Prosecuting Latin America's Dirty Wars
Feitlowitz, Marguerite
"The conduct with which we are concerned are archetypal acts of government or sovereign power. We would contend that where torture is committed in the context of the military forces or...
...The five recounted that on August 5 they had informed the secretary general of the Socialist Party that a coup was in the offing...
...Contreras—one of the few men convicted in Chile for crimes committed during the dictatorship—was asking for ten new agents: two each in the embassies of Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, and one each in Belgium, Costa Rica, Italy, and Venezuela...
...Will Pinochet and Co...
...The essential point," he stressed, "is that this trial is not Spain v. Argentina...
...The numbers of less well-known Latin Americans "caught in the claws of the Condor" rise into the thousands...
...All over Latin America there are people who have died—or who are willing to die—for the opportunity...
...Ernesto Ekaizer, "Uno de los lores tacha de fantasiosa a la defensa del general Pinochet," El Pais, January 28, 1999...
...4. Telma Luzzani, "Con nosotros se inaugur6 la tortura," Clarin (Buenos Aires), January 26, 1999...
...GarzOn's direct link to Pinochet was Operation Condor, the code name for what Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia jointly established in 1973-1974 as an "Interpol for subversives...
...Will the United States prosecute on behalf of Moffitt...
...This is why, to cite just one example, ex-Nazi Erich Priebke could be tried and convicted in Italy in 1996...
...5. Jonathan Calvert and Andy McSmith, "Look Who's Coming to the Rescue of Augusto," the Guardian, January 17, 1999...
...In the interviews I conducted last summer, a host of leading jurists from Italy, France, and various nations of the Americas praised him as "visionary," "beyond courageous," "the man the whole Establishment wants to kill...
...Samuel Blixen is the author of Operación Candor...
...We thought Allende needed to know," said Sergio Villar...
...9 More incriminating still is a letter provided to GarzOn by the Uruguayan author and journalist Samuel Blixen: on September 16, 1975, Manuel Contreras, then head of the brutal Chilean secret police (DINA) requested from Pinochet $600,000 for the "neutralization of the principal adversaries of the Junta who live abroad...
...The Nuremberg Principles make explicit that such crimes are committed by "individuals, not abstract entities," and that any person found guilty of such offenses "is internationally accountable and subject to punishment" whether or not he or she is a government official or head of state...
...These "universal crimes against basic humane standards" include systematized killings, torture, disappearance, slavery, arbitrary deportation, forced labor, rape, and persecution for political, religious, or ethnic reasons...
...All told, 250 members of the military were arrested and tortured in the weeks leading up to the coup...
...The United Nations and the International Court of the Organization of American States (OAS) have both made it clear that domestic amnesties do not apply to universal crimes...
...In sworn testimony many Argentine survivors have said that they were tortured in Argentina by men with identifiable Chilean, Paraguayan, or Bolivian accents or kidnapped while traveling elsewhere in Latin America...
...12 Montgomery's cool technicalities visibly offended some of the Lord Justices: "It's like Alice in Wonderland," interrupted Lord Phillips at one point...
...These cases that have recently put nine highranking military men in jail for baby-trafficking during the regime would never have happened without the positive pressure from Europe...
...It began with us...
...Pinochet had traveled to London—his favorite city—in October 1998 and stayed on for treatment of a herniated disk...
...He has also investigated Gonzalez's more conservative successor, Jose Maria Aznar, for irregularities in the handling of intelligence documents, and corralled elusive operations for the sheltering of white-collar money...
...Which is not to say that there are no surprises in this story...
...She describes her friend as old and frail, mournful in the face of mistreatment...
...The team cited the major precursors of the Nuremberg Principles, all of which came about in response to instances of mass brutality...
...The Spanish case against Chile was filed in Valencia on July 4, 1996, by Miguel Maravet, then president of the Union of Progressive Prosecutors...
...Yet under Franco the country developed some unexpectedly helpful laws—originally directed against Basque separatists—which enable it to reach out internationally and prosecute acts of terrorism...
