Manuel Contreras, Pinochet-era former spy chief, dies in Chile

Contreras, who as head of the ruthless and now-defunct DINA secret police during the 1970s was the principal repressor of the Pinochet regime, had become increasingly ill in recent weeks and was no longer receiving medical treatment beyond pain medication, according to the officials.

He had been suffering from colon cancer, hypertension and diabetes for years.

As the DINA chief, Contreras oversaw Operation Colombo, a media effort to cover up the murder of dozens of Chilean dissidents; and Operation Condor, in which South American military regimes collaborated with each other to eliminate their respective enemies.

He was serving a combined sentence of more than 500 years in prison and was a defendant in 56 other trials at the time of his death on Friday night.

On Thursday, the head of the Communist Party of Chile, lawmaker Guillermo Teillier, sent a letter to Defense Minister Jose Antonio Gomez inquiring why Contreras had not been stripped of his rank of general, noting that an article in the country's Code of Military Justice requires such a step in the case of individuals sentenced to life in prison.

Teillier recalled that Contreras was serving two life sentences, one for the 1974 assassination of Chilean former army chief Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires and the other for 19 forced disappearances and a murder at Villa Grimaldi, a notorious 1970s torture center in Santiago.

Prats, a constitutionalist, had opposed Gen. Pinochet's plans to overthrow Chile's leftist government, which was ousted in a 1973 military coup.

The president of Chile's Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared, Lorena Pizarro, also lamented that the army never stripped Contreras of his rank and that he died in Santiago's Military Hospital.

The Pinochet regime killed more than 3,000 people, jailed around 38,000 others for political reasons - torturing most of them - and forced tens of thousands into exile.

Pinochet came to power in the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that toppled Chile's elected head of state, Socialist Salvador Allende, who killed himself with a gunshot to the head on the day of the putsch.

Pinochet died of a heart attack in December 2006 at the age of 91.