Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional

(DINA)

   / Directorate of National Intelligence

   The notorious Chilean secret police, established in June 1974 under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. The explicit purpose of DINA was to gather information from a variety of sources at the national level. Its implicit purpose, however, was to gather information on political opponents and to eliminate the leftist influence on Chilean society. The gathering of information actually began in November 1973, when a commission was established under Colonel (later General) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda. When DINA was created, Contreras Sepúlveda continued as its director and, to the dismay of other junta officers, reported directly to Pinochet Ugarte. He recruited from the intelligence units of the military—the army, carabineros (national police), navy, and air force—as well as from death squads active against the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) government of President Salvador Allende Gossens, especially Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty).

   DINA agents worked out of secret detention centers throughout the country, the most notorious of which was Villa Grimaldi, a former estate mansion. They abducted their victims under cover of curfew, and using information obtained from torture, murdered or disappeared persons perceived as subversives. To eliminate political opponents living in exile, DINA participated in a secret regional military network code-named Operation Condor. Condor has been linked to the assassination of Orlando Letelier del Solar, a former Chilean cabinet official, and his assistant Ronni Moffitt in the United States, and to an assassination attempt on Bernardo Leighton, one of the founders of the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (Christian Democratic Party), in Rome.

   In 1977, under international pressure owing to the murder of Letelier del Solar and Moffitt, Pinochet Ugarte dissolved DINA and replaced it with the Centro Nacional de Información (CNI, National Information Center).