Contreras, and the sociopath butcher Nixon-supported Pinochet.TWENTY YEARS BEFORE, the building at Tejas Verdes had been an elegant resort hotel where wealthy Santiagans relaxed by the sea. In October 1973, a naked prisoner lay strapped to a bare metal cot in the former music room. The Army School of Engineers had replaced the vacationers years before, but people still called the barracks Tejas Verdes - the Green Roofs. The Maipo River flowed beneath the spacious terraces, carrying the pulverised black stone of the Andes the last mile to the Pacific. Beaches the colour of ashes and charcoal stretched from the mouth of the river north to the port of San Antonio.
Antonio Moreno - the name is false to protect him - screamed many times that day but remembered thinking that no one would hear because of the soundproofing. No one, that is, except the half- dozen men watching the interrogation. An army patrol had picked up Antonio in Santiago and brought him here. On the parrilla - the electric grill - the soldiers had tortured him until he named several rightist intellectuals as Soviet undercover agents, and now they were torturing him because his confession had been a lie.
The stench of faeces filled the room. His soiled pants and body had remained unwashed since his arrest three weeks before. A soldier retched as he moved the electrode from an eyelid to Antonio's penis. Between jolts of electricity, Antonio fixed his eyes on the face of a bulky man in the uniform of a lieutenant colonel who leaned against a wall watching intently, clinically. The horror of the experience etched this face in Antonio's memory, and later, having survived, he would recognise the heavy jowls, impenetrable black eyes beneath drooping lids, and look of tired contempt. He would learn the man's name: Lieutenant Colonel Juan Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, regimental commander of the Tejas Verdes army base.
Naked Ambition
Contreras, at forty-four one of the youngest colonels in the Chilean Army, would later become its youngest general. But he did not seek power through rank alone. Port San Antonio and the Tejas Verdes regiment provided a base to build upon until he would stand next to power itself.
The son of a middle-class, social-climbing military family, Contreras was in his final year at the Chilean military academy when one of his future victims, Orlando Letelier, entered as a lowly plebeian. Early in his career, Contreras attracted the attention of one of his former academy professors, Captain Augusto Pinochet. The two, young officer and his mentor, became close friends, and Pinochet crowned their friendship by standing as godfather<3> at the baptism of one of Contreras' children.
As a major, Contreras spent two years - 1967 through 1969 - at the Army Career Officers School in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. While in the United States he joined the Lions Club at Fort Hunt, Virginia, a membership he would proudly continue in Chile's chapter of Lions International. And he opened an account at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., which proved convenient later on.
More:
http://www.remember-chile.org.uk/beginners/contdina.htm
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