Missing Persons

Marta Neira, a 29-year-old model, was arrested last Dec. 9 in Santiago by DINA, Chile's brutal secret police. According to a prisoners' report smuggled out of the Pirque Women's Prison, when Marta was last seen inside the Quilen detention center on Christmas Eve 1974, her nose was broken and she had welts all over her body. She had been subjected to electric shocks and to sexual abuse.

Luis Guajardo Zamorano, 23, a cycling enthusiast and engineering student at the University of Chile, was arrested at a bicycle repair shop in Santiago on July 20, 1974. Four days later, a priest called the Guajardo family to inform them that Luis had been hit by a car and was taken to the first aid post in the Santiago railroad station in the custody of DINA agents. According to the smuggled prisoners' report, however, a month later a witness saw DINA agents run over Guajardo's legs with a pickup truck in the courtyard of the Jose Domingo Canas detention center.

The two young victims of DINA are among at least 1,500 Chileans who have simply disappeared since the military, led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, seized power in September 1973. Their names also appear on two strange obituary lists that have recently surfaced outside of Chile.

The first list described Marta Neira as one of 60 Chileans killed in Latin America and Europe during a power struggle among leftist guerrillas. It was published in an obscure Buenos Aires weekly called Lea. In the same issue, the only one ever published, were editorial attacks against several Argentines who had recently incurred the displeasure of either President Isabel Peron or her hated adviser, former Social Welfare Minister Jose Lopez Rega. A check of the address given on Lea's title page revealed no building; near by, however, was a publishing house operated by the Argentine Ministry of Social Welfare.

The second list named Luis Guajardo as one of 59 exiled Chilean guerrillas who had clashed in a deadly shoot-out with Argentine police in the remote province of Salta. It appeared in Brazil in another justly obscure publication, a "newspaper" called O Dia. So far, no one has been able to locate the O Dia offices, and the Brazilian Press Association says it has never heard of the paper. Neither has anyone been able to confirm the spectacular shoot-out in Salta involving 59 supposed terrorists. Despite the questionable validity of both reports, they have been widely publicized in Chile's government-dominated press. Said El Mercuric: "Despising all law, [the terrorists] have ended up killing each other and putting into practice the most brutal of all laws, that of vengeance."

The two lists are not the only sign of collusion between DINA and sympathizers outside the country. Last month two mangled, bullet-ridden bodies were found in a burnt-out car in the Argentine town of Pilar, some 25 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. Miraculously un-charred, however, were documents that enabled the Argentine police to identify the corpses as those of two Chilean students--Jaime Robotham Bravo, 24, and Luis Guendelman Wisniak, 26, neither of them very active politically. Also conveniently intact was a placard attached to the bodies that said the students had been "executed by the MIR," the Chilean revolutionary leftist movement. The Chilean press has quoted government officials as saying that it was not DINA agents who had been kidnaping leftists but Marxist revolutionaries cunningly impersonating DINA agents.

Two Bodies. Relatives of Guendelman and Robotham found this official explanation unconvincing. They also claim that the bodies they were shown in the Pilar morgue could not possibly be those of the two students. The corpse identified as Robotham was that of a man nearly three inches shorter, and the alleged remains of Guendelman included part of a hip bone that his mother says had been removed in surgery several years ago. Both students were last seen in Chilean detention centers, and their families fear they died in Chile at the hands of DINA.

In the past, responsibility for burnt, bullet-ridden corpses like those found near Buenos Aires has been claimed by the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, a right-wing terrorist group publicly linked to Jose Lopez Rega. A working relationship would well serve the mutual interests of DINA and the A. A. A. DINA has a long list of names for which it needs bodies and the A.A.A. has bodies for which it needs names. DINA, it is thought, was particularly interested in whittling down its long list of missing persons before the arrival of a delegation from the U.N. Human Rights Commission that was to investigate charges of illegal detention and torture. In the end, Pinochet simply banned the U.N. investigators from the country.

American Banks. Conceivably, the decision may prove costly. Until recently, international publicity about political repression in Chile had undermined Pinochet's efforts to obtain desperately needed aid. In the past few weeks, however, a group of American banks that includes First National City, Bank of America, Morgan Guaranty and Chemical Bank, had put together a $70 million renewable credit for Chile. But with the furor over the apparently forged death lists growing stronger every day, what Pinochet hoped might be the beginning of a stream of foreign loans could quickly dry up.

Last week the scandal provoked the first outright protest against Pinochet's increasingly personal dictatorship. Four thousand people, including three bishops and 30 priests, crushed into Santiago's Lourdes Basilica to pray for the missing persons and their families. With all political meetings outlawed, a religious service is virtually the only form of assembly permitted in Chile.

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