Chile

LONDON – The arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London in October, 1998, was a bolt from the blue. It can be said with near certainty that it never had crossed the mind of senior members of the British judiciary who were soon to be landed with untangling the legal intricacies. Indeed, it was such an impossible idea that until almost the very last moment it never occurred to the ex-dictator himself that he could be vulnerable in the very country where his great friend and supporter, Margaret Thatcher, had been prime minister. But when Baltazar Garzón, a senior Spanish magistrate, is on your tail you have to watch out. He has bested Felipe González, the former socialist prime minister, for having been party to the use of a police cell to assassinate leaders of ETA , the violent Basque group. He has also had great success in bringing to quick...

LONDON – Could it be that the Pinochet affair is now moving inexorably towards its denouement? Even more a cause celebre among human rights activists than the case of the Serbian, Slobovan Milosevic, it remains unresolved since the arrested former dictator was allowed to walk free four years ago from his detention in Britain. General Augusto Pinochet’s crimes were no ordinary crimes of the maintenance of political authority in a time of turbulence. They continued until 1990, long after Pinochet announced in 1978 that the “communist threat”, with which he had justified his coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, had ended. “The rituals of torture were intended to send horrific whispers through the populace”, wrote Geoffrey Robertson in his book, Crimes Against Humanity. Pinochet, it is alleged, personally supervised the torture operations with the boss of the torture unit, Manuel Contreras, reporting daily to him. He is...

LONDON – The Pinochet affair is now inexorably moving towards its denouement. The script is written. The players have but to act out their lines, which we in the audience by now know almost as well as the actors themselves. At last, this most miserable of men is set to confront his fate and witness his own final destruction- in name, and mind, but not in body. The Chilean social and legal system is too kind and forgiving for that- even the daughter of Salvador Allende, the president he overthrew, asks for mercy once the trial is over. Thus mankind this year will take a giant step forward towards its goal of civilization, a state of political being where the rule of law grounded in the belief that disputes can be settled short of violence triumphs over the baser and more primitive instincts of each one of us. In Chile Judge...