Soviets gun-running to rebels—Chile

Press, 13 August 1986, Page 10

Soviets gun-running to rebels—Chile

NZPA-Reuter Santiago Chile’s anti-subversion agency today displayed a wide array of United States and Soviet munitions and weaponry, which, it said, was part of a 12-tonne haul smuggled by Soviet fishing boats to Leftist guerrillas. The National Information Centre (C.N.1.) said its men had captured the munitions, which included 348 United States-made Ml 6 automatic rifles, 315 Soviet “Katyusha” rockets, and submarine mines, in raids in northern Chile last week. A C.N.I. spokesman said that six guerrillas of the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, four of them with Cuban training, had been captured. About 20 more had escaped, including at least two who were wounded in a shootout. The rifles and rockets were displayed to the military government and reporters yesterday with a large quantity of explosives, sophisticated Western communications systems, rubber boats often used by commandos, and wetsuits.

The President, General Augusto Pinochet, said after examining the cache, "This shows I have been telling the truth. There is enough here to arm 600 men, that’s to say in guerrilla terms the equivalent of a division or maybe 20,000. “Here there is ... 1300 kg of TNT ... with that they could blow up half of Santiago,” he said. A C.N.I. spokesman said one of the detainees was a top leader of the Manuel Rodriguez guerrilla group who had entered Chile secretly in January after 12 years in Cuba.

The C.N.I. official played a 20-minute video to reporters, which showed what appeared to be stacks of explosives hidden in a tunnel, as well as piles of Ml6s with markings that he said showed they had come from North Vietnam. He said the C.N.I. also had discovered a field hospital hidden nearby, as well as food and drink for 50 people for a month. The guerrillas had a communications system that could link to satellites and

be used to contact submarines, he said. The last delivery of arms had been on July 27, the spokesman said, when the guerrillas used boats to collect munitions from a Soviet vessel standing off the coast. He did not say how the cache was uncovered. But there had been two intense exchanges of fire with guerrillas in the area on Wednesday night, he said, and that at least two guerrillas had been wounded but escaped.