TNI and the Pinochet precedent
On December 30 2005, two millennia after someone reported an immaculate conception, a miracle occurred in Chile. Twenty-one out of 24 judges on the Santiago Court of Appeals stripped former dictator General Augusto Pinochet of immunity, which he awarded himself in 1990 as he stepped down as President. Chile’s Congress reaffirmed the immunity in 2000. The judges decided, however, that Pinochet’s self-awarded protection did not apply to charges that he stole $2 million from the public coffers.
Judge Juan Escobar, president of the tribunal, explained that removing Pinochet’s immunity opened the legal process for wider ranging probes of the ex dictator’s personal corruption and violent crimes. Last year, Pinochet also lost immunity in cases involving tax evasion and keeping secret U.S. bank accounts, in which he had stashed $28 million.
Since 1998, the 90-year-old Pinochet’s legal woes have mounted. That year, Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge, asked the British government to extradite Pinochet to face charges in Spain for international terrorism, torture and genocide. The British arrested Pinochet, and after more than a year of appeals, England’s Law Lords approved the Spanish request. Pinochet, however, escaped the clutches of Spanish law and returned to Chile in March 2000, after the British government rigged a group of doctors to rule him mentally and physically unfit for trial.
Pinochet landed the next day in Chile and practically danced the cueca (Chile’s national dance) as he descended the steps of the airplane before he embraced his old military confreres, whose names he remembered. This militarized triumphant return seemed to place Pinochet forever outside the reach of justice. Those Chileans who had demanded his return from England on the grounds that Chile, not Spain, had the legal right and indeed the obligation to try Pinochet for his crimes, faced not only an intimidating show of military support, but a lack of political will on the part of the governing class.
The socialist Ricardo Lagos won the presidency in 2000 and was inaugurated a week after Pinochet returned. Human rights advocates waited in vain for Lagos to open the door for judges to charge Pinochet. Lagos did nothing. But shortly after Pinochet’s triumphant return, Judge Juan Guzman concluded his investigation into some of the disappearances – technically kidnappings – that Pinochet’s troops carried out between 1973 and 1990. Guzman then charged Pinochet as a criminal and asked that his immunity from prosecution be stripped. This move marked the first in a series of prosecutions that still continue today.
Pinochet swore to Guzman that he had never ordered executions. "I’m not a neurologist or psychiatrist or psychologist," Guzman said. But Pinochet appeared to be "an extraordinarily normal person … very gentlemanly." Pinochet denied to Guzman any role in the Caravan of Death that occurred shortly after the September 11, 1973 military coup, which he led. (After violently toppling the elected socialist government of Dr. Salvador Allende, Pinochet appointed himself head of a ruling junta that subsequently carried out widespread assassinations and routine torture of political enemies from the left of the spectrum to the centrist Christian Democrats.)
Pinochet blamed his subordinate, General Arellano Stark (deceased), for organizing an itinerant murder squad that toured Chile and summarily executed alleged leftists in several cities. Some 75 people died during that October 1973 "Caravan."
The man who in 1981 said "not a leaf turns in Chile without me knowing about it" feigned ignorance of mass murder and torture. "I ordered the troops to shoot only in self-defense," he told Guzman. Pinochet’s former officers, however, have sneered at such remarks. Those on the Caravan of Death testified that Pinochet actually witnessed some of the worst mutilations of live prisoners in the northern city of Antofagasta.
Ironically, Judge Guzman complained that the Socialist Party government officials had pressured him to drop the case. Socialist Party leaders apparently still tremble at the consequences of a Pinochet trial. Will the military make trouble? Will Pinochet involve U.S. officials? Will such a trial hurt our election chances?
Top government officials breathed sighs of relief when Appellate courts invalidated Guzman’s requests on the grounds that Pinochet was mentally unfit for trial. Guzman told me that "international opinion brought moral support and helped us realize that we are living in the era of human rights."
In 2004, Guzman retired and took an academic job, but other judges picked up the cases. On December 7, 2005, a Santiago Appeals Court stripped Pinochet of his immunity in the case of the disappearance of 29 political opponents between 1973 and 1990. Judge Victor Montiglio will add these cases to others already filed around Operation Colombo in the mid 1970s, where Pinochet allegedly ordered the death and disappearance of 119 opponents.
