 |
A L S O +T O D A Y
T A B L E+T A L K Newt resigns! Mull over the soon-to-be-former speaker's decision in the Headlines area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y A day to remember? Can we talk? Newtron Bomb Newt to U.S.: You won't have me to kick around anymore Body slam - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - -
|
 ![[ 21st: Microsoft vs. the U.S. Justice Department ]](/news/1998/11/src/12newslinks.gif) |
|
 |
HE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN | PAGE 1, 2
Through 17 years of Pinochet's rule the body count mounted. More than 3,000 executions and disappearances. Mass graves and lime pits filled with the general's victims. Ten of thousands of Chileans passed through the jails and were routinely tortured. The regime's secret police hunted down Gen. Carlos Prats, Pinochet's constitutionally minded predecessor as commander of the armed forces, and blew him up in a Buenos Aires car bomb. The moderate but anti-military politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife were cornered on an Italian street and shot by the general's agents. Pinochet brought international terrorism to the U.S. capital when his secret police exploded another car bomb to wipe out former Allende foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronnie Karpen Moffitt. Through this long night we survivors clung -- tenuously-- to Allende's final promise of justice. That's why this month of Pinochet's detention assumes such dramatic importance. Most of the outside world had long forgotten Allende -- let alone his last words. That's natural. But it had also forgotten -- or perhaps never bothered to even know -- Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet used the naked power of his dictatorship to fashion a cloak of respectability, naming himself president, commander-in-chief, captain general, and then writing a constitution that allowed him to sit as senator-for-life in the civilian government that succeeded him. He became an object of adoration for William Buckley, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the reporters of the New York Times, the claque of conservatives at Heritage and Cato and the Baroness Maggie Thatcher, with whom the obsequiously Anglophile dictator was sipping tea just days before he was collared by Scotland Yard. Even the Chilean civilian government that came to power in 1990 after defeating Pinochet in a national plebiscite tiptoed around the general, leaving him in charge of the army until this past spring, respecting his self-granted "immunity" and then scurrying to defend him when he fell prisoner in London. But after the imposed silence of the last two decades, today in Chile there is no more important subject of public debate than Pinochet's legacy. According to recent polls, two-thirds or more of Chileans want the general tried somehow, somewhere. At last count, seven European countries have joined in the clamor to try him as an international human rights criminal. And now comes word that even the U.S. government -- his original sponsor -- is actively weighing the possibility of asking for Pinochet's extradition on charges of murdering Horman, Teruggi, Letelier and Moffitt. In the meantime, three dozen other Chilean notables -- among them former Pinochet cabinet ministers, military junta members and cronies -- have been named by the Spanish courts in the same arrest warrant that bottled up Pinochet. Now -- finally -- they too will be publicly known for what they are: no longer respected leaders of the Chilean right, but accused accessories to organized murder. Any day now, a five-man committee of the British House of Lords will render its decision as to whether Pinochet will be extradited to a Spanish courtroom or if he will be released as ordered by a British court the previous week. But it matters little how that decision comes down. If the general gets sent to Spain, then a clear-cut, earth-shaking victory will have been achieved for the cause of international human rights. But even if Pinochet is freed, it will be his defeat. Waiting for him in Santiago is Chilean Judge Juan Guzman Tapia (who has gotten virtually no coverage in the American press), who is vowing to try Pinochet -- with or without his self-imposed immunity. Just this past Tuesday, the Chilean journalists' guild filed a case with Guzman charging Pinochet with the murder or disappearance of 20 reporters. Of course, he could decide not to return to Chile, becoming an exile from his homeland. But if he does return, Pinochet will face an entire Chilean population that has been given back its most precious resource -- its collective memory. Chileans no longer need to hold tight to the faint, fading words of Salvador Allende. They are now free to publicly remember Pinochet. To recoil in horror and disgust. To scorn and despise him. And with a bit of luck -- to see him judged and condemned. Salvador Allende can now rest quietly in his grave. The day of justice he promised us is now upon us.
Marc Cooper, a contributing editor of the Nation, served as translator to Chilean President Salvador Allende.
No place to hide The arrest of the brutal ex-dictator Pinochet marks the first time since Nuremberg that a head of state faces legal responsibility for his mass killings.
|
|