...the Free Association of Lawyers...
...In her defense of Pinochet, Montgomery asserted (erroneously) that international crimes are limited to war and other types of armed conflict...
...Article 69 rules out designations like Senator for Life because they "distort" the constitutional system based on the democratic election of parliamentary representatives...
...its counterpart in Chile was Villa Grimaldi...
...The worry is that the international travel required for government, diplomatic, and financial business will be endangered out of sheer vengeance...
...Only 2 percent are "enraged" by the efforts to try Pinochet...
...Spain signed the major human-rights treaties only after the death of General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until 1975...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...The case of the tortured navy men helps substantiate this point...
...Montgomery's statement was widely quoted in the international press...
...the disregard for half a century of human rights law seems not merely anachronistic, but insensitive to the need for universal basic protections...
...Anticipating rebuttals from the defense, they added that even before he was named head of the armed forces or head of state, Pinochet had conspired to commit torture, kidnap, and other human-rights abuses...
...Just before 6 p.m...
...But here as elsewhere he attempted to split procedural hairs...
...From the beginning, the prosecution has stressed the historical depth of its support...
...GarzOn, a forty-six-year-old former seminarian, seems to thrive on opposition...
...For starters, if GarzOn had not previously been investigating Argentina, he never would have got PROSECUTING LATIN AMERICA'S DIRTY WARS to Pinochet...
...Perhaps the most telling finding is that 71 percent find their lives unaffected by the general's arrest...
...the 1985 trial of the ex-commanders, which resulted in the convictions of the leaders of that repression...
...Two other socialist MPs were charged: Juan Bustos, a human rights lawyer and Fanny Pollarolo, a physician who works with survivors of Pinochet's torture camps...
...13 As president of the court, Lord BrowneWilkinson set the tone early on: "If torture is not an international crime, then what is...
...9. Alberto Pedroncini is the attorney for the Abuelas [Grandmothers] de Plaza de Mayo, and is most recently responsible for the incarceration of eight high-ranking military officers for baby-trafficking during the Dirty War...
...For close to twenty years he has taken tea with the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who declared the general's arrest in her capital "outrageous...
...Our emphasis is on the future...
...Signing on to the convention implies no waiver of immunity, Collins asserted...
...82 percent oppose any boycott of British consumer products...
...Well before his investigation hit the international press, GarzOn had told his closest legal advisers that the most important case of his career was the one that until recently "no one paid attention to...
...These instruments, however, had mostly lain fallow...
...I was told by Spanish attorneys and judges close to the case that the pressure was so intense that Garcia CasteIlOn had even left Madrid, requesting a lower-ranking job in the relative backwater of Valladolid...
...In 1995, his investigation of the secret government-sponsored death squads that killed twenty-eight Basque liberation activists living in France quickly brought down the administration of the socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez...
...That would radically change as the investigation gathered momentum and international guidance...
...Morever, the Spanish Constitution specifically prohibits executive pardons and legislative amnesties...
...A combination of international and Spanish domestic laws counters the defense assertion that Pinochet is safe from extradition because he was amnestied in Chile in 1978 (a pardon the general himself had written into the Constitution) and because he is "Senator for Life...
...6. The survey was done by MORI in Santiago, Chile...
...last year he found a microphone in his bed...
...The Spanish prosecution may well change that...
...To fight against oblivion and impunity...
...and Izquierda Unida (Unifed Left), a consortium of six political parties...
...Hundreds are named in the documentation furnished to the Law Lords by GarzOn...
...In Chile, the excavations of Colonia Dignidad are likewise a response to the energizing forces of international interest...
...Amnesty International has called this proceeding "the most important human rights-trial of the century...
...Ernesto Ekaizer, "La defensa de Pinochet dice que sus delitos no tienen jurisdicc6n internacional," El Pais, January 27, 1999...
...And so a helping hand is in order...
...The victims of these crimes have waited decades for some effective vindication, for the opportunity to go before a judge who would listen to sworn testimony and write it down...
