The Pinochet Regime at 50: The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofa Cuthbert

Car Bombing in Buenos Aires Marked First Act of State-Sponsored International Terror of Chilean Military Regime

On 50th Anniversary of Prats’ Assassination, Archive Posts Key U.S. and Chilean Records on Pinochet’s Use of Terrorism to Eliminate Threats to His Regime

Published: Oct 1, 2024
Briefing Book #
871
Edited by Peter Kornbluh

Washington, D.C., October 1, 2024 - On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents, including CIA intelligence reports and a judicial confession of the Chilean secret police operative, Michael Townley, who constructed, placed, and detonated the car bomb that killed Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974.

Only weeks after the bombing, a friend of the Prats daughters gave them a chilling message: the Pinochet regime planned to “celebrate the coup” every September by eliminating specific persons deemed a threat to the dictatorship. This information proved to be prescient. The following September, the Vice President of the Chilean Christian Democrat Party, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife were gunned down and critically injured on a street in Rome. A year later, on September 21, 1976, a car bomb similar to the one that killed the Prats took the lives of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C.



After Gen. Prats was assassinated, his daughters salvaged the manuscript of his memoir, which was subsequently published in Mexico.

“The first [assassination] was our parents,” Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book, Lo que tarde la justicia, published in Chile this week.

The compilation of records posted today marks an anniversary that was commemorated in Buenos Aires, where the attack took place, as well as in Chile, where the atrocities of the Pinochet era continue to cast a shadow over present-day politics. “The Prats case,” notes Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, “provides a dramatic reminder of the true terrorist nature of the military dictatorship—and of Pinochet himself.”

More:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-10-01/pinochet-regime-50-assassination-general-carlos-prats-and-sofia