An Exiled Son of Santiago (Page 2)

"Everywhere, begin the remembering."
(from a mural by Francisco Letelier, Venice, California)

The US government is silent these days about the terrorist acts committed not far from the White House in 1976. With pressure from the families and public opinion, the Justice Department successfully pursued the case against five anti-Castro agents in 1978 but three Chilean DINA agents who were indicted were never extradited to face trail. The Clinton Administration later disclosed previously classified official documents that shed new light on American collaboration with Pinochet and Operation Condor, a Pinochet-inspired collaboration of secret police units from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay. Today the Letelier-Karpen case is technically "open" at the Justice Department, but not actively pursued,

Perhaps the fact that George H.W. Bush happened to be CIA director during the period of the Letelier-Moffitt murders and the Condor conspiracy, and Donald Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense has something to do with the present Administration's inactivity. Immediately after the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations, Bush (senior) authorized a CIA disinformation campaign planting stories that blamed the killings on left-wing radicals seeking to make a martyr of Letelier. In addition, the US government has attempted to both deny and distance itself from the Condor project, but memos classified for twenty-five years suggest a greater CIA involvement than previously acknowledged. For example, as early as 1974 the CIA knew that Condor assassins were killing nonviolent political opponents. More documents remain under wraps at the Justice Department, on the pretext that they would have value to the prosecution in any future case against Pinochet.

Also having reason to worry might be America's new spy chief, John Negroponte, who served in the State Department in Vietnam during Operation Phoenix, the assassination program targeting Vietcong and Vietcong sympathizers, and as ambassador to Honduras during the notorious death-squad period of the 1980s. In other words, the Pinochet papers, when and if fully disclosed, may illuminate links in a thirty-year policy of tolerating, even promoting, torture and "renditions" as a matter of US policy, not the excessive behavior of a few "bad apples."

While their feelings are bittersweet, the Letelier family can claim some satisfaction as the case continues to unfold. At dinner in Santiago with Francisco, his brother Juan Pablo and his mother, Isabel, the family was firm in its desire that Pinochet "play the piano," as Juan Pablo put it, using an expression for fingerprinting. For the historical record, Juan Pablo said, it is crucial that Pinochet be convicted as both a "dictator and a thief." Ironically, Juan Pablo, an official in his father's Socialist Party and a four-term congressman, plays an overseeing role in a new investigation of Pinochet's secret deposits of million of dollars in the Washington, DC-based Riggs bank.

The Riggs scandal was uncovered by US Senate investigators using the money-laundering provision of the Patriot Act, added by Democratic Senators Paul Sarbane and Carl Levin, which requires enhanced due diligence and criminalizes the hiding of stolen money in American bank accounts. The Pinochet investigation thus may become a case study of hidden linkages in US policy between militarism and economic privatization. It was not dictatorial megalomania alone that drove Pinochet, but violent opposition to the socialist policies of the elected government of Salvador Allende, which he overthrew in 1973 with enthusiastic American support.

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