Mariana Inés Callejas Honores (11 April 1932 – 10 August 2016) was a Chilean writer and member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) who participated in several terrorist attacks, including the murder of General Carlos Prats and his wife, which was perpetrated in 1974 in Buenos Aires.
[citation needed] Her life changed dramatically at age 18 – she secretly left school after her favorite teachers, the Feinsilbert couple, were thrown out.
[citation needed] On the first kibbutz where Callejas lived, Nan Kissuphim (probably the current Kissufim), besides working, she studied Hebrew in special classes.
Michael, now successful, hoped to make peace with the family, but everything fell apart when rumors of the imminent bankruptcy of IOS arose because one of its directors, Bernard Cornfeld, had stolen millions of dollars.
First they settled in the house of Michael's grandparents in Pompano Beach (where he tried to sell Fords, without success), and then in Miami's Little Havana, to work at an AAMCO Transmissions shop.
Mariana began to attend a literary workshop at the University of Miami, joined marches called by the New Party, a group where her new friends were active and that, among other things, proposed the legalization of abortion and marijuana, opposed the Vietnam War, and supported the poet and senator Eugene McCarthy for president.
We used to go out on a yacht and we had a great time, but all that vanished when the ugly things happened.When Salvador Allende won the 1970 elections, Callejas decided to return to Chile, which she did despite the opposition of her husband, who did not want to leave his business for the economic uncertainty in Santiago.
There were fights, Michael had a romantic affair in the United States, he considered getting divorced, there were comings and goings, but finally the crisis was overcome and the couple saw each other again in Chile.
After participating in an operation to eliminate interference that prevented transmissions of the conservative Channel 5 of Concepción, a dependent of the Catholic University, "whose position was of decided opposition to the government of Allende", which ended with the death of a worker,[5] Townley was forced to flee.
Upon his return, Townley contacted the CIA again to offer his services (he had already done so in 1970, before going to Chile), conspired with the Cubans who worked at AAMCO, and tried to aid Fatherland and Liberty from Miami.
He decided to travel under a false name, that of his friend Kenneth Enyart, who gave him his birth certificate and social security card, documents with which he obtained a passport.
It was Colonel Pedro Espinoza [es], who, upon learning of Townley's work for Fatherland and Liberty, invited him to join the military dictatorship's secret police, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA).
In his novel Las cenizas del Cóndor, the Uruguayan Fernando Butazzoni tells how Callejas and Townley, along with their two small children, went with Colonel Espinoza to San Cristóbal Hill in Santiago, to test at a distance the detonators from the bomb that would eventually end the life of General Carlos Prats.
[5] But Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper affirm in their book devoted to the assassination of Orlando Letelier, Labyrinth, that both agreed to work for the DINA with pleasure, and that they considered it an honor.
[6] In addition to participating in the 1974 attack in Buenos Aires that ended the life of Prats, Callejas accompanied her husband on other missions, particularly one in Mexico the following year.
Among the objectives were Allende's widow Hortensia Bussi, the socialist Carlos Altamirano, and the communist Volodia Teitelboim, but the mission turned out to be a complete fiasco.
[6] In a U.S. Department of Justice affidavit from August 1991, U.S. Justice Department attorney Eric B. Marcy noted that between the years 1982 and 1990, she provided numerous "confession letters" which “were prepared by Townley prior to his expulsion from Chile in order to protect him from the fugitives Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza and to protect his expulsion from Chile.”[10] In a letter from March 1978, her husband wrote that their DINA missions were carried out by "following orders from Gen.
The large house, delivered in recognition of the services provided by the couple to the secret police of the dictatorship, was located in the upper part of Santiago, in Lo Curro [es], Via Naranja 4925.
[7] A voluminous mass of cubic concrete, rather ugly, with something of an orphanage, hospital, or other public building.Legally it was not theirs; it had been acquired by then-Army Major Raúl Iturriaga and a DINA lawyer who died in strange circumstances in 1976, under a false identity.
Callejas, on returning to Chile, began to frequent the literary workshop of Enrique Lafourcade, which was held at the National Library in Santiago and was attended by writers who would later form the New Chilean Narrative [es].
So I was the one who formally asked the painter to leave.Gonzalo Contreras says about that workshop (which met until 1978[12]): We were dopes and she was waiting for us with some trays of steak, cartons of cigarettes, bottles of pisco.
[13]Contreras and Carlos Franz – who maintains that Callejas "wrote good stories"[14] – arrived by bus at a bridge where Townley himself was waiting for them in a small car, and in the night, before the curfew, an employee took them back to the stop.
[16] Iturra affirms that Callejas is "a great writer", says that he "would be very honored" to take charge of the unpublished works she produces, and predicts that "after death she will be read avidly.
"[16] Cristián Aiguader – son of Jaume Aiguader, former mayor of Barcelona, minister of the Second Republic and one of the founders of the Republican Left – who arrived in Chile after the Spanish Civil War and prospered in Santiago as a trader and man linked to culture, describes Callejas in his book Lucha inconclusa: memorias de un catalán exiliado a Chile as the author of "some stories of heavy psychological weight."
"[17] Mariana Callejas published La noche larga in 1980, a book of stories with a black cover, in whose upper right corner there is a green eye behind bars.
It has to be something grand, so that others learn from his example, so the enemies learn.In that story, Callejas redeems Max, the murderer, and shows him to be sensitive, reading Walt Whitman and being touched when he sees a dead bird next to a statue.
According to the head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, it would have been she who pressed the button of the bomb that killed the general and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, in Buenos Aires on 30 September 1974.
[1] In 2008 the Uruguayan director Esteban Schroeder premiered the film Matar a todos, inspired by the life of Mariana Callejas, who is played by Chilean actress María Izquierdo.
[27]The workshop and what happened at her home in Lo Curro – literary evenings in parallel with the detention and torture in her basement – has led to the writing of several texts: the chronicle Las orquídeas negras de Mariana Callejas by Pedro Lemebel[28] (included in his book De perlas y cicatrices [es], LOM, Santiago, 1998); a part of the novel By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño;[29] the story "Caída en desgracia" by Carlos Iturra (part of the volume Crimen y castigo, Catalonia, Santiago, 2008).
El taller, the actress and director Nona Fernández's first play, which premiered in 2012, was about Callejas's literary salon and its disturbing intersection with political torture and assassination.