--- alias: - Carlos Prats González - General Prats category: Military created: 2026-09-21 died: 1974-09-30 location: Buenos Aires, Argentina summary: Commander of the Chilean army under Salvador Allende, who recommended Augusto Pinochet as his successor and was killed with his wife by a secret police car bomb in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974. tags: - Person - CarlosPrats - Chile - DINA - OperationCondor - Assassination - BuenosAires updated: 2026-09-21 --- General Carlos Prats González became commander in chief of the Chilean army in October 1970, after the shooting of his predecessor, General [René Schneider](/people/rene-schneider/), in a kidnapping attempt supported by the [CIA](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/). He entered the cabinet of [Salvador Allende](/people/salvador-allende/) in 1972 and served for a time as vice president. In June 1973 he put down the Tanquetazo, a coup attempt by junior officers and [Patria y Libertad](/organizations/patria-y-libertad/). Protests against his support for the government forced his resignation in late August 1973. He recommended General [Augusto Pinochet](/people/augusto-pinochet/) to replace him, believing that Pinochet would defend the constitution.[^1] ### Exile Four days after the coup of September 11, 1973, Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, left for Buenos Aires. He "was living quietly," the CIA reported; "he was not permitted to make any public appearances or statements and had faithfully carried out the restrictive instructions pertaining to his exile." Six weeks after the coup Pinochet sent General Sergio Arellano Stark to Buenos Aires on a mission whose first purpose, a CIA source reported, was to "discuss with the Argentine military any information they have regarding the activities of General (retired) Carlos Prats" and to arrange for the Argentines to "maintain scrutiny over Prats and regularly inform the Chileans of his activities."[^1] In June 1974 Pinochet met Colonel [Manuel Contreras](/people/manuel-contreras/), director of [DINA](/organizations/dina/), and ordered him to eliminate Prats. A DINA captain, Juan Morales, filed a surveillance report from Buenos Aires giving the couple's home and work addresses and the models of their cars, noting that Prats had no guards, and enclosing a drawing of the entrance to his garage. Four days before the killing the Chilean foreign ministry told its consul in Buenos Aires, Álvaro Droguett, that it would be "inconvenient" to issue the couple the passports they had requested to travel to [Brazil](/places/brazil/). Droguett later gave the family a copy of the refusal with a handwritten note saying that he had learned of it only on September 30.[^1] ### September 30, 1974 The DINA station chief in [Argentina](/places/argentina/), Enrique Arancibia Clavel, had been told to have Argentine paramilitaries do the killing. When that did not advance, Contreras's deputy, Colonel [Pedro Espinoza](/people/pedro-espinoza/), gave the job to [Michael Townley](/people/michael-townley/), an American recently recruited by the service, who arrived with his wife, [Mariana Callejas](/people/mariana-callejas/), on September 10. Townley fixed two cartridges of C4 under the general's Fiat 125 in the garage of his building on September 29 and detonated them by remote control from a car across the street when the couple came home just after midnight. The CIA's weekly terrorism summary repeated a police report that a bomb had been thrown at the car. Ambassador David Popper cabled from [Santiago](/places/santiago/) that a Radio Moscow report that DINA had killed Prats because the junta feared he would draw the loyalty of disaffected officers "makes no sense to us. Nor do we see significant interest in killing Prats of any other Chilean group with capacity of doing so."[^1] Major Raúl Iturriaga of DINA had gone to Buenos Aires in late July "with a bag of cash to hire assassins and to coordinate the operation with the Argentine service, SIDE." Arancibia distributed 20,000 dollars. The men kept the money. "The Argentines didn't have the guts to kill them," Townley testified. He built the bomb "from a CB radio transmitter, primacord blasting caps, and what he called 'a tone device buzzer thing,'" hid his passport inside a pipe railing in the garage, slid under the car, and "tied the bomb to a bar supporting the transmission, almost exactly in the middle of the car." "The car turned, it came around, it slowed at the intersection and then sped on to enter the garage. All I could see was the back of the car." After the blast he heard Arancibia shout "Asi mueren los traidores." Of his reasons he said: "It was, I'll get jumped on for this, but it was a patriotic request, if you will, and I did it." Investigators noted "multiple phoned death threats to Prats; withdrawal of police from the street outside Prats's home; darkening of street lights near the Prats's apartment in the hours prior to the assassination."[^2] Chilean sources of DINA and its successor told [Eugene Propper](/people/eugene-propper/) in 1981 "that President Pinochet approved the Prats murder in advance, at the instigation of Contreras." After the killing Contreras received Townley, pronounced "the operation in Buenos Aires a complete success," and said he "has earned the gratitude of all patriotic Chileans."[^3] Weeks later a friend told the Prats daughters that the regime planned to "celebrate the coup" each September by eliminating a person it considered a threat. [Bernardo Leighton](/people/bernardo-leighton/) was shot in [Rome](/places/rome/) the following year and [Orlando Letelier](/people/orlando-letelier/) was killed in Washington on September 21, 1976.[^1] ### Prosecution In 1983 Sofía and Angélica Prats went to Washington with Argentine lawyers to seek the extradition of Townley, who was by then in the witness protection program after a short sentence for the Letelier bombing. A federal judge ruled that his plea agreement prevented it. A Chilean judge refused to extradite Callejas. The Argentine judge María Servini deposed Townley in the [United States](/places/united-states/) in 1999, and his testimony was sealed for some years. Arancibia Clavel was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades. In June 2010 Chilean courts convicted Contreras, Espinoza, and other DINA officers of the murders. Pinochet was never charged. At the viewing of his open coffin in December 2006 a grandson of the general, Francisco Cuadrado Prats, waited in line and spat on the glass.[^1] [^1]: Kornbluh, Peter, ed. "The Pinochet Regime at 50: The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert," National Security Archive, October 1, 2024, with CIA and DINA documents and the 1999 deposition of Michael Townley. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-10-01/pinochet-regime-50-assassination-general-carlos-prats-and-sofia [^2]: Dinges, John. *The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents*. New Press, 2004, pp. 63, 74-78. [^3]: Branch, Taylor, and Eugene M. Propper. *Labyrinth*. Viking, 1982, pp. 67-69.