...Here is where the argument for sovereignty becomes a discourse on history, on the need for marginalizing—indeed silencing— those who have been abused or who witnessed the atrocious treatment of others...
...Time will tell...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Longstanding assumptions about sovereignty, impunity, and popular will have been re-arranged in a new calculus that should make the world less hospitable to abusive heads of state and former heads of state...
...on October 16, the Spanish investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzón issued a warrant calling for the general's extradition to Madrid to stand trial for "crimes against humanity," as defined in 1946 by the Nuremberg Principles...
...Also marshaled is the May 24, 1915 Declaration by France, Great Britain, and Russia that the massacre of Armenians committed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire constituted "crimes against humanity and civilization for which every member and representative of the Turkish government would be [internationally] accountable...
...The Chilean case had for months been languishing in the files, because the investigating magistrate had buckled under pressure from factions in Madrid and Santiago...
...0 F ALL the issues at play in these proceedings, torture has remained the most tenacious...
...Castresana has consistently warned that "transitional democracies often mask deeply-entrenched repressive traits and practices...
...obstetricians, nurses, and midwives who attended desaparecidas as they gave birth blindfolded and chained only to be killed so their babies—"seeds of the Tree of Evil" in the parlance of the regime—could be "saved" by military families...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...Although Collins several times "deplored" the events that occurred in Chile during the 1970s, he never once gave a name to those crimes and insisted that the accusations had PROSECUTING LATIN AMERICA'S DIRTY WARS yet to be proven...
...Tucuman established the country's first Truth Commission, in response to GarzOn's arrest warrant for its governor, Antonio Bussi, who was in charge of several torture camps during the dictatorship...
...and Mark Honigsbaum, "Pinochet Groupies Fly in to Combat `Vendetta' Against their Hero," the Guardian, January 24, 1999...
...15 Not only did Chile here attempt to discredit the Rettig Commission and the work of human-rights groups like Amnesty, it disparaged the reliability of the extensive testimony by survivors and relatives of desaparecidos...
...All of that was crucial," Castresana stresses, "but much of it got undone...
...Because Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their associates helped orchestrate and finance the coup against Allende and because Chile murdered both Letelier and Moffitt on U.S...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...Castresana's original denuncia followed all the usual channels: it ended up with GarzOn through the normal round-robin distribution system in the National Court...
...Horacio Mendez Carrera, one of Argentina's most prominent human rights attorneys, told me that the Spanish prosecution "has pumped new energy into our courts...
...On October 28, 1998, the Law Lords (Britain's highest court) ruled that as a former head of state Pinochet was immune from prosecution in the United Kingdom...
...Of special note is the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment...
...Indeed there are—at every point along the way...
...That's a very North American question," quipped Richard Wilson, Director of AmeriDISSENT / Spring 1999 • 39 PROSECUTING LATIN AMERICA'S DIRTY WARS can University's International Human Rights Law Clinic, and an adviser to the Spaniards on both Argentina and Chile...
...France and Portugal were named as probable harbors for "subversives...
...4 pINOCHET'S public relations team— headed by Robin Harris, an ex-policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher—has spent a fortune attempting to expunge this image from the public mind...
...Martin Almada escaped from Paraguay in 1978 with the help of Amnesty International...
...And neither would anyone else...
...Against Carlos Altamirano, the secretary general of the Socialist Party, there were several assassination attempts, in Spain, France, and the United States...
...2. Ernesto Ekaizer, "El Gobierno chileno deplora 'la dictadura,' pero defiende los 'actos publicos' de Pinochet, El Pais (Madrid), February 2, 1999...
...7. The Guardian, January 17 & 24, 1999...
...The ex-navy men endured between three and five years in concentration camps, "[an institution] which had never before existed in Chile...
...To ensure the Chilean "peace process," the general must come home.' Yet an independent survey done in Chile in late November 1998 tells a different story: 63 percent of citizens believe that Pinochet is guilty of the crimes of which he is accused...
...Current photos of the general show him as the very essence of a British gentleman: white-haired, rosycheeked, and regal in luxuriously sober civilian suits...
