Guardian Weekly Pinochet's drug link comes to light By Hugh O'Shaughnessy Thursday December 14, 2000 The Chilean army and secret police have spent almost two decades secretly flooding Europe and the United States with cocaine. The trafficking began during General Augusto Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship, and continues to this day, a year-long investigation has established. Twelve tons of the drug, with a street value of several billion dollars, left Chile in 1986 and 1987 alone. The drugs, destined for Europe, have often been flown to Spanish territory by planes carrying Chilean arms to Iraq and Iran. Distribution to European nations has been controlled by secret police stationed in Chilean embassies in Stockholm and Madrid. There can be no doubt that Gen Pinochet, whose power was absolute between the 1973 coup and 1990, when he stepped down, was a party to trafficking. He declared in October 1981: "Not a leaf moves in Chile if I don't move it - let that be clear." The secret police - originally known as the Dina and from 1977 as the SNI - was staffed by service personnel, and helped Gen Pinochet to torture and kill opponents. The general kept a close, day-by-day check on all secret police operations. The Dina's former director, Gen Manuel Contreras, told the Chilean supreme court in 1998 that he undertook nothing without Gen Pinochet's permission. The huge profits from the drug deals went to enrich senior figures in Chile, with some going to finance the Dina/SNI operations. Gen Pinochet, who is fighting arrest on kidnapping and murder charges in Santiago, has not clarified how he and his wife, Lucia, had more than $1m in their account in the Riggs Bank in Washington in March 1997. As commander-in-chief of the Chilean army his annual salary at that time was $16,000. New evidence of Gen Pinochet's collaboration with Colombian drug dealers, first sketched out last year in my book, Pinochet: The Politics Of Torture, has emerged in The Thin White Line, a new book by Rodrigo de Castro, a former international civil servant in Chile, and Juan Gasparini, an Argentine journalist. It quotes US court documents, Chilean police files and depositions by a former US marine, Frankell Ivan Baramdyka, who was involved in the trafficking. Baramdyka was extradited from Chile in May 1993 and convicted in California of narcotics offences. He worked for US intelligence in the early 80s, and was encouraged to traffic in drugs on condition that some of the profits went to the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, who were supported by President Ronald Reagan. After the US authorities raided his home in Los Angeles in 1985, Baramdyka fled to Santiago, where he set up a new trafficking operation. Later that year he was recruited by the Chilean secret police, and was soon overseeing the army's drug-export activities. The Observer Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
