Nowhere do the CIA files explicitly document any high-level American collaboration with the Pinochet regime. Heavily censored and tailored so as to implicate the US executive only obliquely, the files fail to reveal the extent of American complicity with the junta. Nevertheless, a general picture of the horror it created does emerge. Although the secretary of state's answer to the request has been omitted from the files, the request as such is evidence of significant collaboration between the Chilean and American security forces. The declassified files, in turn, testify to the terror, while maintaining a safe distance between the US government and the junta.
Severe repression is planned.
The military is rounding up large numbers of people, including students and leftists and interning them. 300 students were killed in the Technical University when they refused to surrender in Santiago, the capital. Recently-released FBI reports, however, tend to blur the distance between US government agencies and the junta. Contreras and a Central American henchmen of a similar calibre were selected and trained by top US brass. The links between Latin America's commanders and dictators were forged in places like the US Army School of the Americas and other military schools in the US itself.