Pinochet: trapped by the law, forgotten by the right

Increasingly hemmed in by the law and abandoned by his former apologists, former dictator Augusto Pinochet made headlines in Chile again this year and will continue to do so in 2006, even though President Ricardo Lagos and other politicians say he is "a figure of the past." The right is now working hard to distance itself from Pinochet "because of its public image," since the former dictator casts a shadow over its chances in the second round of the presidential elections, to be held on Jan. 15, Lorena Pizarro, president of the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD), told IPS. On that day, voters will decide between Michelle Bachelet, the socialist candidate of the governing center-left coalition, who received 46 percent of the vote in the first round on Dec. 11, and businessman Sebastián Piñera, a neoliberal politician backed by the civilian groups who governed with Pinochet from September 1973 to March 1990. Piñera, of the National Renewal Party, captured 25.4 percent of the vote and now has the support of Joaquín Lavín, who took 23.2 percent as the candidate of the rightwing Independent Democratic Union (UDI), the most pro-Pinochet party in Chilean politics. This year has been the ex-dictator's worst, not only due to the numerous legal proceedings he faces for crimes against humanity and corruption, but also because the presidential and parliamentary election campaigns have motivated the right, and particularly Lavín and the UDI, to finally break with him. At the age of 90, the man who in 1983 boasted that in Chile "not a leaf moves unless I order it to," is under house arrest, accompanied only by his family and generals Guillermo Garín and Luis Cortés, his immediate subordinates during his many years as commander of the army (1973-1998), who remain loyal to him. The last straw in a year full of legal resolutions on Pinochet was a Dec. 26 Supreme Court decision to reject an appeal on behalf of the ex-dictator and allow him to be tried on four charges related to Operation Colombo, a media campaign staged to cover up the forced disappearance and murder of 119 leftists in 1975. "We were quite pleased with the verdict. Our presence at the hearings and the background information contributed by our lawyers, who have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and reliable in this Operation Colombo trial, led to the failure of the appeal," said Pizarro. The former dictator's defense lawyers wanted the Supreme Court to accept that their client suffered from senile dementia, an argument that has been successful in other legal cases, and to declare him mentally unfit to stand trial. "We hope this will be the way forward, and that the court will reopen proceedings [against Pinochet] that were suspended because of his supposed senile dementia, which has now been demonstrated not to exist," added the AFDD activist. The Supreme Court acquitted Pinochet on the grounds of mental incapacity for the first time in July 2002, in a trial presided over by Judge Juan Guzmán for 57 homicides and 18 kidnappings committed by a special army mission. Known as the "caravan of death," the mission was carried out in October 1973, shortly after the Sept. 11 coup d'état that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende. Guzmán began to prosecute the ex-dictator in April 2000, shortly after Pinochet returned from London, where he had been held under house arrest since October 1998 at the request of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón. Garzón was seeking his extradition to Spain to face trial for crimes against humanity. On that occasion Jack Straw, British home secretary (interior minister) at the time, interrupted extradition proceedings and freed Pinochet for "humanitarian reasons," based on the controversial diagnosis of senile dementia. Pinochet had handed over command of the army to General Ricardo Izurieta on Mar. 10, 1998, and was sworn in as senator-for-life the next day. Upon returning to Chile after his arrest in London, Pinochet resigned from the Senate but remained under the protection of a special statute for former heads of state which granted him immunity from criminal prosecution. This means that prosecuting judges investigating human rights accusations must ask for Pinochet's immunity to be lifted every time they attempt to bring him to trial. In a case involving the 1974 assassination in Buenos Aires of General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert, the Supreme Court declared Pinochet mentally unfit to stand trial, last March. Another trial for nine murders and one kidnapping in connection with Operation Condor was also terminated on Sept. 15 by the Supreme Court, again on the grounds of mental incapacity. Operation Condor was a coordinated plan set up in 1975 by security forces in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to track down, kidnap, murder and "disappear" opponents of the military regimes ruling those countries. Pinochet's apparent invulnerability in the Chilean justice system based on his alleged dementia began to crack slightly in August 2004, when a US Senate investigating committee revealed that the ex-dictator had millions of dollars in secret bank accounts abroad. The scandal primarily involved the Riggs Bank, a US financial institution, and it led to an inquiry in Chile headed first by Judge Sergio Muñoz and then by Judge Carlos Cerda. The investigation established that Pinochet and his relatives had accumulated an illicit fortune of about $27 million. On Aug. 10, Judge Muñoz ordered the arrest of 81-year-old Lucía Hiriart, Pinochet's wife, and their youngest son, Marco Antonio, on charges that they participated in the crimes of tax evasion and hiding allegedly ill-gotten money abroad. On Nov. 23, two days before his 90th birthday, the courts ordered the house arrest of Pinochet himself. He was then prosecuted by Judge Víctor Montiglio, who is investigating Operation Colombo. Over the past year, as evidence mounted against Pinochet in the Riggs affair, the political right has been increasing its distance from the ex-dictator. In May, Lavín said that had he known of Pinochet's involvement in corruption, he would not have supported him in a 1988 referendum that spelled the beginning of the end of the dictatorship. Lavín also said on that occasion that he shared President Lagos's view that "General Pinochet is a political figure of the past, he is old and sick, and justice must take its course [in the trials he is facing]." "What's happened is terrible," said Pizarro. "The right considers illicit enrichment to be worse than the thousands of people murdered and 'disappeared' during the dictatorship. We think Pinochet should be judged for all of his crimes, including corruption, but the right does not seem to be interested in the value of human life." The activist further stated that "the right has always known about the crimes and the corruption," recalling that in the 1980s journalists who reported the purchase of a mansion for Pinochet with public funds were persecuted by the state. And in 1994 an investigation of the irregular transfer of three million dollars to Pinochet's eldest son, Augusto, was closed, invoking "reasons of State."