...66 percent are convinced that Chilean democracy is unthreatened by the arrest of Pinochet...
...In Spain, it is the Juez de InstrucciOn (in this case, GarzOn) who actually carries out the research, calls witnesses, takes sworn testimony, and structures the trial (with extensive input from the lawyers for the plaintiffs...
...Moreover, no one accused of crimes against humanity may offer the defense of claiming to have been "following orders...
...With the death of Franco, the country incorporated all of the major international treaties and conventions—"in one fell swoop," as I was told by one Spanish judge...
...0 N THE very day that Pinochet's attorney, Clare Montgomery, was arguing before the British Law Lords that her DISSENT / Spring 1999 • 33 PROSECUTING LATIN AMERICA'S DIRTY WARS client was entitled to "absolute immunity" as a former head of state, doctors and forensic anthropologists were searching for the remains of Chilean desaparecidos at the site of a concentration camp known as "Dignity...
...the insistence that only Chile can legitimately address its past seems hypocritical—not only in light of the amnesty Pinochet decreed for himself in 1978 when he re-wrote the country's Constitution, but also because in early January the relatives of several of the regime's most prominent victims (including Isabel Allende, daughter of Salvador Allende, and Juan Letelier, son of Allende's foreign minister Orlando Letelier) were charged with "criminal conspiracy" for having publicly supported the extradition process and for having told their stories to the European press.' On October 16, 1998, when Baltasar Garain issued his original extradition order for Pinochet, the action seemed to many like a bolt from the blue...
...See also "Ni los militares se salvaron," an interview with Sergio Villar in Pdgina 12 (Buenos Aires), January 26, 1999...
...An irony of these prosecutions is that for the last century Spain had one of the most anachronistic and provincial legal cultures in all of Europe...
...It is an offering from one court of law to the victims of the Argentine repression who have been unable to find justice in their own country...
...Almada's documentation— five tons of papers, tapes, files, and microfilms—distributes primary responsibility for Condor among Pinochet, Argentina's General Jorge Rafael Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera, Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner, and Bolivia's past dictator and current president, Hugo Banzer...
...Well over one hundred such accounts have been discovered, several with millions of dollars...
...In representing Spain, the Crown Prosecution Service employed other legal instruments in a more "surgical" way...
...his son, a medical student and the president of the Paraguayan Students Association at the University of Cordoba, was murdered there in 1976...
...MARGUERITE FEITLOWITZ is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, named a New York Times Notable Book of 1998...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...Ernesto Ekaizer, "El Gobierno chileno deplora 'la dictadura,' pero defiende los 'actos publicos' de Pinochet," El Pais, February 2, 1999...
...The Spanish action on Argentina stands out because it was started not by the government, or by a "rogue magistrate," as some detractors have claimed, but by popular initiative— against the advice of lawyers who said it "would never fly...
...It was the Mothers of the Plaza who overwhelmed me," he said...
...The most famous victims of the Condor were Chilean ex-President Bernardo Leighton, murdered in Rome...
...The hearings took DISSENT / Spring 1999 • 37 PROSECUTING LATIN AMERICA'S DIRTY WARS place from January 18 until February 4, when the Lords adjourned to prepare their ruling...
...On the last Argentine dictatorship—and on the international banking, business, and intelligence operations that helped it along—there is far more information in Madrid than anywhere else on earth...
...THE EDITORS 40 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...
...Speaking without notes, he electrified the audience that overflowed the ballroom of Madrid's ornate Circulo de Bellas Artes...
...And for this reason the investigation proceeded unmolested for eighteen months—until GarzOn began issuing arrest warrants for high-level military men...
...Yet there is also some legitimate concern that if Spain should prevail in these extradition hearings, it could encourage vendettas against former officials and heads of state...
...In fact, about four hours before signing the extradition warrant for Pinochet on October 1 6, PROSECUTING LATIN AMERICA'S DIRTY WARS GarzOn embargoed the assets and froze the bank accounts of 152 Argentine officers implicated in the abuses of the last repression...
