Michael Townley. That same year, Townley, at seventeen, fell madly in love with her, and despite the difference in age, courted her until she agreed to marry him.
Their marriage was celebrated on 22 July 1961. None of their parents attended the wedding. Not only the Callejas were against it; Townley's father, who worked at Ford Chile, had been promoted to Venezuela and had left the country with his wife and two other children. Michael had refused to leave and had remained in Santiago, determined to conquer Mariana.
To make a living, Michael sold Collier's Encyclopedia to wealthy families who knew English, and fixed cars and electrical appliances. Three years later, in 1964, thanks to his father, he got a job with Ford in Peru, but he failed and four months later he left Lima.
In 1965 luck smiled on him and he became the representative of the mutual fund Investors Overseas Services (IOS). This allowed him to move with Callejas and the children to a good house in La Reina, with two employees. The couple enjoyed skiing, and Townley participated in car races.
The next year, Townley's father was promoted again, and was preparing to return to Santiago as president of Ford Chile. Michael, now successful, hoped to make peace with the family, but everything fell apart when rumors of the imminent bankruptcy of IOS arose because one of its directors, Bernard Cornfeld, had stolen millions of dollars. Michael's clients, in a panic, begin to harass him and he was forced to flee to the United States.
Mariana followed shortly afterward with her children, but only after obtaining the promise that they would return to Chile as soon as possible. First they settled in the house of Michael's grandparents in Pompano Beach (where he tried to sell Fords, without success), and then in Miami's Little Havana, to work at an AAMCO Transmissions shop.
Nothing in their lives yet indicated that the couple would become terrorist agents. Mariana began to attend a literary workshop at the University of Miami, joined marches called by the New Party, a group where her new friends were active and that, among other things, proposed the legalization of abortion and marijuana, opposed the Vietnam War, and supported the poet and senator Eugene McCarthy for president. However, it was also anti-communist. Townley, on the other hand, was not interested in literature or even politics; he worked as a mechanic and remained a fan of car racing.
When Salvador Allende won the 1970 presidential elections, Callejas decided to return to Chile, which she did despite the opposition of her husband, who did not want to leave his business for the economic uncertainty in Santiago. There were fights, Michael had a romantic affair in the United States, he considered getting divorced, there were comings and goings, but finally the crisis was overcome and the couple saw each other again in Chile.
An anti-Allendist, Callejas made contacts with Fatherland and Liberty (), while Michael tried, with little success, to conduct business. Urged by his wife to join her new right-wing friends, Michael said he had to work and characterized their actions as those of children and their Molotov cocktails as primitive. A few weeks later, Michael agreed to make an authentic Molotov bomb. Thus began his collaboration with the Chilean extreme right, in whose circles he would be known as Juan Manolo. His biggest success was the clandestine radio that he managed to manufacture and with which he transmitted anti-Allendist messages.
After participating in an operation to eliminate interference that prevented transmissions of the conservative Channel 5 of Concepción, a dependent of the Catholic University, "whose position was of decided opposition to the government of Allende", which ended with the death of a worker, Townley was forced to flee. He arrived in Miami, with empty pockets, on 2 April 1973. Callejas followed him later, in June, with the children.
Upon his return, Townley contacted the CIA again to offer his services (he had already done so in 1970, before going to Chile), conspired with the Cubans who worked at AAMCO and tried to aid Fatherland and Liberty from Miami.
Agents of the DINA The 1973 Chilean coup d'état, led by General Augusto Pinochet, allowed Callejas and Townley to return to Chile. Mariana took the first flight to Santiago after the coup, while Michael put his affairs in order so that he could leave with the children. The CIA had not contacted him, and, even though his wife assured him that he was not in any danger, he worried about the charges against him in Chile. He decided to travel under a false name, that of his friend Kenneth Enyart, who gave him his birth certificate and social security card, documents with which he obtained a passport.
It was Colonel , who, upon learning of Townley's work for Fatherland and Liberty, invited him to join the military dictatorship's secret police, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). Michael did so under the name Andrés Wilson; Mariana joined as Ana Luisa Pizarro.
In his novel Las cenizas del Cóndor, the Uruguayan Fernando Butazzoni tells how Callejas and Townley, along with their two small children, went with Colonel Espinoza to San Cristóbal Hill in Santiago, to test at a distance the detonators from the bomb that would eventually end the life of General Carlos Prats.
Callejas would try to justify herself years later by saying that they were going through a bad time and that they needed money to support the family. But Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper affirm in their book devoted to the assassination of Orlando Letelier, Labyrinth, that both agreed to work for the DINA with pleasure, and that they considered it an honor.
In addition to participating in the 1974 attack in Buenos Aires that ended the life of Prats, Callejas accompanied her husband on other missions, particularly one in Mexico the following year.
Callejas traveled, under her DINA alias, to Mexico City in early 1975 on a mission to eliminate opponents of Pinochet. Among the objectives were Allende's widow Hortensia Bussi, the socialist Carlos Altamirano, and the communist Volodia Teitelboim, but the mission turned out to be a complete fiasco. They did not hit their targets, and almost exploded the mobile home in which they were traveling with Virgilio Paz, an anti-Castro Cuban.
She also accompanied Townley in the operation to assassinate Orlando Letelier and his secretary Roni Moffit on 21 September 1976 in Washington. It would be for this crime that Townley would fall into the hands of American justice. He was handed over in Chile in April 1978 and taken out of the country by FBI agents. This also ended the idyll of Callejas with the military junta.
In a U.S. Department of Justice affidavit from August 1991, U.S. Justice Department attorney Eric B. Marcy noted that between the years 1982 and 1990, she provided numerous "confession letters" which “were prepared by Townley prior to his expulsion from Chile in order to protect him from the fugitives Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza and to protect his expulsion from Chile.” In a letter from March 1978, her husband wrote that their DINA missions were carried out by "following orders from Gen. Contreras."
House in Lo Curro: torture and literature Shortly after the 1973 coup, the DINA turned over a mansion – three floors, almost 1,000 square meters of building and 5,000 square meters of land – to Michael Townley and his wife Mariana Callejas. The large house, delivered in recognition of the services provided by the couple to the secret police of the dictatorship, was located in the upper part of Santiago, in , Via Naranja 4925.
Legally it was not theirs; it had been acquired by then-Army Major Raúl Iturriaga and a DINA lawyer who died in strange circumstances in 1976, under a false identity. The idea was for it to serve as a home for married agents and their children, and at the same time, for the Quepulillán barracks to operate there, from which terrorist operations abroad would be planned.