Operation Colombo, also known as the Case of the 119 (), was a disinformation operation carried out in 1975 by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police of the Chilean military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Its purpose was to conceal the forced disappearance of 119 political opponents who had been abducted by DINA agents in Chile between 1974 and early 1975. Through false reports planted in publications in Argentina and Brazil and then republished by the major Chilean newspapers, the regime sought to persuade Chilean and international opinion that the missing people had not been detained but had died in clashes with foreign security forces or in internal purges among leftist groups.
Most of the victims were members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), but the list also included members of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Popular Unitary Action Movement (MAPU) and the Communist League, as well as people with no party affiliation. The hoax was run mainly through the Chilean press: in 2006 the Chilean College of Journalists found that El Mercurio, La Segunda, Las Últimas Noticias and La Tercera had committed numerous breaches of professional ethics in the affair. The operation unraveled within weeks, and decades later Chilean courts held that it had been a cover for kidnappings and killings by the DINA. Pinochet was stripped of his immunity and indicted in the case in 2005, but died in 2006 before it was concluded; dozens of former DINA agents have since been convicted.
Background By late 1974 Pinochet's government was under open international criticism for systematic human rights violations—including arbitrary detention, torture and the existence of hundreds of disappeared detainees—reported since the coup of 11 September 1973. In November the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution calling for the "restoration of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms in Chile", and a month later the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States released the final report of its investigators' visit to Chile, which found that the military regime had committed "extremely serious human rights violations".
Revelations about the role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Chile, along with the growing number of reports of torture and disappearances, also began to generate opposition to the dictatorship in the United States Congress. In October 1974 the United States Senate, on the initiative of Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, rejected more than $20 million in military assistance to Chile. In January 1975 the Senate created the Church Committee to investigate the CIA's covert actions over previous decades, including its part in the coup against Salvador Allende.
In this context, during the first months of 1975, the DINA began to devise a strategy to persuade Chilean and international opinion that the number of disappeared detainees was either nonexistent or exaggerated. The plan was to attribute the disappearances to internal feuds on the left, and specifically within the MIR. Republishing such reports in the Chilean press was meant to support the government's position that there were no disappeared detainees and that the people sought by their families had left the country.
The operation Planning and organization The disinformation campaign was organized by Álvaro Puga Cappa, director of civil affairs for the military junta and head of psychological operations for the DINA, who supplied national and foreign journalists with press reports covering up the fate of the 119 detainees. At the time Puga was also a columnist for La Segunda under the pseudonym "Alexis".
The DINA used the media to publish fabricated stories that named missing people and claimed they had been killed in clashes with Argentine security forces or in internal purges, in an effort to convince the public that a foreign enemy was responsible for the deaths of Chileans. Within days, however, the church-sponsored Pro-Peace Committee published a detailed report showing that 77 of the 119 people on the list had last been seen in the custody of Chilean security personnel.
Victims The 119 people on the lists were arrested in Chile between June 1974 and February 1975, with a few cases earlier or later. The great majority were MIR members; the rest included militants of the Communist and Socialist parties, MAPU, the Communist League and the Christian Democratic Party, plus some people with no political affiliation. Nineteen of the victims were women; the youngest, María Isabel Joui, was 19 at the time of her arrest. One of the disappeared women was pregnant and four were mothers of very young children. A full list, compiled by the human rights group CODEPU, is available online.
Early fabrications On 16 April 1975 a mutilated body was found on Sarmiento Street in Buenos Aires carrying an identity card in the name of the Chilean chemical engineer David Silberman. Silberman, a Communist Party member, had been general manager of the state copper company Cobre Chuqui until the 1973 coup. He was serving a thirteen-year sentence in the Santiago Penitentiary for violating the State Security Law, imposed by a court-martial, when DINA agents kidnapped him on 4 October 1974; his whereabouts had been unknown since. Years later, former DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel confessed that Silberman's supposed appearance in Buenos Aires was an operation, code-named "Colombo", ordered by Raúl Iturriaga Neumann to make a "Chilean subversive" appear in Argentina.
In the following months Chile's major newspapers began running stories about "alleged missing persons" who were supposedly alive outside Chile. On 13 June La Tercera published "Chilean Extremists Train in Tucumán", noting that "among the extremists are a large number of members of the Mir and other Marxist groups who are publicly listed as missing". Other outlets followed with headlines such as "Chilean Extremists Trained in Guerrilla Warfare" (La Segunda, 12 June), "Armed Miristas Cross into Chile" (El Mercurio, 16 June) and "Extremists Cross the Border" (Las Últimas Noticias, 16 June).