...the further prosecutions of lowerranking repressors...
...Clare Montgomery, Defense Attorney for General Augusto Pinochet,' January 25, 1999 "So was Hitler's [Night of Long Knives] an 'official act -72 -British Law Lord Peter Millet, February 1, 1999 EVEN IF Augusto Pinochet eventually escapes trial for the widespread torture and terrorism that characterized his regime in Chile (1973-1991), the efforts to bring him to justice in Spain (and lately France, Switzerland, and Belgium) mark a pivotal moment in international human rights law...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...From Alberto Pedroncini, one of Argentina's most prominent human-rights attorneys, GarzOn received a host of materials, including a declassified FBI cable sent to Washington from Buenos Aires on April 9, 1976, which described Chile as the "center" or "headquarters" of the Condor operation, with Argentina and Uruguay being notably "enthusiastic...
...Sanz, "Un documento vincula a Pinochet con la persección de opositores en el extranjero," in El Pais, January 22, 1999, for a synopsis of his testimony...
...The prosecution reminded the Lords that the UN Declaration of 1946 specifies that signatories (among them Chile, Argentina, Britain, and Spain) have not only the right but the obligation to prosecute criminals against humanity...
...Excerpts from his testimony to Garz6n were generously provided to me by Fernando Mas, who has covered this investigation since 1996...
...The acuity of the judges' reasoning, their skill and honesty with evidence, and their grasp of history must meet the most exacting humane standards...
...Funded by the Pinochet Foundation in Santiago, the public relations team has published pamphlets and 34 • DISSENT / Spring 1999 articles, placed ads and set up a "Chile Reconciliation" Web site, all with the same message: In order to save the world from "universal chaos," sovereignty must be respected absolutely...
...The charges were brought by General Odlanier Mena, who became chief of Pinochet's secret police in 1978...
...8. The 1984 Due Obedience law enabled lower-ranking torturers and other human rights abusers to claim that they were merely "following orders" (a violation of the Nuremberg Principles...
...From the outset, the Salvador Allende Foundation has supported this process...
...See El Pais, December 3, 1998...
...Pinochet is represented by Herbert & Smith, one of the most elite British firms...
...Thousands of torturers and repressors have escaped prosecution in Argentina.' "Still," Castresana insisted, "after all these horrible blows, there was enormous effort on the part of human-rights groups, and popular—even political—will to investigate those crimes...
...These mid-career lawyers started with little specialized training...
...and Chilean democracy requires a collective move away from divisive issues...
...Since the spring of 1996, GarzOn had sat in his small, rather Spartan office near the Plaza Colon and listened to the sworn testimony of individuals from all sides of the ghastly Argentine equation: survivors of the torture camps and relatives of desaparecidos...
...Joan Garces, former legal, economic, and political adviser to President Allende, has represented the victims of Chile's repression...
...he was granted asylum in France where he worked for UNESCO until returning to Paraguay in 1989...
...In early February, a group of elderly women announced that after decades of anguish over their missing grandchildren, they would found their own group of Abuelas, modeled on their Argentine counterparts...
...The cable also included information on special Condor groups whose mission was "to travel anywhere in the world . to assassinate so-called [leftists, communists, and Marxists...
...BY OCTOBER 1998, the Chilean case in Madrid had been dormant for approximately five months...
...Only now [March 1998] did our Parliament finally find the courage to derogate the laws of Due Obedience and Punto Final...
...not Spain against Argentina...
...But in truth it was the logical result of two years of painstaking investigations in Spain into both the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships...
...For periodic updates on the Pinochet trial visit the Dissent Web site at www.igc.org/dissent...
...6 Montgomery's defense of Pinochet is deeply flawed, on logical, legal, and moral grounds...
...That speaks volumes for the importance of this process, whatever the eventual outcome...
...S0 WHAT hangs in the balance as we await the decision of the Lords and, perhaps, the resolution of Pinochet's trial in Madrid...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...The National Security Archive—and to a lesser extent the Justice Department—has provided GarzOn with a host of CIA, FBI, and State Department documents...
