Armando Fernandez Larios

Armando Fernández Larios was an officer of the Chilean army and of DINA. He left the army in January 1987 with the rank of major and has lived since in the United States.¹

The Caravan of Death

In October 1973 he was one of the squad of General Sergio Arellano Stark that toured provincial garrisons removing prisoners for execution. A federal appeals court recorded that on October 17 at Copiapó the squad chose thirteen prisoners, "drove the thirteen prisoners ten minutes outside of Copiapo toward the City of La Serena, ordered the prisoners out of the truck, and executed each by gunfire or by stabbing." The economist Winston Cabello "refused to leave the truck and was stabbed to death by Fernandez who slashed Cabello with a corvo, a short, curved knife that is designed to inflict fatal wounds while causing a prolonged and painful death." Fernández denied at trial that he had been present. In 2003 a federal jury awarded Cabello's family four million dollars under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in 2005.¹

Letelier

In July 1976 Fernández and Michael Townley went to Paraguay for false passports in the names Alejandro Romeral and Juan Williams, which Ambassador George Landau photographed. That September he went ahead of Townley to Washington to watch Orlando Letelier, and met Townley at Kennedy Airport on September 9. Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed on September 21. A Washington grand jury indicted Fernández in 1978 with Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza, and Chile refused to extradite them.²

The 1987 Arrangement

In mid-January 1987 he met American officials secretly in Santiago for ten hours. He left for Brazil on January 22, was questioned there by officers of the State Department and the FBI, and was brought to the United States. Polygraph examinations found "consistent signs of deception" in his denial that he had known the purpose of the mission. A State Department memorandum of January 26 declared that "Fernandez is not a murderer" and that "the foreign policy benefits are substantial." On February 4 he pleaded guilty before Judge Barrington Parker to being an accessory after the fact. The government promised that it "would neither seek to deport [him] to Chile nor to cooperate in his extradition to Chile." Parker sentenced him on May 6 to up to seven years. In July the State Department's lawyer Michael Kozak wrote to the parole commission: "I personally have come to know Mr. Fernandez Larios and his character well." He was paroled on September 11, 1987, after five months.¹²

In 2005 he applied without success for the visa given to foreign informants. On October 27, 2025, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him in Florida and held him at the Krome Detention Center, and in January 2026 the Department of Homeland Security put him on a published list of the "worst of the worst." He petitioned for habeas corpus on February 20, pleading the promise of 1987. Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga ordered the government to answer by March 19. It released him that day instead, and she dismissed the case as moot on March 30.²