38 Londres Street, page 38
The authorities failed to act, so Erika Hennings and the Londres 38 organisation stepped in: in October 2017 they initiated a criminal action against the Pinochet-era directors of the Pesquera Arauco. They alleged that the fishery financed DINA crimes and was involved in the disappearance of Alfonso Chanfreau and ninety-seven other men and women from Londres 38. Hennings asked the court to investigate kidnappings and illegal burials, and to locate the ‘final destination’ of the disappeared. One of the judges who investigated the case was Paola Plaza.
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Judge Plaza agreed to meet me at her bustling office in downtown Santiago in November 2022. She was brisk, bright and purposeful, in blue-rimmed glasses, and open with her thinking. She was also incredibly busy, with more than two hundred live cases involving Pinochet-era deaths or disappearances. As we met, she was about to report that the exhumed body of Pablo Neruda, who died just twelve days after the Coup, contained traces of Clostridium botulinum, a deadly man-made toxin.
‘Everything changed after Pinochet was arrested in London,’ she said. The dam broke, allowing new investigations on the disappeared. Her work turned on whether there was any proof of a death: if there was a witness, or evidence of a body, or DNA, the case was treated as murder (homicidio); in the absence of such evidence, the case was treated as a kidnapping (secuestro). This was how it was for Alfonso Chanfreau, seen at Londres 38 on 13 August 1974 by León Gómez. With no body or other evidence, his disappearance was treated as an act of continuing torture of the family, or as an illegal burial or exhumation. The latter crime was, however, only an infraction, which in Chile is a lesser crime.
The absence of any documentary evidence was an unintended consequence of the US investigation into the killing of Orlando Letelier. It led to the dissolution of the DINA and the destruction of documents, making the investigations far more difficult. Cases went to court, but there was still no overall plan to find the disappeared.
As criminal investigations were underway, Judge Plaza was limit-ed in what she could say. She explained that her office investigated crimes that originated in Santiago – the Pesquera Arauco had an office at a food market in Santiago – or at Colonia Dignidad. The Colony was, she believed, probably the ‘final destination’ for many of the disappeared from Londres 38, transported in Pesquera Arauco vans. Crimes committed in San Antonio or at Rocas de Santo Domingo fell within the jurisdiction of judges and courts in Valparaíso.
Fifty years after the Coup, not a single person had been indicted for the use of the Arauco vans or facilities. Mario Jara was prosecuted, but he died before he could be tried. ‘Progress has been limited,’ Judge Plaza accepted, but it was more than nothing. The use of the refrigerated vans was ‘a proven fact’, on the basis of witness testimony. The allegations about the Pesquera’s role in disposing of bodies at sea, or in the fishmeal plant, on the other hand, were not yet proven. These were allegations with no direct witness testimony. ‘A Pesquera accountant recently testified that he did not see its installations being used to disappear bodies,’ she told me. The formulation, however, tracked the words of the fishnet repairers.
Nevertheless, Judge Plaza had no doubt that the Pesquera Arauco was associated with crimes during the Pinochet era, and disappearances. She was focusing on links between the Pesquera Arauco and Colonia Dignidad, and ‘actions taken to hide or disappear bodies’. She had evidence that Paul Schäfer ordered bodies that were buried at Colonia Dignidad to be exhumed and then destroyed. She had found places of burial, but no human remains. Gerhard Mücke, Schäfer’s right-hand man, testified about the murder and burial of ‘about thirty’ detainees at the Colony, but the bodies were exhumed, removed and destroyed, as part of Operación Retiro de Televisores (Operation Recall of Televisions).
On Mücke’s account, Pinochet personally ordered the operation, after the DINA was dismantled, to cover up the crimes. Mücke testified that because he and others were Germans, they had been ordered to disappear the bodies; Germans, after all, were people who ‘knew how to execute with perfection a given task’. Convicted of crimes against humanity, for kidnapping and torture, he died in 2022.
Judge Plaza had evidence that some detainees were disappeared at sea, and of the Pesquera Arauco’s involvement in other crimes. It may well be, she said, that their involvement was connected to the use of sarin being developed at the Vía Naranja, and the activities of the boinas negras, or black berets, the elite group who protected Pinochet and engaged in ‘special operations’. The boinas negras may have been involved in the murders of Letelier and Soria, she said.
