Pinochet’s Mad Scientist

Pinochet’s Mad Scientist

December 15, 2014

From the Archive: Much like the 9/11 attacks, the Cold War plunged the U.S. government into the “dark side,” especially in Latin America where the CIA colluded with torturers and assassins, leading to grisly murders and enduring mysteries, as Samuel Blixen described in 1999.

By Samuel Blixen (First published on Jan. 13, 1999 and updated in 2006)


On Nov. 15, 1992, a terrified scientist — trapped inside a white bungalow in the Uruguayan beach town of Parque del Plata — broke a window to escape. Chubby, in his mid-40s, the man struggled through the opening. Once outside, furtively and slowly, he picked his way through the town’s streets to the local police station.

“I am a Chilean citizen,” the scientist told the police. He pulled a folded photostatic copy of his identification papers concealed in his right shoe. “I have been abducted by the armies of Uruguay and my country,” he claimed.
The scientist, rumpled with a graying beard, said he feared for his life. He insisted that his murder had been ordered by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, then the chief of Chile’s army who had ruled as a dictator from 1973 to 1990.

The motive for the execution order was the man’s anticipated testimony at a politically sensitive trial in Chile, a case that could have sent reverberations all the way to Washington, D.C., potentially embarrassing the man who in November 1992 still sat in the White House, President George H.W. Bush.

The scientist had worked as an accomplice in a terror campaign that included the bombing deaths of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker Ronni Moffitt as they drove to work in Washington in 1976. That terrorist attack in America’s capital had occurred when George H.W. Bush was CIA director, despite prior warnings to the CIA about the plot.

More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2014/12/15/pinochets-mad-scientist/