Hermán Brady

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Hermán Julio Brady Roche ( 1919 - May 16, 2011 in Santiago de Chile ) was a Chilean major general and politician who was one of the main initiators of the military coup of September 11, 1973. During the military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet , he was Minister of Defense between 1975 and 1978 and then President of the National Energy Commission CNE (Comisión Nacional de Energía de Chile) from 1978 to 1990 . During the coup on September 11, 1973, he and General Sergio Arellano Stark played a key role in the military actions in Santiago de Chile.

Life

Military career, first conspiracies and promotion to brigadier general

Brady, son of a mother from the USA , entered the military after attending school and was trained as an infantry officer. In 1949 he completed a course for infantry officers at the US Army Infantry Center at Fort Benning , which he graduated with honors. After various posts as an officer, he took over the professorship for military history and strategy at the Academy of War (Academia de Guerra Militar) in 1961 . He then became commander of the Tucapel Regiment in Temuco , before graduating from 1967 to 1968 and then himself an instructor at the Inter-American Defense College (IADC) in Washington, DC between 1968 and 1969 .

After his return to Chile, he was one of the alleged participants in October 1969 when General Roberto Urbano Viaux Marambio occupied the barracks of the Tacna regiment in Santiago de Chile during the tenure of President Eduardo Frei , thereby triggering a serious political-military crisis. In October 1970 Brady was once again one of the alleged accomplices of General Viaux when he, with the support of the United States, tried to prevent Salvador Allende from being elected president. This also resulted in the kidnapping and later shooting of the then Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General René Schneider Chereau , who was loyal to the constitution of Chile and supported a fair presidential election. Brady was Schneider's negotiator, but according to later information also a friend of Viaux and privy to his plans.

After that, Brady was first director of the Army NCO School (Escuela de Suboficiales del Ejército) in 1970 and then commander of the 5th Army Division stationed in Iquique . Because of his family background and his numerous courses, he had close ties to the USA.

In January 1971 the Senate refused to approve Brady's promotion to brigadier general . It was only after Defense Minister José Tohá González intervened directly with President Salvador Allende that he was finally promoted to Brigadier General and, in March 1972, appointed Director of the War Academy. In Allende's first years in office he was one of the five army generals who were loyal to the constitution, while later, like Generals Pinochet and Orlando Urbina Herrera , he only pretended to be loyal to the constitution and to the president.

Attitude towards Allende and preparations for the September 11, 1973 military coup

Even in public he was considered Allende's military person, especially since in January 1973, at the invitation of the government of the Soviet Union, he had completed a course at the military academy of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces .

In the immediate period leading up to the 1973 coup, Brady took an ambiguous position within the generals. Exemplary of this was his changeable attitude during the crisis in the high command when the wives of several active generals such as Sergio Arellano Stark , Sergio Ñuño Bawden , Óscar Bonilla Bradanovic and Javier Palacios Ruhmann criticized the army commander in chief, General Carlos Prats González , which Brady was an act of the riot. At the following meeting of the generals, only General Mario Sepúlveda Squella , commander of the 2nd Army Division, and Guillermo Pickering , commander of the military institutes, announced their resignation from active military service to the acting commander-in-chief of Army Pinochet in order to show their solidarity with General Prats . Otherwise there was no reaction from the General Corps. Two days later, Pinochet officially succeeded Prats as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, while Brady succeeded Sepúlveda as Commander of the 2nd Army Division and commander of the Santiago de Chile garrison.

In the months leading up to the coup, Brady was actually one of the main conspirators who met to prepare for the coup. The meetings were held at a house in Lo Curro, a district of Santiago de Chile, owned by Jorge Gamboa, a cousin of General Arellano Stark. Among the permanent participants of the meeting included the army generals Sergio Arellano Stark, Washington Carrasco , César Benavides and Ernesto Baeza Michelsen , the generals of the Air Force Gustavo Leigh , Nicanor Diaz Estrada and Francisco Herrera Latoja and admirals José Toribio Merino , Patricio Carvajal , Ismael Huerta , Sergio Huidobro and Hugo Castro Jiménez . Later the generals of the Carabineros, Arturo Yovane and César Mendoza , took part in these meetings.

Speaking to Secretary of Defense Orlando Letelier on September 7, 1973, Prats expressed doubts about Brady's loyalty to President Allende: “Well, Brady makes a fuss about his friendship with President Allende, but in fact he is a person I have little confidence in ('Bueno, Brady hace mucho alarde de su amistad con el Presidente Allende, pero realmente es una persona a la cual yo no le tendría gran confianza.') On the other hand, however, he expected the Army Evaluation Committee (Junta de Calificaciones de Ejército) would request Brady's resignation within the next 20 days.

