Hugo Wenzel was prepared to do anything for his dictator hero

Hugo Wenzel was a psychopathic killer who rose through the Chilean military to be the trusted sidekick of Augusto Pinochet.

Hugo Salas Wenzel was a general in the Chilean army during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In August 2007 he was the first former senior military official sentenced to life for human rights violations in Chile during the 1980s.

OBITUARY
Hugo Salas Wenzel

Soldier, mass murderer. Born Chile, October 30, 1935; died in Santiago Military
Hospital, August 11, aged 85.

When Salvadore Allende was constitutionally and popularly elected president of Chile in 1970, it was a test of those who instinctively believed the Marxist would, like communists everywhere, cling to power by whatever means, including violence against his own people. We never will know.

In 1970, the US soon set out its rules for engagement. Allende needed to be quickly overthrown. And they threw everything at him, following the principal of US national security adviser Henry Kissinger telling the shadowy 40 Committee that oversaw America’s covert operations: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

As with Kissinger, some senior Chilean army officers were unhappy there had not been a military coup in Allende’s first days. But General Rene Schneider Chereau, the army’s commander-in-chief, was a constitutionalist and wanted his forces to uphold their long tradition of remaining apolitical. Chile had generally been a civil, evenly governed country whose citizens appreciated the rule of law. Across the Americas, only Canada had a murder rate as low.

Rebel army groups set out to kidnap Chereau, three times. Finally, in another botched attempt, they killed him. Chileans reacted unexpectedly and embraced their newly elected communist government with enthusiasm.

Economic disorder would soon change their minds. It didn’t take long for Allende’s chaotic changes – nationalising industries, agrarian reforms (stealing private farmland, that is), freezing prices and raising wages – to have Chile headed in the direction Venezuela would go years later under Hugo Chavez.

The government was paralysed by strikes and its economy was shot by 1973, and the army, assisted by the CIA, put restive officers in charge of changing the government by force. After a failed attempt in June 1973, a coup that September did the trick and a besieged Allende killed himself with an AK-47 he had recently been given during a visit by Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Augusto Pinochet had been appointed commander-in-chief of the army three weeks before. Now he was running Chile, and would until 1990. The world didn’t know it yet, but among his senior officers was a sizeable cabal of murderous psychopaths not unlike the Hitler’s frontline of Bormann, Goering, Himmler and Goebbels. Sadly, too many of these remain little known, and even fewer have been punished. But some names remain prominent from an era during which, in a government-supervised program, up to 300,000 Chileans were raped, beaten, tortured, received electric shocks, put through mock hangings or were forced to watch while others were executed. At least 1300 people were murdered while others “disappeared”. The junta’s “enemies” were hunted down overseas and assassinated. (Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 after being indicted for human rights ­violations. He was held there 18 months and then returned to Chile but died before being convicted.)

However, we are very familiar with two architects of this savage and ferocious agenda: Manuel Contreras and Hugo Sala Wenzel, both of whom were charged and convicted of eliminating, through various means, Pinochet’s enemies. There were many enemies, of course, and countless murders.

Secret police boss Contreras was in jail when he died six years back serving a sentence of 529 years for kidnappings, assassinations and disappearances.

Intelligence chief Wenzel, among many crimes, arranged Operation Albania. There had been an attempt on Pinochet’s life late in 1986 and the junta hit out widely and with vengeance. The group suspected of the attempted assassination was targeted in June 1987. A dozen urban guerrillas were rounded up. The official story at the time was that they were killed in crossfire as security forces tried to arrest them at several addresses in Santiago. It was later revealed that they had been taken back to Wenzel’s headquarters where they were tortured, then taken to a suburban house and shot dead, the youngest being Esther Cabrer, 22. It was reported that after work that day Wenzel “entertained the personnel with a barbecue in the army non-commissioned officer’s casino – at the celebration, according to the case file, Salas Wenzel distributed bottles of whiskey”.

Human rights lawyer Nelson Caucoto described these convictions as “the great milestone of the democratic transition in human rights … the prosecution, detention and punishment of the two heads of the highest repressive bodies of the dictatorship: Salas Wenzel … and Manuel Contreras”.

Wenzel, one of too few of Pinochet’s ruthless lackeys to face justice, was given a life sentence. He has served it.