Tuesday, July 11, 2006

I'm not surprised...

Former Aide says Augusto Pinochet was a coke dealer.

SANTIAGO, Chile, July 10 — Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s former intelligence chief, now one of his bitterest enemies, has implicated the disgraced dictator and one of his sons in a cocaine manufacturing and smuggling scheme and contends that it was one of the sources of General Pinochet’s illicit $28 million fortune.

Gen. Manuel Contreras, who ran the Directorate of National Intelligence, the Chilean secret police, during the 1970’s, made the charges in a document submitted last week to an investigating magistrate here. He also accused General Pinochet of embezzling money from secret government accounts that the dictator controlled during his 17 years in power, which ended in 1990.

According to General Contreras’s account, the cocaine was processed with General Pinochet’s authorization at a Chilean Army chemical plant in Talagante, south of here, during the 1980’s. General Pinochet’s son Marco Antonio and one of his business partners then arranged for the drugs to be transported to Europe and the United States, with payoffs going into secret bank accounts the Pinochet family held abroad, General Contreras’s account said.

The accusations were first reported Sunday in the Chilean newspaper La Nación. General Contreras has been in jail since January 2005 in connection with human rights abuses and was not available for comment. But his lawyer, Fidel Reyes, and judicial officials confirmed Monday that the account published Sunday accurately reflected the written statement General Contreras supplied to the magistrate.


Psilocybin induces mystical experiences. (This is news?) Unfortunately, the real experience is borne of hard work. But I'm not surprised...

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