Military coup of September 11, 1973

In a report on the military coup known as “the day of decision” ('El día decisivo') , Pinochet was reassured that Brady had not resigned: “… Fate allowed me to fill two key positions with two friends, who had my absolute confidence: On the same day the order came that Hermán Brady should take over command of the garrison of Santiago de Chile and the 2nd Army Division; and the other ( César Raúl Benavides ) took command of the military institutes. That cleared the way. ” (‚… El destino me permitió ubicar a dos de mis mejores amigos en puestos de mi más absoluta confianza. Ese mismo día se dio la orden para que asumiera la Comandancia de la Guarnición de Santiago y de la II División a Hermán Brady; y al otro (César Raúl Benavides) que tomara el mando del Comando de Institutos Militares. Con esto el camino quedaba despejado ') .

On the morning of September 11, 1973, President Allende received reports of suspicious troop movements in the Guardia Vieja regiments in Los Andes and Aroncagua in San Felipe . Thereupon Brady, as the commander in charge of the 2nd Army Division responsible for these garrisons, confirmed these troop movements to the president. A little later the president received new news that the garrison of Santiago de Chile had quadrupled for no apparent reason. Defense Secretary Orlando Letelier received news from Brady that he was the last to give orders to reinforce the garrison to protect the capital's fuel supplies. Brady also untruthfully claimed to the minister that he had gathered his troops to tackle any excesses over the protests of Senator Carlos Altamirano Orrego and MP Oscar Guillermo Carretón .

Brady then deployed commanders of the units in Santiago de Chile as follows: César Benvides ordered the troops east of Avenida Vicuña Mackenna with headquarters in the military academy, Sergio Arellano Stark was responsible for the units in the city center with a command post on the hills west of the capital , north of the Río Mapocho was Colonel Felipe Geiger Stahr, the commander of the Buin regiment , while in the south between the Avenida Departemental to San Bernardo was under the command of Colonel Koenig from the infantry school.

Minister of Defense, President of the National Energy Commission and charges of human rights abuses

After the death of Óscar Bonilla Bradanovic on March 3, 1975, Brady took over on March 7, 1975 as his successor as Minister of Defense (Ministro de la Defensa) . Within the cabinet, he was one of the most important supporters of the president of the ruling military junta, General Pinochet, alongside Interior Minister Benavides. He held the post of Defense Minister until April 14, 1978, when he was replaced by Benavides, who in turn was succeeded as Interior Minister Sergio Fernández Fernández, who also remained Minister for Labor and Social Welfare. In the period that followed, there were various press reports speculating about Brady's dismissal as Secretary of Defense. The journalist Mauricio Carvallo of the newspaper Hoy suspected that his dismissal was linked to the murder of former Defense Secretary Orlando Letelier on September 21, 1976 in Washington, DC and the expulsion of the national secret service DINA ( Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional ) , Michael Townley , from the USA.

After leaving the cabinet, he was given a leave of absence for several weeks and during this period he no longer appeared in public in uniform. However, his request to retire from active military service was rejected. In interviews during this time, Brady expressed his loyalty to Pinochet and its politics and doubted that there had actually been cases of disappeared people ( Desaparecidos ) . He also stated that as Minister of Defense he was not responsible for DINA and that he therefore had no knowledge of its activities. However, he confirmed informal contacts and raised concerns that with the dissolution of DINA in 1977 there would no longer be a political problem. However, Brady was one of the most important allies of the then director of the DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras .

Brady, whom Pinochet referred to as a long-time friend ('amigo por muchos años') , was only appointed President of the CNE (Comisión Nacional de Energía de Chile) on June 8, 1978, and took up this newly created position on July 1, 1978 . This sent a signal that he should continue to hold public offices. In September 1979 he retired from active military service.

He held the position of President of the National Energy Commission (CNE) for almost twelve years until he was replaced by Jaime Tohá González on March 11, 1990.

In 1999 a Spanish judge brought charges against 60 officers and high-ranking representatives of the military dictatorship on suspicion of human rights violations against Spanish nationals. Brady was specifically accused of involvement in the case of Carmelo Soria, who was kidnapped on July 14, 1976 by agents of the National Secret Service DINA and whose body, which showed evidence of torture, was found in a canal two days later. In May 2001, the 5th Central Investigative Court of the Audiencia Nacional de España in Madrid applied for an international arrest warrant against Brady at Interpol . In 2005, he was also charged with participating in the storming of the La Moneda presidential palace during the military coup.

Brady, who was married with two children, died of complications from apallic syndrome in the military hospital of Santiago de Chile (Hospital Militar de Santiago del General Luis Felipe Brieba Aran) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Florencia Varas: Conversaciones con Viaux , Eire Impresora, Santiago, 1972, p. 114
personal data
SURNAME Brady, Hermán
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brady Roche, Hermán Julio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean major general and politician
DATE OF BIRTH 1919
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 2011
Place of death Santiago de Chile