Wanted: Pinochet and other former dictators. Accent on the word former.
What an international ethical and judicial can of worms was opened when Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon decided to request the extradition of the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinoche! The request was filed with the British government last month in London where Pinochet was hospitalized for surgery.
This isn’t the first time the Spanish judge has sought to apply the letter of the law to seek a somewhat ambiguous form of justice. Garzon is also responsible for prosecuting the former Spanish minister of the interior, Barrionuevo, for his overly zealous attempts to subdue ETA, the Basque separatist group that has been plaguing Spain with its violent acts of terrorism since the 1970s.
The British government is in an embarrassing position on several fronts. Pinochet was officially in London for health matters. However, the general was also ostensibly a guest of the British defense ministry as military ambassador of the Chilean government, charged with the task of negotiating the purchase of three British warships for the Chilean navy as well as anti-mine systems and infrastructure material for his country’s military apparatus.
Even more disconcerting for the British was the fact that the arrest of Pinochet just happened to fall one week before Argentinean President Carlos Menem was due for a visit in London. The purpose of this visit was to reconcile the relationship between the two countries 16 years after the conflict in the Falklands. As former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pointed out, Great Britain was about to play host to a democratically elected leader whose country, however, was responsible for invading British territory and causing the death of 250 British citizens. Moreover, Menem is personally responsible for pardoning the generals who were not only responsible for the Falklands incident, but for the entire episode of the desaparecidos. How could the British preach reconciliation on the one hand, while holding under arrest the man who had been instrumental in saving so many British lives during the Falklands incident?
One by one other European countries have followed suit with their own requests for the extradition of the former dictator. These initiatives have been put forth in compliance with the request of family members of victims who were active in radical politics in Chile at the time of the military coup. Although this seeking of belated justice may be understandable as a quest for respect for human rights, it is raising complicated questions of judicial extraterritoriality. The crimes were committed on Chilean soil, so the legality of prosecuting Pinochet in a foreign court is highly disputable.
Also questionable is the opportuneness of submitting Chile’s delicate democracy to the shock waves that have been released by this incident. In Santiago del Chile the Pinochet affair has provoked violent street demonstration reminiscent of 20 years ago. Three thousand supporters of Pinochet attempted an assault on the British Embassy and burned the Spanish flag. Clashes between police and demonstrators also occurred during a demonstration hostile to Pinochet organized by the student movement and attended by Communist party members. The motives for seeking justice for past wrongs may be highly virtuous. Nevertheless, democracy in Chile is probably too young and too fragile to withstand this picking at its all too recent historical wounds.
Indubitably, the atrocities that went on, particularly during the first years of Pinochet’s regime, clash fervently with our democratic sensitivities. Although there is no excuse for the disregard of human rights, it serves to remember the times and the context in which Chile’s military coup took place.
Salvador Allende had won the presidential elections of 1970 on a platform that promised full nationalization of all major industries, banks, and communication systems. This was the first time that a president had been elected in a non-Communist country in the western hemisphere with a Marxist-Leninist agenda.
State control of the economy, mineral resources, foreign banks, and monopolistic enterprises soon became a reality, together with the redistribution of income, raised wages, and price controls. Opposition to his efforts to turn the country toward socialism was strong from the beginning. By 1972, the economic problems of the country had severely polarized its citizenry. Food shortages caused by the reduction of foreign credits, skyrocketing prices, strikes, and political violence brought Chile to the brink of chaos. The climax came when the military forces seized power on September 11, 1973.
For all its wrong doings, Pinochet’s government, with its austere controls, managed to slash inflation and stimulate production. In 1988, he allowed for a plebiscite to decide whether or not to extend his term of office to 1997. When that result proved negative, he respected the outcome, and in 1989 Chile’s first presidential election in 19 years took place. Chile’s economic miracle in the 90s has been compared to that of the Asian tigers of the 80s, with other South American countries seeking to imitate its success.
Two weeks after the Spanish request for Pinochet’s extradition, the Spanish chapter of the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba presented a 56-page accusation denouncing Fidel Castro and several other top Cuban officials. Although recognizing that Castro’s 18,000 victims were even more numerous than Pinochet’s 4,000, Spanish law, and for that matter international law, sanctions judicial immunity to heads of state and other high ranking officials of foreign governments.
The arrest of Pinochet is imparting one useful message to the dictators of the world: that their moment of truth and reckoning will indeed eventually come. The guarantee of permanent impunity is no longer. The collective amnesia which suspended justice for so many years is a hypocrisy of the past. The totalitarian Communist block of the East no longer exists to justify the concubinage of western democracies with dictatorial regimes.
Nevertheless, there is a countermessage that is perhaps more worrisome than anything else. If our laws only permit the punishment of leaders who belong to the past, what will prevent those dictators still in power from interpreting that as a license to kill in the present? And what’s worse, what incentive will the Castros and the Milosevices of the world have to allow for a transition to democracy as Pinochet did in Chile, if by doing so they will be signing their own international warrant of arrest?
November 1998
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