Carlos Prats

General Carlos Prats González became commander in chief of the Chilean army in October 1970, after the shooting of his predecessor, General René Schneider, in a kidnapping attempt supported by the CIA. He entered the cabinet of 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. Protests against his support for the government forced his resignation in late August 1973. He recommended General 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, director of 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. 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, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, had been told to have Argentine paramilitaries do the killing. When that did not advance, Contreras's deputy, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, gave the job to Michael Townley, an American recently recruited by the service, who arrived with his wife, 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 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

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 was shot in Rome the following year and 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 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