On June 30, a Chilean judge sentenced Manuel Contreras, who led the National Intelligence Directive (DINA) during the rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, to double life sentences for the assassination of Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert. DINA was Pinochet’s CIA-backed secret police that tortured and assassinated political prisoners.
Prats served as Chilean army general under Socialist President Salvador Allende. After the 1973 U.S.-backed coup led by Pinochet, Prats and Cuthbert went into exile in Argentina, where in 1974 they were murdered in a car bombing.
The long-awaited sentencing comes 34 years after the crime. Pinochet, who was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, died in 2006—after being indicted for a number of crimes but before being found guilty for any of the atrocities he committed.
Angelica Prats, one of the couple’s daughters, told reporters, “This sentence is justice for all that our parents lived through.”
