The Supreme Court of Chile will request that the United States extradites three individuals, including an American former professional assassin, who are implicated in the kidnapping, torture and murder of a United Nations diplomat. Carmelo Soria was a Spanish diplomat with dual Chilean nationality, who in the early 1970s was employed in the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. In 1971, when the leftist Popular Unity party won Chile’s elections and became the nation’s governing coalition, Soria became an advisor to the country’s Marxist President, Salvador Allende. After the 1973 violent military coup, which killed Allende and overthrew his government, Soria used his diplomatic status to extend political asylum to a number of pro-Allende activists who were being hunted down by the new rightwing government of General August Pinochet.
Soria’s activities made him a target of
the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), Chile’s domestic security
service, which was a leading implementer of Operation CONDOR, a
widespread anti-communist program that began in 1968 with the
participation of most Latin American governments. CONDOR, which ended in
1989, included psychological operations, kidnappings and assassinations
that targeted leftwing organizations and activists. On July 14, 1976,
Soria, who had by then resumed his previous UN post, was kidnapped by
agents of the DINA. He was tortured and murdered under detention. His
body was found on July 16 inside a car that had been dumped in a river
in Santiago de Chile. The Pinochet government refused to investigate the
incident, saying that Soria had been driving under the influence of
alcohol.
On Tuesday, however, after an investigation that dates back to 1991, the Supreme Court of Chile said
that an extradition request will be sent to the United States for three
individuals who were allegedly directly implicated in the murder of
Soria. They are: Michael Townley, a US citizen; Armando Fernandez
Larios, of Chile; and Cuban Virgilio Pablo Paz Romero, all of whom were
agents of DINA at the time of Soria’s murder. Townley is a former professional assassin
who was hired by DINA for a series of murders. In 1978, a US court
convicted him for his participation in the assassination of Orlando
Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the US, who was killed
in 1976, when his car exploded in Washington, DC. Since his release
from prison, Townley has been living in the US under the Witness
Protection Program.
Larios, a Chilean national, was also
convicted of being “an accessory after the fact” in the Letelier
assassination and is also living in the US, having struck a plea bargain
with Washington. The third individual, Paz Romero, was sentenced to 12
years in prison in 1991, after admitting that he personally detonated
the remote-controlled car bomb that killed Leteler. He was paroled after
serving half of his sentence and was ordered to be deported to his home
country of Cuba. However, due to the absence of a bilateral deportation
agreement between Washington and Havana, Romero remained in the
indefinite custody of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. In
2001, the US Supreme Court ruled that indefinite detentions were
unconstitutional, so Romero was released and has been living freely in
the US since that time.
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