Have you encountered the name of Walther Rauff in your investigations?
‘No,’ she said, although she knew the name.
Samuel Fuenzalida had recognised the man in a photograph I showed him, as did El Mocito, but neither knew his name until I mentioned it, I told her.
She had interviewed Fuenzalida, she said, but before he saw the photograph. He didn’t mention the man now known to be Rauff. She had not, however, interviewed Vergara. ‘Rauff could well end up being connected to the Pesquera Arauco,’ she added. ‘From now on, he will certainly be on my radar, and San Antonio should be on yours.’
San Antonio
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San Antonio is a city of hills and coastal dunes on the Pacific coast, about an hour west of Santiago. The Maipu River flows through the city that is home to the Tejas Verdes regiment and the School of Engineers, Manuel Contreras’s base, and the Pesquera Arauco. Nearby are the fine old seaside resort of Cartagena, to the north, and the Rocas de Santo Domingo, to the south.
I have learned through my work on international disputes that there is much to be gained by visiting a place, that words alone are not able to give a complete sense of geography and the impregnations of history. I wanted to go to San Antonio where, according to Samuel Fuenzalida and Jorgelino Vergara, Walther Rauff developed a second career with vans. They said they’d like to come with me, on a Chilean summer’s day, in March, but first I would meet Anatolio Zárate.
He was eighty-six years old when we met and he lives with his wife in a sunny apartment on the upper floor of a building in a Santiago suburb. Natural light bathed the dining table on which he’d laid out old newspapers, with interviews he had given describing the torture to which he was subjected. An unbroken man of intelligence and warmth, he spoke excellent English.
His parents were medical doctors but he opted for life as an en-gineer, joining the Pesquera Arauco in 1970, the year Allende became President. ‘I was head of the fleet’, responsible for six large boats, of which two came from Cuba, and three from the Soviet Union. The fleet caught two or three hundred tonnes of merluza, or hake, every day. Most was frozen for sale across Chile and some was exported to Spain, possibly to be made into fishfingers.
The hake that remained was processed into fish oil or fishmeal, up to thirty tonnes a day, on site. ‘The boca de la planta – the mouth of the oven – was about a metre and a half by two metres, it could easily take a shark or a sea-lion, or a human body,’ Zárate said. He pointed to a tapestry on the wall, a view of medieval Florence. ‘About that size.’ He testified on rumours about the use of the oven. ‘I saw nothing, as I was arrested early on the morning of the Coup, at about half past seven, accused of being part of Plan Z.’ He was an Allende supporter.
He was held for a month at the School of Engineers in Tejas Verdes. ‘It was a concentration camp. They broke my spine, so I went to hospital, then to the San Antonio prison, then to Calbuco Island, in the south, near Puerto Montt.’ He was released in December 1974. For the harm he suffered, he receives a modest monthly pension, 220,000 pesos (about US $250). ‘I was very happy when Pinochet was arrested in London,’ he said, ‘the courts in Chile have been slow, I know, as I have testified many times.’
He knew of the refrigerated vans. ‘Chevrolets,’ he said. C-10s and C-30s, he thought. I showed him a Chilean C-30 advertisement from 1973. ‘That’s what the front looked like, but the back was different, a refrigerated square box, big enough to hold a few men.’ There were a couple of hundred Chevrolets, maybe more, including a couple of dozen Apaches. He thought they arrived at the time of the Coup. ‘I never saw them, as I’d been arrested.’ The Army occupied the Pesquera plant, and Contreras, Espinoza and later the DINA ran the company. The intervention must have been planned in advance, I suggested, for the Army to have taken over the plant so quickly, and for vans to have been ordered. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but I never heard of an order for the vans.’
He knew too that the vans were used to transport detainees.
And bodies?
‘Ah,’ he exclaimed. From the table he took a copy of La Nación from 2004, an article about El Kiwi, a boat that took bodies from San Antonio and disappeared them at sea. I knew the article, which contained Captain Vincente’s first-hand account.
