Focus on Healing Arts After Kidnapping Conviction
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Version 0 of 1. SANTIAGO, Chile CLAD in a white medical robe, faded bluejeans and socks, Tomás Cassella gently glides his hands over his patient while New Age music plays softly in the background. With sweeping motions, Mr. Cassella, a mild-mannered reiki master, symbolically amasses any lingering negative energy, cups it into his hands and blows it away. “How do you feel?” he asks Gabriel, a 63-year-old engineer undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. Gabriel, who withheld his last name because he said most of his friends were unaware he had cancer, simply smiled and nodded from underneath a thin blanket. He slowly got up off the cot, and the two men embraced. “Tomás has helped me so much, unconditionally, and has never charged me anything,” Gabriel said. “So when I learned about his past, I chose not to think about it. It just doesn’t make sense.” Last year, Gabriel said he looked up Mr. Cassella on Google to confirm the spelling of his last name. But what he discovered was that the warm, caring man who had helped him heal for over a year had been convicted on kidnapping charges. Mr. Cassella, 66, a former Uruguayan Army colonel, was extradited to Chile in 2006 with two other officers and prosecuted for the abduction of Eugenio Berríos, a former chemist for Chile’s secret intelligence agency during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Mr. Berríos was killed in Uruguay in the early 1990s. A criminal investigation established that once the Pinochet government ended in 1990, the army’s intelligence department began what it called “casualty control,” taking former agents wanted for human rights crimes clandestinely out of the country to evade justice. In 1991, Mr. Berríos and at least two other agents were escorted under false names to Argentina and then Uruguay with the cooperation of military officers in those countries. Mr. Cassella, the investigation found, was ordered to act as a liaison. But Mr. Berríos’s increasing emotional instability, depression and heavy drinking — and a scandalous episode in 1992 in which he ran to a police station claiming that his handlers were out to kill him — had made him a liability for his Chilean protectors and Uruguayan hosts, and he disappeared, the investigation found. His body was found buried on a Uruguayan beach in 1995, two bullet wounds to the head. In 2010, Mr. Cassella was sentenced to eight years for kidnapping and illegal association, and he is now in the appeal process. Although he acknowledges having known Mr. Berrios, he claims the charges are preposterous. “I didn’t know they were using false names, who they were or what they were doing in Uruguay,” he said of the Chilean agents. “Berríos was never kidnapped. He lived in a luxurious apartment, his wallet was full of money and he was free to move about. His wife used to visit him. There was no illegal organization. I was just their contact in case he needed anything.” For more than six years, Mr. Cassella has lived in a legal limbo in Chile, prohibited from leaving. All the while, he has pursued his healing therapies, claiming to help restore sight to blind patients, reduce tumors and get children up from wheelchairs. “I see these kind of cases all the time. Inoperable brain tumors, for example, shrink until they disappear, without chemotherapy or radiation,” he said. “I’ve done it.” MR. CASSELLA was familiar with Chile long before his legal troubles began. In 1975, while both countries were under military rule, he won a yearlong scholarship to the Chilean Army’s Parachute and Special Forces School in Peldehue, the site of political executions and anti-subversive commando training after the 1973 coup. There he first met Chilean intelligence agents later convicted of human rights crimes. Mr. Cassella returned to Uruguay to found its first parachute instruction center in 1976, under Infantry Battalion 14. It was in this battalion, two years later, that an antiterrorist squadron called Scorpion was trained, according to the army’s Web page. Over the past year, criminal inquiries into human rights violations have found the remains of two “disappeared” victims buried in a field next to Battalion 14. Mr. Cassella said he had no knowledge of executions or the burial of political prisoners in his unit. He has not been charged with any human rights crimes or the Berríos affair in Uruguay. Later, Mr. Cassella was appointed head of the Counterintelligence Company at the Army’s General Command, and he went to Chile once again to attend, in 1988, a monthlong course offered by the successor group to Chile’s secret intelligence agency. When in mid-1993 an anonymous source alerted Uruguayan legislators to Mr. Berríos’s presumed abduction, Mr. Cassella suddenly became front-page news. His life had changed forever, but not only because of the missing Chilean agent. Earlier that year, his brother-in-law learned he had an inoperable cancer. Mr. Cassella and his sister embarked on a desperate search for alternative treatments and heard about a Filipino healer who would be in Argentina for a weeklong healing congress. They signed up. “That’s when I first learned about reiki, working with energy, stones, aromatherapy, magnets,” Mr. Cassella said. “I was skeptical but open to the experience. A woman with severe multiple sclerosis offered a heartbreaking testimony. And there I was, a tough parachuter and commando, with tears streaming down my face.” His soul-searching began. In late 1993, with the Berríos case in full flare, Mr. Cassella took his first reiki class. His military comrades would jest that he had become “a little girl.” What was he searching for? “The purpose in life, the origins, why we are here, what we should do.” The Berríos affair impeded his promotion to general in 2000, so he retired from the army and set up a jewelry import business with his former wife. As the business boomed, a Chilean judge indicted him and two other Uruguayan officers in 2002 on the Berríos case. Four years later, they landed in Chile. “I DON’T believe in coincidence, but in causality,” he said. “So there has to be a reason I am in Chile now, and that reason has to be very important for keeping me here for so long.” By the time he got to Chile, he had mastered three levels of reiki and learned a number of other therapies. When he was released on bail after a five-month detention, the Uruguayan Army helped him rent an apartment. Next door was a yoga center with a sign offering reiki. The center put him in contact with reiki therapists and through them he became a volunteer at the Luis Calvo Mackenna public children’s hospital in Santiago. For six years, Mr. Cassella has been “devoted in body and soul” to reiki and syntergetics — a synthesis of conventional, homeopathic, Chinese and Hindu medicine, reiki, color therapy, flower essences, shamanism, magnet therapy and other healing techniques. Even friends and military comrades from Uruguay see him for treatment. Living off a generous military pension plan, Mr. Cassella is now in charge of all the syntergetic volunteer groups at the hospital and provides free reiki services for cancer patients on Mondays, syntergetics on Thursdays and reiki for bone-marrow transplant patients on Fridays. The rest of his time he treats patients from his home or a private center, all free, and teaches reiki. Mr. Cassella also coordinates “healing caravans,” in which therapists go to remote towns. Everyone in the medical and alternative therapy world knows who he is and why he is in Chile, he contends, but “no one has said a word, not ever.” “I don’t care about the Berríos case anymore,” he said. “I don’t read what the papers say about it, and I don’t participate in the court proceedings if I don’t have to. I’m not going to poison myself with it.” There are two Uruguayan syntergetics practitioners in the world; one lives in Spain, and the other is Tomás Cassella. That is the underlying purpose of his extradition, he believes. “I understand now why this happened to me, and I can let it go,” he said. “The Berríos case was a breaking point in my military career and in my life, but for the better.” |