Juan Manuel "Mamo" Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda (4 May 1929 – 7 August 2015) was a Chilean Army officer and the former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Chile's secret police during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
In 1967, Contreras completed a Postgraduate Course as a General Staff Officer at the School of the Americas in Fort Gulick, located in the Panama Canal Zone.
It was during this period that he, along with a group of colonels and captains, began gathering information and devising an intelligence apparatus capable of infiltrating and dismantling leftist organizations.
Contreras established a network of informants in Chile, which included individuals affiliated with right-wing parties and groups like the Nationalist Front Fatherland and Liberty (Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad, FNPL).
Simultaneously, he maintained contacts with agents from the CIA and the Naval Intelligence Office in Valparaíso and San Antonio, who were active in Chile at the time.
These contacts provided him with manuals utilized by the secret police of various countries, such as the KCIA of South Korea, the SAVAK of Iran, and the National Information Service of Brazil.
A significant portion of Contreras's focus revolved around formulating strategies to neutralize or undermine the industrial unions in which the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), the Socialist Party, and to a lesser extent, the MAPU, wielded considerable political influence.
[5] In his March 13, 1978 "confession," Townley detailed how his many missions for DINA, which even included Operation Condor operations in Europe and the assassinations of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt, were carried out "following orders from Gen. Contreras.”[6] In a letter which Townley wrote to Contreras on March 1, 1978 under the alias J. Andres Wilson, he referred to him as "Don Manuel" and even indicated his belief that Contreras had not “let his Excellency [Pinochet] know the truth about this case” when he discussed the Letelier-Moffitt assassination.
By 1975, American intelligence reports had identified Contreras as the main obstacle to implementing a rational human rights policy within the Pinochet government.
As a result, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) was shut down in 1977, and a new organization called the National Informations Center (CNI) took its place.
[16][18] Contreras was also convicted by an Argentine court in connection with the assassination of the former Chilean army chief Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires, in 1974.
He was ordered to pay 50 million pesos to compensate for the 1974 abduction of Felix Vargas Fernandez and received another 15 years of prison at a March 2009 sentencing.
On 6 July 2012, he received an additional 10 years in prison over the detention and disappearance of the ex-militants José Hipólito Jara Castro and Alfonso Domingo Diaz Briones in 1974.
[17] In September 2013, under the orders of President Sebastián Piñera, the luxurious Penal Cordillera, in eastern Santiago, was closed,[19] and Contreras was transferred back to Punta Peuco in Tiltil, north of the capital.
[17][22] During the same May 2005 hearing to the Supreme Court, Contreras directly accused the CIA and the Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier.