Mariana Callejas, the spy who organized literary gatherings at a DINA barracks

They were lively and joyful gatherings amidst the darkness of the Pinochet dictatorship . Despite the curfew, as if terror didn't exist, promising and already established writers met every week on the third floor of a strange mansion in the Lo Curro neighborhood . The hostess was named Mariana Callejas , and she coordinated the literary workshop, welcomed her guests with food and drinks, and chose the music for the dances. She was a mother of five children. She was a writer by vocation. And she was an agent of the National Intelligence Directorate ( DINA ).

Callejas and her husband, American Michael Townley , arrived at this three-story property before that corner of Santiago de Chile became the exclusive residential area it is today. The house was a gift from the DINA (National Institute of Statistics and Census), a prize , in fact, for the assassination of former Chilean Interior Minister Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, in the Argentine neighborhood of Palermo. As part of Operation Condor, the two planted a bomb in their car and detonated it remotely.

At that time, there wasn't much going on on the slopes of Lo Curro Hill, not even public transportation that reached it. Therefore, what was happening in that house guarded by soldiers remained hidden from curious neighbors. Neither the literary gatherings, nor the torture sessions of kidnapped dissidents, nor the production of sarin gas that could kill an adult in seconds, nor the murder of the Spanish diplomat Camilo Soria, nor the raising of the owner's three minor children.

"I was interested in her crimes and her literature, but also in her domestic life, " Chilean journalist and academic Juan Cristóbal Peña (Santiago, Chile, 1969), author of Letras Torcidas (Twisted Letters: A Profile of Mariana Callejas) (UDP Editions), tells Clarín. This is an extraordinary exploration of a disconcerting life.

In his office in the Journalism Department at Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, it's Thursday afternoon, and the journalist is working surrounded by a poster of Roberto Arlt, a photo of his children, a succulent Sansevieria Laurentii , and a whiteboard with some pending tasks waiting for him. Four books are stacked on the table: Pinochet's Sicarios by Benedicto Castillo; Animales mitológicos by Rocío Casas Bulnes; Primer viaje ronda el mundo by Antonio Pigafetta; and El simples arte de escribir by Raymond Chandler. Peña prepares to answer Clarín 's questions while a metal band rehearses in the school's courtyard. "Frankly, I don't know if it's a tribute band or a parody of a group like Judas Priest, Scorpions, or Mötley Crüe," he says.

–Your book was published in 2024. What was the perception of Mariana Callejas in the country at that time?

–Much was written about Mariana Callejas in the 1980s and 1990s in the press, partly because she herself enjoyed exposure, and partly because of that extraordinary track record that interweaves crime and literature. There have also been attempts to decipher her through film, literature, and playwriting. All are possible and complementary interpretations that contributed to shaping a black legend. I perhaps see her in a more prosaic light. I was interested in her crimes and her literature, but also in her domestic life. After all, she was a woman you could run into in a neighborhood store, at a doctor's office, at a book launch. In fact, she had a fairly active social life, partly because she never paid for her crimes and therefore enjoyed impunity and ease.

Callejas was interested in socialism throughout her life. She then traveled to a kibbutz in Israel to help build the country. She lived and chronicled 1950s New York, and ended up working as a DINA spy. How is it possible to change so much, or, in any case, what of all this was authentic about her?

–It seems to me that all of that was genuine, although she was guided by curiosity, by adventure, and by the sheer pleasure of adrenaline. As Borges wrote in the story "The Dead Man," which serves as the epigraph to my book, "she doesn't know which side is right, but she is attracted by the pure taste of danger, like others are by cards or music." In that sense, the fact that she ended up working as an agent in Pinochet's political police was accidental and useful to her material needs at the time, during a period when she was unemployed and thought she could make a career as a songwriter or, ultimately, as a writer. In any case, there is a great banality in her actions, a senselessness, and, as her eldest son told me, a lack of political conviction that makes everything she did as an agent of international terrorism even more brutal and perverse.

–You've said that "Mariana Callejas never fit the stereotype of someone from the DINA." What was the general profile of someone from the DINA, and why did the organization keep someone with such a distinct style like her?

–The vast majority of DINA agents were military personnel or police officers who dressed in civilian clothes and had military manners and interests: conservative and Catholic people, guided by a blind and elemental anti-communism. In that sense, Callejas and her husband had little to do with that profile. They were anti-communists, of course, as politically illiterate as the others, but unlike the average dictatorship agent, they were rather liberal, somewhat hippie, cosmopolitan, with more sensitive and diverse interests, especially her: literature, for example, interested her much more than politics, which bored her. And why was the DINA interested in her? Well, because she operated alongside her husband, and they made an excellent pair as agents of international terrorism. As seen in the series The Americans, an upper-middle-class couple with children is a perfect cover for concealing operations and crimes.

Callejas argued in court that her role in the murder of Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert, as well as in other attacks (successful or unsuccessful), was marginal or nonexistent, and that she only accompanied her husband because he was jealous. What was her true role in the Prats case in particular?

–She was a complement to Michael Townley, who knew how to prepare and detonate explosives, as well as how to purchase electronic equipment in the United States for espionage and counterespionage, and how to repair juicers, televisions, and irons for the wives of Chilean army officers. Townley was up for any duty, so to speak, but none of the important things he did abroad could have been done without his wife's support, without her presence and support, because ultimately, that man needed validation and a strong, confident woman at his side.