‘I was Captain Vincente!’ said Zárate, suddenly. He was given a full account by ‘Pituco’ Reyes, the captain of El Kiwi, as the two men sailed another boat from Germany to Chile. They encountered a ferocious storm in the English Channel, near Dover Point, one that caused Reyes to fear for his life. ‘I have to tell you something, and he told me the story.’ In later recounting what he heard, Zárate used a pseudonym, Captain Vincente – his wife feared the consequences of his involvement.
‘No one wants to talk of these things, not even today,’ he said.
Was the story accurate?
‘One hundred per cent.’
Not a myth?
‘No.’
On the subject of myth, I showed him a photograph of Walther Rauff.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he lived in Punta Arenas, I know about him, the rumours and myths.’ Then he said something else: ‘When I was detained and tortured, people spoke with foreign accents.’
German accents?
‘Yes, German accents. I couldn’t see anyone, but I heard the accents.’
Might you recognise the voice?
‘Perhaps.’
I have a recording of Rauff, I said. Yes, he’d listen to it. On the laptop I pulled up a clip from the Hunter and the Hunted documentary, in which the journalist confronted Rauff near his son’s home in Santiago. Zárate watched and listened intently.
‘Suddenly, the unexpected happened,’ said the journalist. ‘Approaching from the north end of Los Pozos was the man himself, SS Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff, the alleged murderer of a quarter of a million human beings.’ Birds tweeted as Rauff approached, balding and bespectacled, a cigarette in his left hand, the heavy glasses, in a dark-blue shirt with white dots.
‘Where is this?’ Zárate asked me. Los Pozos Street, in Los Condes. There at the gate Rauff came face to face with an unwelcome visitor carrying a hidden radio microphone. ‘You live in Santiago, don’t you?’ the journalist asked.
‘Yes,’ Rauff replied. One word, spoken slowly, in a voice that was deep and gravelly, with a slight tremolo, the sound left by cigarettes, and an unmistakable German accent.
As he heard the word, Zárate’s face seemed to freeze, literally. He brought his hands together onto the table and clenched them tightly. He was immobile and silent for several minutes. I have never seen someone react in this way.
‘I must phone up to the jurist,’ said Rauff in the documentary. ‘My case is finished, I am not guilty, I want to say only the verity.’ The truth.
‘Yes, yes,’ Zárate said to me. ‘I remember that voice.’ He was deeply shaken, terribly disturbed even. ‘Yes, yes…oof. Yes.’
We watched and listened again.
‘It was in San Antonio, in Tejas Verdes, a concentration camp in the School of Engineers, underground, where I was detained.’
The man with that voice was in the room, he said, asking questions. ‘Where are the guns, where are the guns? It was the only thing they wanted to know.’ Zárate was wearing a hood, so he never saw his interrogators, but he knew a German accent, for there were many Germans around Valparaíso and San Antonio.
‘Oof,’ he said. No, he didn’t know whether the one with the German accent used physical violence against him. ‘There were a few people there, I remember only the voice.’
How certain are you that was the voice?
‘Yes, I’m certain. Eighty per cent. I don’t know how to say this, but it’s a deep sensation.’
As it was for me. Here was a second person, after León Gómez, who said he recognised Rauff and was interrogated by him.
Only later did I make the connection between this moment and the play Death and the Maiden, written by Ariel Dorfman, in which a detainee recognises her torturer by his voice alone.
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The next morning, Monserrat and I drove to San Antonio with Samuel Fuenzalida and Jorgelino Vergara, two men who knew a lot about the disappearance of people.
As we approached the city, Fuenzalida suggested we leave the highway and take the old road, the one from the 1970s. ‘I know this road,’ he said. ‘Me too,’ said El Vergara, ‘we used it to go to the Contreras house by the sea, with the dog and the children.’ As we drove, we talked about this and that, my trip to Patagonia, the Pesquera Camelio, Quito, Londres 38, and Guatón Romo’s perfume.
‘I wore Flaño,’ said Fuenzalida.
‘So did I!’ said Vergara.
