Pursuing Pinochet

Pursuing Pinochet
The Case We Made, 22 Years Ago
E. Lawrence Barcella Jr
The Washington Post, 6 December 1998

The bomb had been carefully placed under the car so that when it exploded, it vaporized the driver's legs, leaving only the grim residue of a mangled foot on the street. His death was as quick as it was brutal. The young woman riding in the front seat of the car was not so fortunate. A shard of metal pierced her neck, severing an artery and her windpipe. In spite of a passing doctor's immediate assistance, the woman spent the next moments choking to death on her own blood; her husband of only a few months, riding in the back seat, watched her die. The car bombing took place not in some foreign capital wracked by civil war, but on Sept. 21, 1976, at Sheridan Circle, here in Washington. The Chilean secret police and intelligence service (DINA) had dispatched agents to kill an opponent of the military junta that had seized power in a bloody coup in Chile three years earlier. Former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier was the driver. Ronni Moffitt, who worked with him at the Institute for Policy Studies, was the young woman.

The decision of the British Law Lords to allow Spanish extradition proceedings against former Chilean president Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested while recovering from back surgery at a London hospital, should provide the impetus to revisit the Letelier case. Moffitt's family has appealed to President Clinton to indict Pinochet for her murder. It's now time to resolve some outstanding questions from the investigation begun that September morning 22 years ago in the most extensive terrorism investigation then undertaken by the FBI and the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia. As one of the assistant US attorneys overseeing the investigation, I spent a good part of the next decade trying to ensure that those responsible for that callous and cowardly act of terrorism were brought to justice. Following a painstaking investigation, a federal grand jury in Washington issued unprecedented indictments charging Manuel Contreras, the general in charge of DINA, his deputy and other DINA operatives.

Pinochet was not indicted, but the evidence gathered two decades ago showed conclusively that the highest levels of the Chilean secret police had ordered its operatives to locate and assassinate Letelier. It had not been enough for them that Letelier, a former minister of defense, and minister of the interior as well as ambassador to Washington, had been imprisoned and tortured following the September 1973 coup - on a bleak and frigid island near the tip of South America along with other political prisoners. Letelier's impassioned desire to return democracy to his homeland was viewed with horror by the military junta, which reviled his lobbying activities here and abroad.

The junta grimly celebrated the anniversary of its coming to power each September by disposing of prominent dissidents. In September 1974, Pinochet's predecessor as commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, who had resigned honorably after the coup, was blown up in his car, along with his wife, in Buenos Aires - a chilling preview of what was to happen in Washington two years later. In September 1975, a moderate Chilean politician living in exile in Italy was gunned down, along with his wife, as they entered their apartment. Miraculously, they survived. Letelier and Moffitt were not so lucky the following September.

With Pinochet's recent arrest in London, the US Attorney's Office, the FBI and the Department of Justice should determine whether or not the evidence against the 'senator-for-life' has now reached a level at which his indictment in the Letelier case is appropriate. When I left the United States Attorney's Office in 1986, the evidence was close to that point. In fact, there was not a shred of doubt in my mind that Pinochet ordered the murders. But moral certainty is not admissible evidence, and the United States must review and evaluate the latter.

As things stand now, Spain, Switzerland and France have requested Pinochet's extradition for crimes against humanity committed against their citizens in Chile during and after the coup. As compelling as those requests may be, they would pale beside an extradition request from the United States for crimes committed against our citizens and residents, on our soil, in the heart of our nation's capital. In light of that, the silence by the Department of Justice and the vapid statements by the State Department have been, to say the least, discomforting. The recent decision to release secret US government documents about human rights abuses under Pinochet is not enough. I have come to expect, but do not accept, the State Department's long-standing tug of war between its human rights advocates and fearful bureaucrats who cling mindlessly to the status quo. It is, after all, no less hypocritical to cater to despotic allies than to despotic enemies.

I am more surprised, however, by the apparent inactivity of the Justice Department, whose fight against international terrorism has always been both aggressive and tireless. The men and women I worked with there over a decade ago accepted nothing less. Many of them are still there today, and I do not believe their commitment has wavered.

What, then, is the evidence that would warrant an extradition request by the United States? The publicly available evidence is itself compelling.

• Numerous witnesses and reams of corroborating documents established that Letelier's assassination was ordered and directed by Contreras. Not only was that evidence enough to achieve pleas and convictions of those accomplices found here in the United States, but in an act of democratic and moral courage, the Chilean government brought Contreras and his deputy to trial for the Letelier assassination in 1993 and convicted them on evidence mostly developed by us.
• Contreras answered to only one authority - Gen. Pinochet. Pinochet created DINA, he met with Contreras on a daily basis, and he was, in that rigid military structure, Contreras's direct superior. Recently, in an effort to get his sentence lowered, Contreras ominously, if obviously, filed an affidavit stating that 'only [Pinochet] as supreme authority of DINA had the power to order the missions that were executed... Always in my capacity as delegate of the President, I carried out strictly what was ordered'. It would be an easy matter under international law for the US Justice Department to request the assistance of Chilean courts in questioning Contreras and his deputy about the Letelier assassination.
• When a Chilean army captain and indicted co-conspirator came to the United States in the late 80s, he directly implicated Pinochet in the extensive effort by the Chilean junta to obstruct the US investigation and coverup the involvement of Chile in the Letelier assassination.

But the response we hear to the available evidence is, in fact, not about the evidence at all. Rather, the State Department has expressed concern that democracy in Chile is fragile. Not only does that minimize the resiliency and integrity of the Chilean people, but it also ignores the basic foundations of democracy itself - the sanctity and dignity of individual human life. Some Chileans, particularly those who got rich during Pinochet's reign, whine about Chile's sovereignty. This is not about Chile's sovereignty, since it was our sovereignty that was violated when the junta dispatched its agents, on expense account and per diem no less, to our country to murder our residents.

Far more than our sovereignty has been violated. Left-wing conspiracy theorists assume that our country's own involvement in events leading up to the 1973 coup is the cause of the United States's reluctance. That's myopic. When those events were much fresher in everyone's mind, our investigation went forward and resulted in Contreras's indictment - hardly something that would have occurred in an Oliver Stone scenario. Many on the right wing argue for leniency because Pinochet was an ally in fighting the spread of communism in Latin America and a free-trade advocate. Margaret Thatcher, for example, drones on about Pinochet's support during the Falklands War, as if that had nothing to do with Chile's own disputes with Argentina. The last time I checked the United States code, being an ally or devotee of the Chicago School of Economics wasn't a defense against murder or genocide. We mitigate the punishment of those who cooperate in terrorism cases, we don't give them a pass.

From the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 to the World Trade Center bombing, the Justice Department has shown repeatedly that its prosecutorial memory in terrorism cases does not diminish. In an era when tens of millions of dollars are being spent on investigations of people [...] ing up sexual infidelities, of fuzzy campaign-funding violations and of trips to sporting events, it is unconscionable to devote inadequate resources and attention toward determining whether a full and final measure of justice can be brought in the Letelier/Moffitt murders. Thus far, the governments of other nations have stood up to Pinochet for the rights of their citizens. Our government must do the same.

Copyright 1998 The Washington Post