Legal nightmare ends as Pinochet flies home

By Jamie Wilson

LONDON: Sighs of relief could be heard echoing down the corridors of power in London, Santiago and Madrid on Thursday as Augusto Pinochet took his final, faltering steps on British soil and boarded a Chilean airforce jet at the Royal Air Force base at Waddington in England.

His departure signals the end of a 17-month diplomatic and legal nightmare for the governments of Britain, Chile and Spain, during which the general, once an almost forgotten pariah reviled by the left and loved by the right, has been cast center stage in the debate on how the international community should deal with leaders who break the norms of civilized behavior.

The victims and families of Pinochet's torture squads will have found Thursday's events hard to bear, but no doubt the civil servants, pragmatic to the last, will have raised a glass to the general, wishing him godspeed on his final journey home. Nowhere more so than in Madrid, where the government has found itself caught up in a spiraling diplomatic disaster that began when Baltasar Garzon -- a crusading prosecutor with little regard for the diplomatic niceties that usually govern international relations -- issued a warrant for Pinochet's arrest in October 1998.

Pinochet's lawyers fought the case all the way to the House of Lords, claiming, without success, that the general was entitled to immunity as a former head of state. But where the law could not save him from the dock of a Spanish court, his health, perhaps perversely, could.

While there is no reason to doubt that the final decision to end the extradition proceedings against Pinochet on medical grounds was taken in isolation by British home secretary Jack Straw, acting in his quasi judicial role, it is also the case that the home secretary is not impervious to pressures from other departments. The foreign office in particular has been exercised by the possible ramifications of the case.

Diplomatic relations with Chile have been stretched, almost to breaking point, by the general's detention, while the affair produced a warning blip on the radar screens in the foreign office which suggested it could blow up to affect Britain's relations with much of South America.

Britain's trade links with Chile are negligible in real terms, but Pinochet's detention offended many governments in the region, who saw his arrest as Spain, and by default Britain, imposing a form of moral colonialism on Chile. Santiago's insistence that the general should only be tried in Chile was met with sympathy and support in other South American capitals. Argentina, whose Gen. Galtieri is also on the list of former dictators Judge Garzon wants to see in the dock, vociferously supported the Chilean government.

The beginning of the end of the saga came last June when British foreign secretary Robin Cook met Abel Matutes, the Spanish foreign minister, in secret during a summit in Rio of European and South American countries. Amid rumors of the aging general's ailing health the two men reached an agreement. "I will not let him die in Britain," the foreign secretary reportedly told his Spanish counterpart. "I will not let him come to Spain," Matutes responded.

But it was not until September that a solution to the affair presented itself. Over a cup of tea in a tiny room of the UN building in New York, Cook met the Chilean foreign minister, Juan Gabriel Valdes. Valdes surprised the foreign secretary by turning around the well-rehearsed argument that the Pinochet case was having a detrimental effect on the two countries' relations, instead concentrating on the general's health. The die was cast. It was now just a matter of time.

The home office was briefed by the foreign office, which later passed on representations from the Chilean embassy supported by medical reports suggesting there had been a recent and significant deterioration in Pinochet's condition and that he might be unfit to stand trial.

The request to send him home on humanitarian grounds came less than a month after a new Chilean ambassador, Pablo Cabrera, arrived in London. He was sent by the president, Eduardo Frei, with one instruction: "Bring Pinochet home."

Cabrera's predecessor, Mario Artaza, who in private was reduced almost to tears by having to defend a man he despised, steadfastly refused to go anywhere near Pinochet's rented mansion on the Wentworth estate in Surrey in south-east England. But Cabrera brought a more pragmatic approach to the affair. His first task was to visit the general to outline the new approach.

Despite being surrounded by sycophantic supporters, loneliness was said to be making Pinochet severely depressed. That and suddenly being forced to spend long hours with his wife, something he had studiously avoided for much of his married life. His only real contact with the outside world came through the three special branch officers who spent every waking hour either in the next room or accompanying Pinochet during his brief sojourns in the mansion's garden.

According to the new Chilean ambassador, the man he found at Wentworth in September was a shadow of the general who had ruled Chile for 17 years with an iron fist. Unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes, Pinochet seemed to have no idea why he was under arrest.

