On 19 January 1966, La República of Caracas printed the sentence this family has been living with ever since: “En Suiza certificaron que Anna María estaba loca para negarle el disfrute de los bienes.” In Switzerland, the paper reported, they had certified that Anna María was insane, in order to deny her the enjoyment of the assets.
Another Caracas paper that month reported the same certificate with a different word. It said Switzerland had certified her trastornada, deranged. Two words, one instrument, and no copy of it has ever been in the family’s hands. The heiress it described was eighteen years old.
The mother, 1957
Nine years before that sentence was printed, the Venezuelan state had put the same question about her mother. La República of 27 January 1966 printed the text of the order, a letter sent in the middle of the dictatorship, en plena dictadura in the paper’s words, from the Directorate of Foreigners to a private clinic in Los Dos Caminos.
Dios y Federación · Tomás Pérez Tenreiro, Tte. Cnel. · Director de Extranjeros
Text as printed by La República, Caracas, 27 January 1966. Translation ours.
The paper printed the addressee, Dr. T. Rizquez Figuera, and the signature, Tomás Pérez Tenreiro, lieutenant colonel, Director de Extranjeros. The subject line of a state order was a Swiss cleaning woman whose daughter stood to inherit one of the largest estates in the country.
What 1953 had been
To read those two documents the way the family reads them, you need what the papers said had happened four years before that letter was typed. El Nacional of 28 November 1965 reported that twelve years earlier the daughter of the millionaire had been taken to Switzerland, secuestrada is the paper’s word, kidnapped, and that the widow, who reported the disappearance of her own child in Washington, was tortured and expelled by the Seguridad Nacional after the girl was taken.
She named the men. Últimas Noticias of 17 January 1966 reported her accusation against Pedro Estrada and against an agent the papers call “Suelespuma” Colmenares, and ran both photographs beside the story. Estrada is not a shadowy figure. He was the documented head of the Seguridad Nacional under Pérez Jiménez, which makes her account checkable against Venezuelan state records rather than press alone. El Nacional’s 1965 piece added the date of her expulsion, 22 July 1953, and that her passport was taken from her.
The same reporting carries her account of a paper she signed. In March 1959, El Nacional reported, she told the press that she had been violently handled in a cell and made to sign a document in which she accused herself of paying men to kill her husband.
The diary answers from the grave
The counter-allegation exists, and under this site’s rules it publishes here, beside her account, or not at all. In January 1966 the Caracas papers reported on the petition Othmar Hitz had filed in July 1953 before the Second Court of First Instance. In it, the papers reported, he alleged that Anna Spring had tried to cut his jugular, that she had tried to burn their daughter alive, and that on another occasion she had paid two men to kill him. Últimas Noticias of 17 January 1966 printed the text of the accusation itself.
Her answer is on the record in the same papers. “Yo jamás intenté matar a Hitz”, she told Últimas Noticias, I never tried to kill Hitz, and of the claim that she had tried to strangle him with his necktie she said, “Esa fue una infamia”. The same paper traced the sequence of the marriage’s end: a separation converted into divorce on 13 April 1953, and her statement, which it quoted from La Esfera of March 1959, that she had signed the separation document without knowing what it was, because she could not read or write Spanish.
Read together
No court is known to have proved any of the above, in either direction, and this page asserts none of it. It is what named newspapers printed on named dates, while the people concerned were alive to answer, and they did answer.
Set the two certificates side by side and the pattern is the point. In October 1957 a lieutenant colonel of the dictatorship ordered the mother examined for lucidity. At some point before January 1966, La República reported, a Swiss certificate declared the daughter insane, expressly, the paper said, so that she could not enjoy the assets. The mother was certified by the state that had expelled her. The daughter was certified by the country that had received her. In both cases the estate was in view, and in both cases the paper that said mad was also the paper that stood between a woman and the money.
Whether the Swiss instrument survives, and in which canton’s files, is one of the questions the family’s Swiss research is built to answer. If you held a copy of it, or worked in the offices that did, the door is open.