Former dictator Pinochet pays for his past butchery

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Like many retired mass murderers, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet thought he was untouchable. Now he is under arrest, and with a bit of luck he will die in jail. He wasn't always so stupid, but it has been so long since anybody dared to defy him that he forgot he was only human.

When Pinochet finally retired as commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces last March at the tender age of 82, he lost his ability to threaten the Chilean state directly, but he still thought he was invulnerable. And within Chile, he was.

Before ceding power to a civilian government in 1990, he took the precaution of proclaiming an amnesty for all crimes committed during his 17 years in power, including the murders of 3,197 political opponents who were tortured to death during his term and 1,102 other people who simply disappeared after being arrested by his secret police.

Just to be sure, Pinochet kept direct control of the army until this year, and even after his official retirement he retained the power to overawe the elected government of Prime Minister Eduardo Frei. Since he had run the army for 25 years and personally approved the promotions of every serving Chilean officer above the rank of captain, the government did not dare to take action against him for fear of the army's reaction.

Pinochet thought he had fixed matters on the foreign front, too. A constitutional amendment he pushed through in 1980 assured him the post of senator-for-life after his retirement from the army, and all members of Chile's two houses of parliaments traditionally get diplomatic passports. In his simple-minded way, Pinochet believed that gave him immunity abroad as well.

He was, of course, careful not to travel to countries where there were large numbers of people who were related to those he had killed, but he thought Britain was safe. After all, during the long period of Conservative rule that ended only last year he had been a major customer of the British arms industry and a frequent visitor, regularly flying into British Aerospace's airfields and even having tea with former prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

He didn't go the United States, which has long since repudiated the support that the Nixon administration gave to his 1973 coup -- and would like to talk to him about the car bomb that his agents planted to kill a former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. and his American aide right in the center of Washington's diplomatic quarter in 1976. But then, Pinochet didn't really like the U.S. anyway, dismissing Americans as "rude".

Pinochet was a snob, and what he loved most was swanning around London visiting all the places that rich tourists go to shop or to lunch: Burberry's, the River Cafe, Fortnum & Mason's. England, he told New Yorker magazine recently, is "the ideal place to live" because of its civility, moderation, and respect for rules. He didn't even notice that Britain got a new government last year with a somewhat more robust definition of civility and respect for rules.

So he blithely arrived in London last month and checked into a five-star hotel in Park Lane for a spot of up-market tourism. After Jon Lee Anderson interviewed him for the New Yorker, Pinochet "set off to Madame Tussaud's for the umpteenth time; the British National Army Museum; and then to lunch at Fortnum & Mason's." Early this month, he checked into the private London Clinic for a minor back operation on a herniated disc.

And then the Metropolitan Police showed up at the London Clinic on Friday night and arrested him. Formally, they were simply responding to an extradition request from a Spanish judge accusing him of genocide and terrorism -- but that is just the public face of the affair. If the British government had not wanted him arrested, he would have been warned and allowed to escape.

Arrogance makes people stupid. Pinochet did not realize that a diplomatic passport does not confer immunity from arrest, under British law, unless the holder is actually a head of state or a diplomat formally accredited to the British government. Nor did he pay any heed to the fact that the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has a different policy on human rights violations than its Conservative predecessors.

The British government, having allowed Pinochet to enter, could not easily arrest him of its own volition -- but it could certainly respond to the request of a Spanish court investigating the murder of hundreds of Spanish citizens in the 'southern cone' of South America at the height of the Argentine, Chilean and Uruguayan military dictatorships in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Now everybody is pretending that it is simply a matter for the courts. The Chilean government, which is always looking over its shoulder at an army full of Pinochet loyalists, lodged a formal protest at his arrest. But a spokesman for British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook replied that "this was entirely a judicial matter, and the government has no power to intervene."

Chilean Foreign Minister Jose Miguel Insulza coyly agreed: "the British government is as removed as we are from the (extradition) judge's decision. Just like in Chile, (British) justice is absolutely autonomous." So the Spanish court now has 40 days to make its case for extraditing Pinochet to Spain for trial -- unless friends of his British victims manage to bring a case against him in the British courts first.

Either way, he is unlikely to see Chile again, which will make Chile's government quietly grateful despite its public protests.

This is a man whose secret police used to train dogs to violate women prisoners, but he still has backers in Chile, so a foreign jail is the ideal place for him to spend the rest of his life.

It is also, perhaps, a small sign that the rule of law is making progress in the world.