There was some hostility among the general's close advisers to the "health" option. Their interests conflicted with those of the Chilean government. For Frei and his center-left coalition the doomsday scenario was Pinochet dying in Britain: the old general returning to Santiago in a coffin would immediately grant Pinochet martyr status. But if Cabrera could get him home he would return to Chile a disgraced and discredited man.

The first public sign that Pinochet's health may have deteriorated came in October at his committal hearing at Bow Street magistrates court in central London. Michael Loxton, the general's Surrey physician, told the court he had recently suffered two minor strokes to add to the plethora of other ailments -- diabetes, kidney problems and incontinence -- and that to put him in the witness box "would run the risk of him being very ill". At one point, the court was told, Pinochet's advisers had even called a priest to administer the last rites.

By the end of November the home office, helped behind the scenes by the Chilean embassy, had managed to get Pinochet, or at least his advisers, to agree that he would undergo independent medical tests. But it was more than a month, on Jan. 5, before six hours of tests were carried out by four eminent doctors at Northwick Park hospital in west London.

The home office received the report the following day. Sitting at the kitchen table of his town house in south London, Straw opened his red ministerial box and read the reports. They made grim reading. Pinochet was apparently brain-damaged and his condition was deteriorating.

After consulting the chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, Straw was convinced enough by the evidence to announce on Jan. 11 -- six days before the Chilean election -- that he was "minded" to halt extradition proceedings against the general. While it would be hard to argue that Pinochet's health did not warrant his release, it was prudent to announce the decision a week before the Chilean election, rather than appearing to kowtow to the demands of a newly installed rightwing government afterwards. In the event Ricardo Lagos, Chile's first socialist president since Salvador Allende was killed during Pinochet's coup in 1973, won by a small majority.

Human rights groups were up in arms at Straw's decision. In March Pinochet had been looking sprightly, taking tea with Lady Thatcher, while in July he had given an apparently lucid interview with Dominic Lawson, the editor of the London Sunday Telegraph. How could he suddenly be too ill to stand trial?

For all the apoplexy of Amnesty International and others, Straw's announcement should have left the way open for a quick and easy exit for the general. The Spanish foreign minister had been true to his word, and in a move that infuriated Judge Garzon the Spanish government refused to pass on a request for judicial review of Straw's decision.

But just as the general appeared to be heading for the airport the Belgian government, in a move that enraged the foreign office and Straw, entered the legal fray. Egged on by Judge Garzon, the Belgian government launched judicial review proceedings against Straw's decision not to release the medical reports.

The home office had made what could have been a potentially disastrous mistake in its dealings with the general's lawyers. Officials had offered to keep the report completely confidential, even going so far as to refuse to disclose them to the countries wanting to extradite the former dictator. It was not much, but for the groups hoping to reverse Straw's decision it was a legal chink of light that could be exploited in the courts.

After two high court hearings a panel of three judges ruled that the medical report should be released in confidence to the extraditing states. Within hours of the report arriving in Madrid it appeared in full in three Spanish newspapers. The finger of suspicion pointed at the Spanish government, although it denied any involvement. But by releasing the report the government was able to get through the Spanish public what it had been saying all along: Pinochet should be allowed to go home.

While the legal maneuvering and posturing continued in London the Chilean military swung into action to plan "Operation Return". After so many months of inaction, now was the Chilean military's chance to shine. Pinochet would have been proud of the planning of the operation. A Boeing 707 equipped with a mobile hospital was dispatched to Bermuda, where it waited on the tarmac for a week before finally arriving in the UK.

What happens to Pinochet now is a matter of conjecture. Lagos has promised to allow the Chilean judiciary to do what it will with him, but the consensus among most observers is that as long as he does not try to re-enter public life by taking his seat in the senate he will be allowed to live out his days in peace, in marked contrast to the hullabaloo that surrounded his 16-month enforced stay in Britain.

One thing, however, is for sure: he will never leave Chile again. And that, perhaps, will be the former dictator's final and lasting legacy. The man who ordered the murder of more than 3,000 people has ensured that former heads of state cannot hide behind state immunity to avoid prosecution for crimes committed in office.

-- Guardian News Service