–After Prats's death, the DINA gave Callejas and his family a strange house in Lo Curro, which, instead of becoming just a family home, became a military barracks, a laboratory for producing sarin gas, an electronics workshop, and a literary workshop. How did these activities coexist?

–I don't know if you saw the film "Zone of Interest ," about the family home of the commander in charge of Auschwitz, adjacent to this Nazi extermination camp. Well, something similar happens here. The Lo Curro mansion was a barracks or operations center for Pinochet's political police, but it was also a family home like any other—mom, dad, young children who came and went from school and sometimes invited their classmates over for a nice afternoon. Like the Hoss family in that film, the Townley Callejas could straddle several levels at once; they could be excellent hosts to their friends, very affectionate with their children, and, at the same time, in that same barracks, plan murders, receive detainees, and house a chemical laboratory where sarin gas was manufactured. As this film and the book on which it is based rightly observe, and as Hannah Arendt also observes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, evil is never absolute; evil—hence perversity—can coexist alongside noble attitudes.

–It's logical that young or amateur writers would join Enrique Lafourcade's workshop at the National Library in Santiago, but it's less understandable that a novice writer would become the focal point for the next literary generation. How did that happen, and who supported her?

–That remains a great mystery, writers and aspiring writers who for at least a couple of years regularly attended the literary workshop Mariana Callejas set up in her home-barracks in Lo Curro and who never noticed anything strange, despite all the signs and evidence. I think it has to do with a self-deception effect: people who don't see or want to see the obvious, who don't want to believe or hear talk of horrors, because they prefer to have a good time and dance to the rhythm of Abba and read high literature before discussing those unpleasant and mundane matters of politics. On the other hand, as Bolaño says with a certain irony in his novel "Nocturno de Chile ," which speaks of that house and of literary life in 1970s Chile, in those years of obscurantism and intellectual decay, there weren't many other places to go and cultivate the spirit and the noblest arts.

–You examine in detail whether the people who gathered at Lo Curro once or even twice a week to read stories and celebrate parties could have been unaware of what was happening there. There are stories and novels that reveal an awareness of this. The testimonies collected in your book mostly say they weren't. What do you think after the entire research process?

–It's hard to believe that the most frequent attendees of the parties or literary workshops at that house knew that, in addition to being a family home, Lo Curro was a DINA barracks. But it's also hard to believe they didn't understand that they were frequenting a house linked to the heart of the dictatorship. The evidence was plain to see: cars with antennas and radio transmitters, armed guards, telecommunications equipment, permission to circulate and hold parties during curfew hours. I have the impression that the most frequent writers—Carlos Franz, Gonzalo Contreras, Carlos Iturra—simply turned a blind eye because it was convenient for them and they were very well looked after by the hostess and the domestic staff.

–Is it possible to evaluate Callejas's stories without being influenced by what is known about his life and political actions?

–It seems to me that it's impossible to abstract Mariana Callejas's literature from her role in state terrorism. It's an unavoidable fact of the case. We're not talking about a writer who supported a dictatorship, like Borges or Céline, or even an official of a dictatorship: we're talking about the woman who was the protagonist of the Chilean dictatorship's most notorious international crimes. Her literature is permeated by her crimes, and vice versa, even more so because a good portion of her stories were written during the period when she acted as an agent of international terrorism, and because her most valuable stories, in my opinion, were written precisely during this period and deal with leftist guerrillas who detonate bombs and carry out kidnappings and assaults. Along with the stories set in New York, the stories about guerrillas seem to me to be the most redeemable, if not the best, especially because the author's perspective, far from containing a moral reproach for her characters, is compassionate, as if she herself belonged to that world.

–Do you find literary merits in line with the recognition you received (sometimes through the direct intervention of Enrique Lafourcade)?

–It must be taken into account that these are self-published stories, and if they had been professionally edited, they could have been greatly improved.

–When the democratic transition began in Chile, Mariana Callejas correctly sensed that the change would not favor her. What would you say were the defining events that shaped her life from then on?

–Since her role as a secret agent was exposed in 1978, and especially after the return to democracy in 1990, she became increasingly alone. She was a pariah in literature and politics, despised by both opponents of the dictatorship and its supporters, who considered her a traitor for her collaboration with the US justice system in the Letelier case. And although she was surrounded by the Chilean and Argentine justice system, which requested her extradition for the murder of Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires, that wasn't what mattered most to her. Not the loneliness, the scorn, or the risk of paying for her crimes with jail time. What really mattered to her was that the publishing world, despite all her persistence, despite her attempts and demands, closed its doors to her time and again. That, in the end, was the only possible sentence: disqualifying her as a writer.

–You interviewed her on several occasions. What were those encounters like, and what aspects of her and her life did they reveal to you?

–Although I conducted a series of interviews in the twilight of her life, a year before she fell ill with Parkinson's and was placed in a nursing home, she remained a vital and intriguing person, with a penetrating gaze, self-confident, somewhat mystical, with the same brazenness as always, without taking the gravity of her actions seriously. As can be seen in that series of interviews I had with her, rather than confronting her—because she repeatedly denied the crimes, as is the case with most agents—I strove to understand her motivations and explore domestic and literary aspects that would help me understand the complexity of the character and the very crimes in which she actively participated. I think that helped me understand the banality of her actions.

Crooked Letters. A Profile of Mariana Callejas , by Juan Cristóbal Peña (UDP Editions).