March 1, 2001
Pinochet
in Winter
The General Blacks Out
The General turned out to be a coward.
When Chilean police knocked on Augusto Pinochet's door and threatened
to slap the cuffs on him, Pinochet fainted. You could have predicted
as much.
Pinochet was placed under house
arrest on January 28 for his role in ordering the massacre known
as the Caravan of Death, one of his innumerable crimes in his
17 years as dictator of Chile. Still, the general must've been
surprised. Only days earlier, his lawyer, Pablo Rodriquez, had
told him to defy the orders of the lower court, that he was above
them and no harm would ever come to him in Chile. To the press,
Rodrizquez said that the judge's orders amounted to "open
harassment of an ill 85-year old man."
Pinochet had already deployed
the "doddering don" routine, feigning the Alzheimer's
disease that had addled his pal Ronald Reagan. It got him out
of England last fall. And it may yet save him from culpability
for the killing of more than 3,000 people during his regime.
His supporters, a dwindling horde, call him Tata, grandpa. They
watch him every morning as he ambles down the beach at his oceanfront
compound in Becalemu, where he waves to them with his cane, before
he enters his private chapel to say his prayers.
Pinochet's increasing desperation probably
stemmed from the fact that his minions, loyal these many years,
are beginning to turn on him, to save their own hides, right
there in Chile.
On January 7, Chilean president
Ricardo Lagos made a nationally televised speech detailing new
evidence of the atrocities committed during Pinochet's reign
of terror. Lagos described how Chilean military intelligence
agents dumped more than 120 bodies of murdered Chileans (many
of them members of the Chilean Communist Party) into "the
ocean, lakes and rivers of Chile." Lagos said that the government
had also located a mass grave inside Santiago, containing more
than 20 bodies. Other evidence emerging from the files of the
Chilean military describes summary executions, torture, and how
bodies were blown up with dynamite. It has been suggested that
the military, under the leadership of Gen. Ricardo Izurieta,
has cooperated in order to secure the purchase of a fleet of
F-16 fighters.
Then on January 27, Pinochet's
old friend, Gen. Joaquin Lagos Osorio, implicated him in the
assassinations committed by the Caravan of Death unit. It was
payback, of a sort, since only the week before Pinochet had told
his interogators that Lagos was person behind the killings and
that he had acted without his authority. "I am not a criminal,"
Pinochet exclaimed.
But Lagos had evidence to undermine
the general: a list of political prisoners on which Pinochet
had marked which ones were to be killed. Lagos told his story
to an interviewer with Chile's Television Nacional on January
27, when he also disclosed a copy of the list. "In the last
conversation I had with Pinochet, he did something I never expected.
He ordered me to 'Never mention the list,' and for me to sign
it. In that case, I would be the only one responsible, as the
crimes were committed in my jurisdiction. I told him that, and
he said he would fix it. I said, 'What are you going to fix?
They are all dead!'"
Then Lagos described in gruesome
detail how the murders took place. "They were torn apart,"
he said. They were no longer human bodies. I wanted to at least
put the bodies back together again, to leave them more decent.
But you couldn't. They cut eyes out with daggers. They broke
their jaws and legs. Even at the firing squad, the killed them
slowly. They shot them to pieces, first the legs, then the sexual
organs, then the heart, all with machine guns."
His friends in the US government have
also proved less than stalwart. After Pinochet was placed under
house arrest in London following his indictment by a Spanish
court, Bill Clinton, in one of his few honorable acts, instructed
the CIA and the State Department to open their files on Chile
from the Allende government through the Pinochet regime. Documents
released in November revealed a direct Pinochet link to the assassination
on September 11, 1976 of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean
diplomat in the Allende governemt who, along with his American
associate, Ronni Moffitt, was killed by a car bomb in on Sheridan
Circle in Washington DC.
The State Department cables
reveal that in the summer of 1976 Pinochet called Paraguyan dictator
Alfredo Stroessner asking him to issue "cover" passports
with phoney names for Letelier's assassins, Michael Townley and
Armando Fernandez Larios, so that they could travel to the United
States to complete their mission. Ultimately, the killers entered
the US on doctored Chilean passports. The CIA and FBI knew the
men were in Washington and probably knew their mission, yet did
nothing to impede them.
Letelier and Moffitt's attorney,
Sam Buffone, says that the State Department documents provide
convincing proof of Pinochet's direct involvement in the assassination
and should form the basis of an indictment for the murders.
The documents also show yet
more blood on the hands of the CIA. Some months prior to the
Letelier and Moffitt killings, the State Department had instructed
its ambassador to Chile, David Popper, and the CIA to express
concern about Pinochet's Operation Condor, the assassination
program against dissidents run by Chilean intelligence. Popper
refused, writing in a cable that Pinochet "might well take
as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination
plots."
The CIA, operating out of Popper's
office, also ignored orders to raise complaints with Manuel Contreras,
head of Chilean military intelligence. Contreras was ultimately
convicted by a Chilean court for his involvement in the assassination
of Letelier. But many believe that Contreras was on the CIA's
payroll. We may never know for sure. Because the newly released
files show that in 1991, the CIA destroyed a security file on
Contreras, a file that almost certainly detailed Contreras' work
for the agency.
At the same time, the CIA was amassing
the names and addresses of Chilean dissidents who would later
be hunted down and murdered by Pinochet's band of killers. There
is the case of Frank Teruggi, a Leftist American journalist,
who, only days after the coup in 1973, was dragged out of his
home in Santiago, tortured and killed by the military. Terguggi's
name and address showed up in CIA files from a year prior to
the coup, leading Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security
Archives, to suggest that the CIA may have fingered Teruggi to
Pinochet's men.
For all this, Pinochet has
picked up some unlikely allies. Cronies of the general have set
up the Pinochet Foundation, a trust fund set up to finance his
ultimately successful legal and pr fight against extradition
to Spain from England. One of the foundation's fundraising schemes
involved the release of a CD featuring Chilean military tunes,
which apparently sold well throughout South America and in London.
The Reebok Human Rights Award
may be the most hypocritical of those kinds of honors. If so,
then the Chilean Human Rights Award can't be far behind. Well,
the rock star Sting has now gotten both. In January, Sting, known
for hob-nobbing with Kayapo chieftains in an attempt to cash
in on the cachet of the Amazon, jetted to Santiago to receive
a human rights award from the Chilean government. A few days
later, Sting announced his belief that if Pinochet would merely
make some public statement of contrition perhaps the charges
against him should be dropped.
Most Chileans see the writing on the
wall. In a recent poll by the Santiago-based Fundacion Futuro,
only 8 percent said that they thought Pinochet was innocent of
the charges from the Caravan of Death massacres-an astounding
turn around from previous polls. But even so 60 percent of polled
said they didn't think the General would even spend a night in
jail even if convicted. CP
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