Chile by night

In the basement with Pinochet's fascist government agents ... Torture and executions ... CIA concerned when the regime's murders moved to Rome and Washington ... United States pulling the strings ... Miss Lumière reviews Mary & Mike 

Augusto Pinochet: backed by the CIA, up to a point

It's 1973. In a sunny, leafy suburb of Santiago hirsute men in mustard-brown flares and slender women in Pucci blouses, leather boots and aqua eye shadow are having a raucous pool party to celebrate the birthday of five-year-old Simon.

The camera moves steadily below ground level where we see a bloodied, naked, hooded man having his cojones deep-fried.

He is a priest suspected of supporting the recently ousted socialist/democrat president, Salvador Allende.

This is General Augusto Pinochet's Chile and it sets the tone for the six scarifying episodes which follow.

Mary & Mike dramatizes the true story of American-born Michael Townley who, along with his wife, Chilean writer Mariana Callejas, committed torture and murder on behalf of Chile's secret police the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA).

Mike, a cool blonde coldly played here by Andrés Rillón, is a sometime mechanic and tinkerer with electronics, a skill the new military dictatorship finds more than valuable in the making and despatching of bombs (and political opponents).

Mariana (Mary) a chilling performance by Mariana Loyola, is a woman who relishes power and position (no matter what political complexion) and pursues it via her role as a terrorist for the Pinochet regime and as a would-be literary figure in Chile's cultural life.

There are several terrifying juxtapositions of her bohemian writer's salon conducted upstairs in the DINA-supplied villa with scenes of torture and chemical weapons experiments in the basement.

A chamber of horrors underneath the lush, seventies surface.

Stylistically, Mary & Mike is a production designer's dream, albeit one which quickly becomes a nightmare for anyone who comes close.

That includes the couple's children - troubled teenager Cony (Consuelo Carreño) whose boyfriend is summarily "disappeared" and Simon (Elías Collado) who is profoundly deaf as a consequence of one of his father's experiments with explosives. 

A number of "liberal-minded" writers from Mary's "salon" also find themselves at the end of a cattle prod.   

The producers of this series (Matias and Macarena Cardone) have largely been faithful to the crimes perpetrated and the characters involved, although Pinochet himself escapes dramatic attention, seen only fleetingly.

Nevertheless, his spectre is everywhere. 

Aside from the small, domestic tortures in their basement, Mike and Mary embark on several big time missions put in train by DINA director, General Sarmiento, a genuinely sinister portrayal by Otilio Castro.

The first is the 1974 murder in Buenos Aires by radio-controlled car bomb of the exiled former Allende minister and chief of army, General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofia.

In 1975, the bomb-happy couple make an attempt in Rome on the life of exiled Chilean Democrat Party founder, Bernardo Leighton. 

It goes spectacularly wrong, leading to a series of personal and political recriminations and a final, vicious betrayal.

In 1976, Mary and Mike travel to Washington DC with a couple of seedy anti-Castro Cubans and instructions to dispose of Orlando Letelier, an economist and former ambassador to the United States, who had fled Pinochet's Chile after the coup.

This proves to be their ultimate undoing, as the CIA seems content to have them assassinate socialists on South American soil, but not on North American. 

As Sarmiento complains:

"Fucking gringos - always meddling in someone else's business." 

Mary & Mike is a creepy companion piece to another Chilean television series dealing with the horrors of the Pinochet regime.

Dignity (also produced by the Cardones) tells the story of ex-Nazi Paul Schafer's Germanic cult and remote jungle compound for torture, murder and paedophilia, Colonia Dignidad. 

Watch both at your peril. Screening now on SBS On Demand.