Santiago

While the formal charging and arrest of Pinochet acquires what plaintiff's attorney and Socialist Party congressman Juan Bustos calls "transcendental" significance, the often underreported collateral events triggered by this case are now also radically rewriting Chile's past and future. It's only now, a full twenty-seven years after Pinochet's bloody coup against an elected Socialist government, that the Chilean military is, at last, on the political defensive. The twin battles, therefore, over who will write Chile's last three decades of history as well as over whether this country of 15 million will have an authentically democratic future are finally and furiously being fought out around the still unresolved but red-hot issue of human rights.

Encouragingly, the most ardent attempts of the Chilean military as well as the nominally center-left civilian administration of President Ricardo Lagos (no relation to General Lagos) to tamp down and forever shelve the issue of human rights have failed miserably. Indeed, as highlighted by Pinochet's fall, in the past few weeks they have wildly backfired, allowing the debate over Chile's recent dark past to spin freely and broadly beyond the control of the timid political establishment. As a result, even the meek and overwhelmingly conservative Chilean press has granted generous and unprecedented daily coverage to the trials of military officers and to the more than 3,000 dead, including 1,100 "disappeared," during the seventeen years of the military dictatorship (1973-90). Widows of murdered political prisoners, until recently on the margins of Chilean society, have become talk-show celebrities. Grainy black-and-white newsreels of the most hair-raising images from the Pinochet dictatorship fill the TV airwaves as Chilean newscasts report on the exhumation of mass graves, the search for bones and the prosecution of the guilty. Reality imitates art, like an extended version of the old Costa-Gavras thriller Z. The Chilean public has been treated to a parade of former--and even a few active--military officers held legally accountable for the atrocities of the 1970s and 1980s. To date, eight generals and another eighty former military and intelligence officials have been indicted.

Chilean TV viewers can only have been shocked--or perhaps indignantly amused--when, on the eve of Pinochet's mental exams, the ultraright head of the Augusto Pinochet Foundation, and the most dogged public apologist for the dictator, retired Gen. Luis Cortes Villa, was asked for his reaction to the just-released report about bodies having been thrown into the sea. "Many times my own sons in the military asked me if these sorts of things were true or not," the former general told the cameras. And then, with a look of mild bewilderment, he added: "I always told them no. But this [report] leaves one standing in a rather awkward position."

Gracias to Garzón

Laura Elgueta, a public employee now in her 40s, needed no official report to confirm the barbarities of the Pinochet dictatorship. She miraculously survived a 1977 abduction in Buenos Aires carried out by a joint Argentine-Chilean government death squad. Her older brother, however, has been "disappeared" ever since. For two decades, along with other members of the Association of Families of the Disappeared, she was convinced that justice would forever be elusive--that is, until the 1998 detention of General Pinochet by Scotland Yard. "One day we are going to have to erect a monument to Judge Garzón," Elgueta says, referring to the Madrid-based magistrate whose work led to the warrant that ensnared Pinochet. It was back in 1996 that Judge Baltasar Garzón began looking into the deaths of some 300 fellow Spanish citizens who had been caught up during the 1970s in Argentina's internal "dirty war." Garzón's investigation led him into the heart of Operation Condor--the network of intelligence services and cross-border murder concocted by Pinochet's Chile, the generals of Argentina and other neighboring dictatorships [see Peter Kornbluh, "Prisoner Pinochet," December 21, 1998]. In the process, he established a legal precedent for treating as actionable crimes what had previously been regarded as political acts. "Garzón single-handedly changed the history of our country," Elgueta says.

Indeed, if Pinochet's London arrest was the best thing that ever happened to Chile's human rights movement, then his getting dumped back into Chile 503 days later for reasons of health (in early 2000) was the second best. The British had held Pinochet just long enough to break his political hold on Chile, and they returned him home just in time to lance the boil that had festered untreated. "Since Pinochet was arrested, and especially since he came back, there's been a public eruption of all the filth and horror of the dictatorship--from the details of repression to the role of the CIA," says Manuel Cabieses, editor of the leading leftist magazine, Punto Final. "It's all been indescribably dramatic. It has turned Pinochet into an intolerable burden even for most of the right."

Pinochet had no sooner hit the Santiago airport tarmac last year after his release in London than Chilean human rights crusaders--sensing a political opening--filed an avalanche of criminal complaints against him: thirty, forty, then 150, and now more than 200 separate cases. By last summer, a reinvigorated Chilean judiciary had stripped Pinochet of his parliamentary immunity as an unelected "Senator for Life." And the Chilean Supreme Court found some creative ways to pierce the shield of amnesty that Pinochet had decreed in the days of the dictatorship. Judge Guzmán was pushing forward the most serious case against Pinochet, the one that named him "intellectual author" of the so-called Caravan of Death. The case stemmed from the first weeks of the military dictatorship, when a special army unit traveling by helicopter went from town to town pulling recently arrested civilians out of jail--seventy-five in total--executing them and disappearing their bodies. "There's no question that this was carried out on personal instructions of Pinochet," says plaintiffs' attorney Carmen Hertz, whose husband perished in the homicidal frenzy of the Caravan.

As the wall of impunity began to crack, both the Chilean military and the elected civilian government of Christian Democrats and Socialists came up with a dramatic gambit to undercut the growing demand for legal accountability. Although the military had until then never acknowledged any wrongdoing, it was now prepared to sit down with human rights representatives in an open-ended "roundtable dialogue." The agreement severely split the human rights community. Defenders of the dialogue said there was nothing to lose. But some critics were scathing in their appraisal. "It's part of a government strategy aimed at showing that Chile can settle at a table what it refuses to settle in the courts," was what attorney Fabiola Letelier told me at the time the dialogue was proposed. Letelier's brother, Orlando, a former Chilean ambassador, was murdered in 1976 by a car bomb planted in Washington, DC, by Pinochet's secret police. "They are going to try to shut us up by offering some bones," she said.

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