Reports of clashes and purges In early July the junta abruptly canceled a visit to Chile by the UN human rights commission scheduled for 11 July. The government said it was not a cancellation but a "postponement until a more opportune moment". On that same day, two charred bodies were found in a car in Pilar, north of Buenos Aires, with identification papers in the names of the Chilean MIR members Jaime Robotham and Luis Guendelman, both detained and disappeared since 1974. A banner over the bodies read "Discharged by the MIR. Black Brigade." Eight days later another body was found, with papers in the name of Juan Carlos Perelman, also a MIR member, who had been detained in Santiago and missing since 20 February 1975.
The Buenos Aires magazine Lea published on 15 July a list of 60 "Chilean extremists eliminated by their own comrades in struggle" in Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and France. Lea published only one issue, with a print run of 20,000 copies, printed by Editorial Codex, which was tied to Argentina's Ministry of Social Welfare under José López Rega. López Rega had founded the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance in 1973, a death squad responsible for numerous human rights violations between 1973 and 1976. Earlier, on 25 June, the Curitiba, Brazil, newspaper Novo O Dia had reported the killing of 59 Miristas in "clashes with Argentine government forces in Salta".
Citing the two foreign publications and cables from the United Press International wire service reporting the discovery of the charred bodies, the main Chilean outlets repeated the stories of supposed clashes over the following weeks. Headlines included "Massacre between MIR members reveals crude maneuver against Chile" (La Tercera, 16 July), "Bloody internal 'vendetta' within the MIR" (Las Últimas Noticias, 16 July), "Ferocious struggle between Chilean Marxists" (La Segunda, 18 July), and "60 murdered MIR members identified", captioned "Executed by their own comrades" (El Mercurio, 23 July). La Tercera ran "The MIR has murdered 60 of its men" on its front page on 23 July, and Las Últimas Noticias ran "Bloody MIR struggle abroad". The evening paper La Segunda, drawing on Novo O Dia, ran the front-page headline "Exterminated like rats" on 24 July 1975, with the caption "59 Chilean MIR members killed in military operation in Argentina".
A few days later El Mercurio wrote in an editorial:
Collapse of the official account Despite the intense coverage, the story was soon challenged. O Dia and Lea were unknown publications; the lists consisted of missing people on whose behalf relatives had already filed amparo petitions; no bodies had been produced; no new information emerged; and the countries named began to deny that any armed confrontations with guerrillas had taken place. International media including La Opinión of Argentina, Time and The New York Times questioned the junta's version. Relatives of Robotham and Guendelman traveled to Buenos Aires and denied that the bodies found there were theirs. On 3 August El Mercurio grudgingly acknowledged the doubts in an editorial, asking whether the information being supplied was credible as a whole, answering "Apparently not", and calling for clarification from the authorities.
On 1 August the Pro-Peace Committee asked the Supreme Court of Chile to appoint a visiting judge to investigate the detention and disappearance of the people named, citing the new claims that 119 Chileans had been killed in Argentina. The Supreme Court rejected the request two months later.
The junta nonetheless stood by its account and described the questioning as a smear campaign abroad against the regime. Pinochet addressed the case publicly on 20 August, at a ceremony in San Bernardo marking the birthday of Bernardo O'Higgins, where he announced an investigation that was never carried out. The government denied for the rest of the dictatorship that the story had been staged, but later testimony from survivors of detention centers confirmed that they had seen many of the people on the lists held in the places of confinement, torture and killing. On 1 December 1977, Chile's ambassador to the UN, Sergio Diez, told the General Assembly that there were no disappeared detainees, repeating the government's claim that many of the victims were killed in MIR purges, had no legal existence, or were dead or in exile.
Press ethics ruling In 2005 relatives of people disappeared in Operation Colombo asked the Chilean College of Journalists to investigate the conduct of the newspapers involved. In a 35-page ruling made public in March 2006, the college's ethics tribunal issued a public censure and a six-month suspension of membership to Fernando Díaz Palma, former editor of Las Últimas Noticias, and to Alberto Guerrero Espinoza, former editor of La Tercera. It imposed a three-month suspension on El Mercurio journalist Beatriz Undurraga Gómez and acquitted La Segunda journalist Mercedes Garrido Garrido. The tribunal also found René Silva Espejo and Mario Carneyro, the former editors of El Mercurio and La Segunda, responsible, but did not sanction them because they were dead. In 2013 the first criminal complaint was filed against Agustín Edwards Eastman, owner of El Mercurio and La Segunda, for his alleged role in the operation.
Investigation and prosecutions