We pulled up at Los Hornitos de Doña Carmen, a bakery. ‘The vans with the detainees stopped here for food,’ said Fuenzalida, a place of ancient brick ovens. A few kilometres on, we pulled over, near a sign for the School of Engineers. This was by the old Lo Gallardo bridge, destroyed in the 1985 earthquake that laid waste to the port of San Antonio. ‘The vans stopped right here, to allow the prisoners to be transferred to the Tejas Verdes team,’ said Fuenzalida.
We drove on, a couple more kilometres, to the seaside town of LLolleo – the name originates from Llollehue, the Mapuche word for ‘fishing place’. At the Plaza Estrella, in the centre, Fuenzalida and Vergara went for a coffee while Monserrat and I met with a retired fisherman, waiting on a park bench.
Jorge Silva was a short man with strong hands. He wore a jumper with blue and red patterns. I’d heard his words on a German radio programme, a few months earlier. He’d been shown a black and white photograph of an older man, bald with glasses.
‘When I see the picture of the old Nazi, I remember,’ he said. ‘He was in the fish factory with Contreras and Jara and the other murderers.’
Where in the San Antonio fishery? the journalist in the radio programme had asked.
‘In the hall, where the net repairers worked,’ Silva replied. ‘He was there, by the trucks with prisoners in the back. He’s the one in the photo, he had a German accent.’ The journalist told him the man’s name: Walther Rauff.
Today, the old fisherman wanted to talk about himself, not the ‘fucking Nazi’. There were four big fishing companies in San Antonio at the time of the Coup, he explained: Contiki, Sopesa, Arauco and Harling, and the DINA took over all of them. Silva worked for Harling. A month after the Coup, he was arrested for being a member of MIR. He was twenty-one.
‘I was taken in a refrigerated van to Tejas Verdes, then held underground, in the cafeteria.’ He knew the place from military service. ‘I was interrogated and tortured. I wore a hood, so didn’t see anyone.’ He heard Brazilian, French and German accents.
Released after six months, Silva didn’t return to Harling, as the DINA had taken over. Some detained comrades were released, others were dropped in the ocean from a helicopter, he believed, or were disappeared by other means. A few chose exile abroad. A year on, Silva was re-arrested, and taken to the cabins at the old holiday camp on the beach at Santo Domingo, south of San Antonio. He remembered the Chevrolet C-10 van, the snub-nosed front, the fabric over the back. I showed him a picture, he nodded.
He was at Santo Domingo for thirty-four days, hands tied, eyes blindfolded, with sixty or seventy other detainees. ‘Santo Domingo was terrible, even worse than the first time.’ As Silva spoke, he clenched his hands, like Anatolio Zárate. Each shed had four rooms with bunk beds. ‘One shed was used to torture, another as a waiting room.’ During the day they heard children on the beach, in the evening just silence. ‘Over time the voices of the detainees fell silent. This increased our fear, as we didn’t know if they’d been released or killed.’
In April 1975 he was taken to Santiago, to the Villa Grimaldi, then Tres and Cuatro Álamos. A month later he was released and taken to a place north of Valparaíso, returning to San Antonio in June. ‘My compañeros were gone, I was alone and frightened. After three months I started work again at the Pesquera Chile, taking the tails off langoustines.’
‘The fishery was used as a place of torture. I saw him where the nets were repaired, the bald guy. I didn’t know his name, but that is where I would see him. Twice in a week. With an accent, wearing a suit, so he stood out immediately.’ He remembered the guttural voice. ‘It was the only German accent.’
How old was the man?
‘I know you think I don’t remember,’ said Jorge Silva, ‘but I do.’
Do you want to see a video of Rauff, or hear his voice? I asked.
Silva looked at me and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t want to see it. It brings bad memories, like talking about Contreras.’ Terrible memories, so terrible, that a few years ago Jorge Silva tried to kill himself by jumping off the new bridge that crossed the Maipu River.
He was not happy about the exchanges with the German journalist who made the radio programme a few months earlier, he told me. ‘They wanted me to make connections about this German man. Of course I remember him, I didn’t know the name, but I would see him, in a suit, a strong impression, at the Pesquera. He was the right-hand man of the people in the fishing company.’
