Marc Cooper (The Nation): Pinochet and Us

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Issue of June 14, 2004
Posted Tuesday June 1

Pinochet and Us
From Villa Grimaldi to Abu Ghraib
By Marc Cooper

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, all of a sudden, is right back where he belongs--a hairsbreadth away from trial. On Friday, a Santiago appeals court made a stunning reversal when it stripped the 88-year-old former general of judicial immunity. A previous court ruling in 2001 had found Pinochet mentally unfit to stand trial on murder indictments deriving from his seventeen-year dictatorship.
But Pinochet was too wily by half. Instead of gratefully and quietly retreating behind his mansion gates, he was seen living it up in some Santiago supper clubs. And after he recently gave a lucid interview to a Miami-based Spanish-language TV station, the court apparently decided he might just be fit enough to spend some quality time in a courtroom dock.
Pinochet's lawyers are expected to appeal last Friday's ruling to the same Chilean Supreme Court that originally granted him immunity. Yet speculation is rife in Santiago that the political tide may have definitively turned against the former dictator--and that an eventual trial cannot be ruled out.
The conservative Santiago daily La Tercera reports that another reason for the reappraisal of Pinochet's immunity stems from the gravity of the crimes that have come to light as part of the investigation into Operation Condor. Condor was the transnational repressive network led by Pinochet in the 1970s and early '80s and whose crimes included the 1976 car-bombing murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, DC. La Tercera reports that some Chilean judges allegedly said that the multinational effort to track down and kill opponents of the various military regimes was an unparalleled display of "state terrorism" that must not go unpunished.

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[struggle4progress]

1. Could justice actually prevail finally?