...In fact, I hardly knew any Argentines," reflected Carlos Castresana, the forty-five-year-old attorney who on March 28, 1996 filed the denuncia that got the process rolling...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...FROM THE beginning, Pinochet's judicial process has been exquisitely careful and transparent...
...Under pressure from Spanish and Chilean business, military and political factions, the investigating judge, Manual Garcia Caste11On, had agreed to shelve the investigation...
...He too had been ordered to halt his investigation, but he refused...
...No nation, according to a host of UN treaties and conventions, may grant asylum to individuals or officials accused of universal crimes...
...It was like we were children playing with a toy—that's how the Establishment viewed the whole area of human-rights law...
...In Paris in 1987 Mendez Carrera won the conviction in absentia against ex-Navy captain Alfredo Astiz for engineering the deaths of two French nuns connected to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo...
...Its domestic legislation went untouched from 1870 until the 1970s...
...No one took us seriously," I was told by Castresana and every other lawyer involved in the case...
...Pinochet, said one ex-navy man, was like "Saturn devouring his children...
...The ruling issued by Britain's Law Lords—and also potentially by Spain's National Court—will create landmark precedents in international law...
...He has sentenced Basque terrorists to prison 36 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 terms exceeding a century and put drug lords away for almost as long...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...In the mid-1980s, jurisdiction for universal crimes was inscribed into the Spanish penal code and other bodies of domestic law...
...The prosecution once again made the case that as head of the armed forces and the governing Junta, Pinochet was responsible for massive crimes against humanity...
...In Buenos Aires, the concentration camp known as Automotores Orletti specialized in "foreign subversives...
...Central among these are the 1864 Geneva Convention (on the humane treatment of combatants and civilians during war) and the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which further codified these rules and established a forum for international accountability with the Permanent Court of Arbitration (located in The Hague...
...He praises London for its "civility" and "respect for rules...
...Castresana was struck by reports about a trial that had recently begun in Italy and about efforts to begin prosecutions in France and Germany...
...I first saw Castresana in action last June at a panel devoted to the trial...
...The twentieth anniversary of the "Dirty War" coup had fallen four days earlier, and Castresana was inspired by the demonstrations, documentaries, and news reports that flooded Madrid...
...All five of these men—who in 1973 were twentyyearold junior officers—have given sworn testimony to the major human rights groups and to Baltasar GarzOn, the judge who requested that Pinochet be extradited to Spain to stand trial for crimes against humanity...
...It wasn't out of party loyalty, but we had sworn to protect the Constitution and wanted that vow to be respected...
...So a new panel of Lords was selected— seven this time, instead of the previous five— and it was decided that both the government of Chile and Amnesty International could be parties to the proceedings...
...The Spanish investigation," stressed Mendez Carrera, "teaches us that no one is beyond the law, an important lesson for a country like ours where humanrights legislation has a deplorable history...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...For GarzOn, death threats are routine...
...ex-policemen who had spent the last twenty years hoarding secret documents...
...That was our original incentive," he said, "but we had no fresh details and we had to rely on work already done in Argentina...
...Had Pinochet stayed home, he would have been safe from Spanish courts...
...3. See "Chile: allanan Colonia Dignidad," Clarin (Buenos Aires), January 25, 1999...
...The arrests, said the delegation, were carried out along a strict chain of command, with "Pinochet [as head of the armed forces] on top of everything...
...The Spanish case is based on no fewer than nine international human-rights treaties and conventions, to which Chile, Spain, and the United Kingdom are all signatories...
...This round of hearings crystallized the proceedings...
...Another judge DISSENT / Spring 1999 • 35 PROSECUTING LATIN AMERICA'S DIRTY WARS will render the verdict...
...According to the laws and conventions cited by Garzón, leaving Chilean territory makes Pinochet vulnerable to arrest for the two hundred thousand individuals tortured during his regime, the three thousand people assassinated, the one thousand "disappeared," and for the five thousand to six thousand buried in unmarked graves...
...Punto Final established February 23, 1987, as the cut-off date for trials related to the Dirty War...
