JUSTICE : Jail Sentences May Not Spell End of Chile’s Letelier Case : Two former secret police officers are expected to appeal their convictions for 1976 murder of exiled Socialist.

SANTIAGO, Chile —  Retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, flanked by bodyguards and police, had just received formal notification of a Chilean judge’s seven-year sentence against him for ordering the murder of exiled Socialist Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.

“I’m not going to any jail, because justice is going to prevail,” Contreras told reporters.

The sentence, issued last Friday and handed to Contreras on Tuesday, was the long-awaited climax of the notorious “Letelier Case,” which began after the explosion of a bomb under Letelier’s car on Sept. 21, 1976.

But as Contreras suggested, the case is not over yet. He and Brig. Pedro Espinoza, an active-duty army officer who received a six-year sentence for his part in the murder, are expected to exhaust all possibilities for appeal.

Letelier’s family is appealing for longer sentences. But whether the two former secret police officers will go to prison is far from certain.

The case symbolizes the sensitive issue of human rights abuses under the military rule from 1973 to 1990. Former dictator Augusto Pinochet has remained as commander of the army since turning the government over to civilians in 1990. On several occasions since, tension has risen between the army and the elected government over pending human rights cases.

Reporters asked Contreras on Tuesday if he was asking for the solidarity of his army comrades. “I don’t ask for it, I have it,” he replied.

But Defense Minister Patricio Rojas Saavedra said that rumors early this week of an army alert were “absolutely false” and that army-government relations were “fluid and normal.”

Letelier was an ambassador to the United States and a prominent Cabinet minister under the government of Socialist President Salvador Allende, who died in a military coup led by Pinochet in 1973. As an exile in Washington, Letelier spearheaded a campaign for the international isolation of the Pinochet regime. The bomb that killed him on Embassy Row also killed his U.S. assistant, Ronnie Moffitt.

Virgilio Paz and Jose Dionisio Suarez, right-wing Cuban exiles, are serving prison sentences in America for participating in the murders. Michael Townley, an American who lived in Chile in the 1970s, and Armando Fernandez Lario, a former Chilean army captain, also have already finished U.S. sentences for the crime.

Townley, who confessed to building the fatal bomb, cooperated with American prosecutors in the case. Based partly on his testimony, the United States requested the extradition of Contreras and Espinoza, but the Chilean Supreme Court ruled against it.

The conservative Supreme Court almost invariably ruled in favor of military defendants in human rights cases. But Justice Adolfo Banados, appointed to the court by the civilian government in 1990, formally charged Contreras and Espinoza in 1991.

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Banados’ verdict against them was based partly on testimony from Townley, who said he had acted as an agent of the military regime’s secretive National Directorate of Intelligence. He said his orders to kill Letelier came from Contreras, director of DINA, through Assistant Director Espinoza.

Contreras, in his defense, alleged that Townley was an agent not of DINA but of the Central Intelligence Agency. In his 400-page sentence, Banados said that he found no proof of any CIA connection and ample proof of Townley’s relationship with DINA.

Townley last year accused Contreras and Espinoza of also ordering the 1974 bomb-murder of exiled Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife in Argentina. That murder is under judicial investigation in Buenos Aires. Contreras also is charged in Italy with the attempted murder in 1975 of Bernardo Leighton, an exiled Christian Democratic leader who was shot and wounded in Rome. In Chile, Contreras is implicated in more than 40 other cases of rights violations.