Pinochet’s lawyers will undoubtedly appeal these cases. Four times previously, Supreme Court judges concluded that Pinochet’s dementia, his multiple strokes, diabetes and arthritis made him unfit to stand trial. But in October, court-appointed doctors examined Pinochet and concluded that he was fit to stand trial.
Pinochet had even given a televised interview to a Miami station in which he appeared very coherent. Like some mafia dons who faked senility, Pinochet’s vanity undermined his act. It has taken fifteen years of civilian government for Chilean magistrates to garner courage to charge Pinochet as a criminal.
Why has it taken so long and why hasn’t the U.S. Attorney General charged Pinochet with masterminding the 1976 terrorist assassination in Washington of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit?
Pinochet stepped down in 1990 after he lost a plebiscite – world opinion would have responded harshly had he refused. When he left office, most of Chile’s judiciary were Pinochetistas; so the legal machinery was hardly suitable to adjudicating the crimes his military had committed, including those against non-Chilean citizens – including Spanish, British French and American citizens.
In 1990, the new government established The Rettig Commission to assess the damage under Pinochet. This Commission ascertained that Pinochet’s "terror" had cost the lives of more than 3,190 people; tens of thousands underwent torture.
Did Pinochet know?
Now, he claims he knew nothing of the human rights abuses. In 2004, however, General Contreras secret police chief (1974-7) filed a writ, to get his seven year prison sentence reduced. A Chilean court had convicted him for conspiring to assassinate Orlando Letelier. But Contreras avowed that Pinochet had given him direct orders for each felonious act he committed, including the September 1976 car-bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC. Ronni Moffitt also died in the bombing. She worked with Letelier at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Letelier, former Chilean Ambassador to Washington and Cabinet Member of the overthrown Allende government, had exiled himself in Washington after spending a year in a Pinochet concentration camp.
Contreras’ statement about responsibility for that act coincides with the views of former FBI Agents Robert Scherrer and L. Carter Cornick, who directed the investigation of the Letelier case. They both concluded that Pinochet had to have authorized it. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Lawrence Barcella, who prosecuted the accused assassins, stated that "it is inconceivable that the Letelier assassination could have taken place without the express authority of the Chilean commander." They had traced the crime to Secret Police Chief Contreras. The U.S. government insisted that Chile better not use notions of sovereignty in the case of an assassination in Washington.
As a result, Contreras and a subordinate were convicted in the Letelier case, in Chile. But somehow the U.S. government never moved against Pinochet and Chile continued to wave the tiresome false flags of diplomatic immunity and sovereignty. Pinochet’s agents, however, showed no respect for sovereignty.
Before assassinating Letelier and Moffitt in Washington, they had murdered exiled General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires in 1974. Chilean secret police agents shot exiled politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife in Rome in 1975 and, as the FBI discovered, had hatched several other plots to eliminate overseas opponents. "Diplomatic immunity" makes little sense to the family of Carmelo Soria, a Spanish UN official who was kidnapped and murdered in 1976 in Chile by Pinochet’s elite secret police unit. He had real diplomatic immunity and it did him no good.
Two British citizens also disappeared during Pinochet’s reign. One case epitomized Pinochet’s methods. Businessman William (Billy) Beausire’s sister was the companion of an ultra left leader. To discover if Billy knew the leftist’s hiding place, Pinochet’s political police decided to torture Billy. Someone tipped Billy’s mother, however, and sent her son to London. Unfortunately, his plane stopped in Buenos Aires. By this time the secret police had discovered his mother’s escape plan and they asked their Argentine colleagues to detain and return Billy to Chile. He was never seen again.
Immediately after the 1973 coup, Pinochet’s military murdered U.S. citizens Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi. Incidents like this epitomized Pinochet’s 17 year "Presidency."
The Pinochet case, first opened in Spain in the mid 1990s, has shown judges throughout the world the way to distinguish between criminal and political acts. By applying international treaties outlawing torture, they have shown that judicial courage can prove infectious. Salvador Allende would feel a sense of satisfaction that Pinochet has been indicted and simultaneously roll over in his grave over the spinelessness of some former comrades some of whom hold the highest offices.
