Letter From Santiago (Page 2)

Infuriated by the judge's ruling, Purdy stomped from the chambers and angrily confronted a waiting claque of courthouse reporters. With TV cameras rolling, Purdy--pressed to explain his behavior in 1973--grabbed a reporter by the arm and shouted in an odd Spanish-English mix, "Momen-fucking-tito!" Purdy's indignation, featured prominently in Chilean newscasts, takes us to the moral center of this story. Purdy was shocked that a US official might actually be held responsible in a foreign court for crimes perpetrated by US policy. The obscure Purdy is now an important symbol in the quest for international justice. If the "Pinochet principle" established that former heads of state lack immunity from human rights violations, then so do ex-consuls general.

Purdy was caught in Guzmán's net only because he retired here and could not escape a Chilean subpoena. But Guzmán's bigger targets are sixteen other former US officials, including US Ambassador to Chile Nathaniel Davis and Kissinger. More than a year ago, Guzmán requested that Washington make these officials available. Only by questioning them can anyone begin to answer key questions like what the US government did or did not know about the murder of its own citizens and to what degree functionaries like Purdy were following a State Department line of cover-up for the Pinochet junta. So far Washington hasn't responded to Guzmán's request. Kissinger told a British audience in late April that while "it is quite possible mistakes were made," a certain number of errors are inevitable and "the issue is whether, thirty years after the event, the courts are the appropriate means by which determination is made."

Some pieces of the Horman puzzle that have emerged from thousands of pages of recently declassified documents indeed point to some level of US involvement. "There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death," reads one State Department memo, obtained by the National Security Archive. "At best it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC [government of Chile]. At worst, US intelligence was aware that GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia."

The Chileans might have been paranoid, but Washington was coldly calculating. The Nixon Administration found it more compelling to support Pinochet's regime than to fully investigate and solve the murder of its own citizens. In early 1974, shortly after Horman and Teruggi's bodies had been found and Pinochet's blood orgy was rising to fever pitch, the State Department official in charge of Latin America, Jack Kubisch, had a private meeting with then-Chilean Foreign Minister Adm. Ismael Huerta. A confidential US Embassy cable to the State Department reports that in that meeting "Kubisch raised this subject [of Horman's murder] in the context of the need to be careful to keep relatively small issues in our relationship from making our cooperation more difficult."

The multilingual Judge Guzmán exudes erudite refinement. The son of a well-known poet, bearded and partial to blazers and regimental ties, Guzmán seems more the country squire than crusading magistrate. But his patience and polish, his deliberate even-temperedness, have led not only to indictments of the once-untouchable Pinochet but also of fifty-five other Chilean officers. As he ushered me into his chambers, he stopped first to shake the hands of several suspect former and active police officials he had cited who were waiting in an adjacent room. "Sometimes it is very difficult to have to treat these men you know are criminals and murderers as gentlemen," he said. "But that's why we have laws to punish them."

In accord with those laws, Guzmán says that if the United States doesn't act soon on his request to gather testimony from Kissinger and other US officials, he'll have no choice but to file for their extradition to Chile. Kissinger could satisfy Guzmán's request by testifying before a US judge, who would ask the questions Guzmán wants answered. Guzmán doesn't want to indict Kissinger; he only wants to hear his testimony on these supposedly "relatively small issues." But there's a better way: Kissinger should get on a plane to Santiago and spend a few hours with the judge to help clear up these crimes. And he can be sure that Judge Guzmán will, at all times, treat him strictly as a gentleman.

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