Chilean police have recorded and spied on several journalists and correspondents

The Chilean Investigative Police (PDI) intercepted and transcribed journalists’ calls with Héctor Llaitul, the Mapuche leader arrested on August 24, among them Sputnik correspondent Carolina Trejo.

For almost 25 years, Hector Llaitul has been the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee (CAM) leader, which seeks to reclaim and recover historic Mapuche territory in south-central Chile.

Llaitul was arrested as part of an investigation under the State Security Law brought by the administration of former President Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022) following a complaint by the former superintendent of La Araucanía, in 2020, for his remarks following the sentencing of one of the members of his organization.

“Then don’t complain about resistance actions (…) we are going to respond as an organization every day that our peñis [brothers] are in jail,” Llaitul said on that occasion.

After his arrest, the investigation file of more than 4,000 pages, which was in charge of the High Complexity Prosecutor’s Office of La Araucanía, came to light, where it appears that the PDI intercepted and transcribed Llaitul’s calls with journalists.

In the file to which the media Ex-Ante, La Tercera, and Interferencia had access, it was found that on May 26, 2021, an undercover group of PDI agents arrived in Santiago, following Llaitul.

A surveillance report of May 2021 states that Llaitul met and arrived at the private home of journalist Carolina Trejo, a professor at the University of Chile, a contributor to Interferencia, and a correspondent for Sputnik.

“The agents in charge of the follow-up took photos of that moment, in which the journalist’s home can be seen and, in addition, they identified that the vehicle in which they had arrived at that house in Las Condes belonged to a relative of the journalist.

The report includes an individualization of Trejo’s relative,” reported Interferencia.

However, this was not the first time the PDI investigated Sputnik’s correspondent in Chile.

In 2020, the PDI had already intercepted two calls between Trejo and Llaitul, in which the journalist proposed to the CAM spokesperson to conduct several interviews with different media.

According to Interferencia, on April 15 and 16, 2020, the PDI intercepted a telephone conversation between the two and transcribed it in full with the labels:

• “April 15, 2020, 13:59 hours, duration 06:14 minutes, interlocutors:
• Héctor Llaitul and Carolina Trejo, and April 16, 2020, 21:07 hours, duration 15.54 minutes, interlocutors:
• Héctor Llaitul and Carolina Trejo”,

in which the journalist proposed interviews with the spokesperson of the CAM.

That the police “intercept calls between journalists and their sources is something serious because it cannot be that journalists are being followed and tapped in the exercise of our profession, not only because it violates our professional work and the protection of our sources, but it turns out to be practices that continue with this logic of the dictatorship of the worst times in Chile’s recent history,” Trejo told Sputnik.

“In this concept of the internal enemy, the Prosecutor’s Office determines that conversations proper to the exercise of the profession can be violated. In Chile, there is also a protection, the Press Law regarding the protection of professional secrecy and, in particular, the protection of the source, which would be violated,” he added.

Trejo refers to Article 7 of the Press Law, which states that journalists and foreign correspondents in Chile “shall have the right to maintain confidentiality about their source, which shall extend to the elements in their possession that allow them to identify it and they may not be forced to reveal it, not even judicially”.

“The feeling that I am left with is that when the press covers an issue or expands, let’s say, the sources of issues of national interest and, especially, in this case, the Mapuche cause, we become suspects. In other words, we are treated as suspects, violating all the norms of free journalism,” Trejo said.

CORRESPONDENTS PERSECUTED BY THE PDI

Trejo’s case is not the only one. Boris van der Spek, a Dutch correspondent for Chile Today, adds to the serious intimidation suffered by journalists who have covered the Mapuche issue.

Among them Gustavo Villarubia, José Tomás González, Mónica González and Paula Huenchumil.

“I realized they [the Police] were looking for me when I wasn’t in Chile; I was in Holland visiting my family,” he told Sputnik.

“My girlfriend’s family called me to tell me that the PDI was in front of their house for quite some time and that after a while, they rang the doorbell and showed them a photograph of me to ask where I was and what I was doing,” he added.

After the Police arrived at his girlfriend’s house, Van der Spek contacted the PDI to find out what was going on and only got the answer, “we are looking for you, and we can’t tell you why”.

“It was bizarre all this, the fact that they went to my house and didn’t want to tell me what was going on. They have my number and email, I am accredited press here in Chile, I have a face, I have to renew my accreditation with the Chilean government, so they have all my information and can contact me if necessary,” she said.

The situation worsened when Van der Spek returned to Chile after his vacation in the Netherlands.

“When I arrived at the airport, the person in charge of border protection asked me for my passport and left for a long time. Then he came back and handed me my passport without any explanation.”

Trejo explained to Sputnik that his case, like Van der Spek’s, was an act of intimidation by the Police. “It’s so that we don’t search for a plurality of sources necessary, let’s say, for a good exercise of journalism.”

In the same vein, Van der Spek pointed out that “people who investigate the Mapuche cause are seen as part of the conflict; they see it as if that person were involved.”

“I see it as intimidation because they don’t believe or don’t want, perhaps, that you talk to people like Llaitul or from the CAM. I understand that the Police are investigating, and for them, it is a threat. I understand all that, but what I do not understand and will never understand and will never accept is the fact that journalists are behind it,” he added.

“That is not acceptable because we are in a democracy. A journalist must do his work freely without having his cell phone tapped, without them going to your house, without them following you. These things are not acceptable. I find that the authorities have to pronounce themselves much more strongly against these actions,” he concluded.

Along the same lines as the correspondent of Chile Today, Carolina Trejo told Sputnik that journalists are being fingerprinted, in which personal data is also given out, including that of family members, “is not only serious but, I would say, absolutely abhorrent.”

“We are talking, or we are facing practices that, in the case of Chile, were linked to the times of the dictatorship,” he concluded.

After the wiretaps and files of journalists, there has been no explanation or condemnation of this fact by the government authorities.

With information from Sputnik