...and Orlando Letelier, killed in Washington (with his U.S...
...That he improved the Chilean economy has so far been Pincohet's most surefire defense...
...16 Since that vote, prosecutions have been reopened or initiated in various Argentine provinces...
...Twenty years later, here was a case of absolute impunity, one of the clearest anywhere in Latin America...
...To all those who commit atrocities we say: There will be no safe haven, no place for you to hide...
...A half-century has elapsed since the acceptance of the Nuremberg Principles, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the UN Charter...
...Even the most reputedly conservative Lords kept coming back to it...
...Moreover the case was not started through the efforts of those who were seeking redress, but through the passionate empathy of individuals unconnected to the events...
...I could not get their images out of my mind...
...soil, the country could well be implicated further down the road...
...That decision was appealed by the prosecution and overturned on November 25, paving the way for the general's extradition...
...We would contend that where torture is committed in the context of the military forces or internal security police...
...Castresana drafted the denuncia with his colleagues at the Union of Progressive Prosecutors, a professional association founded in 1981...
...14 Lawrence Collins, the attorney who represents Chile, conceded that the UN Convention Against Torture grants jurisdiction in this matter to Spain...
...Why, he wondered, was nothing being done in Spain, where nearly a thousand of the victims had their roots, and where about a million Argentines had come as exiles during the repression...
...The absolutist interpretation of sovereignty comes down to an argument for impunity...
...The Spanish case for extradition is represented in London by the Crown Prosecution Services...
...He runs through the history of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared, which in the first year of the new democracy did the groundwork investigation into the missing...
...GarzOn has been permitted to attend hearings and advise his British colleagues...
...1 have relied here on Fernando Mas's interview with Almada...
...A delegation of ex-navy men testified in the British Parliament that they themselves were Pinochet's first torture victims, and that their brutalization began on August 5, 1973—three weeks prior to the coup of September 11...
...The 1961 Vienna Convention— whose Article 14 defines diplomatic agents (ambassadors, papal nuncios, govern38 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 ment ministers and representatives, and so on) and diplomatic business—is cited to establish that Pinochet's trip to England can in no way be considered official, thereby depriving him of diplomatic immunity from prosecution...
...Torture is not an international crime, say Pincohet defence," the Guardian, January 27, 1999 (by Guardian staff and agencies...
...ever be brought to trial...
...See J.C...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is dissent@igc.org . (4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...that still falls within the definition of sovereign or government function...
...That ruling was overturned on December 17 when Pinochet's lawyers charged "bias": Lord Hoffman (who had voted in favor of extradition) has long had public connections to a charity affiliated with Amnesty International...
...It is from Spain to Argentina...
...Despite repeated cases of massive slaughter and abuse, the application rate of these human-rights instruments has been dismal—vitiated by claims of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and realpolitik...
...to date there are over twenty thousand files in GarzOn's investigation...
...He also argued for additional monies to cover operations in Mexico, the United States, and France' Also entered into evidence on Operation Condor are documents from Paraguay, specifically the Archives of the Terror—discovered through a series of police tips in 1992 by Martin Almada, today the president of the American Association of Jurists...
...6 percent are "saddened...
...The remonstrations of Pinochet's counsel make clear that too often "democracy" is invoked to refer not to codified rights of representation but as a stand-in for modernity and the economic trappings that are its major tropes...
...It seems to me that [torture, kidnapping, hostage-taking] are much more crimes against humanity when they are inflicted on an [undefended civilian] population...
...Sometimes they were sent back to their native countries for the "coup de grace...
...Until the explosion last October of the Pinochet case, many Spanish jurists remained unclear as to their substance, scope, and significance...
...Will Kissinger— who signed documents explicitly calling for the overthrow of Allende—be vulnerable to international arrest...
...associate Ronni Moffitt, an employee of the Justice Department...
...The United States watches tensely as these proceedings unfold...
...It was GarzOn who first thought to follow up on hints that high-ranking "Dirty Warriors" maintained secret Swiss bank accounts for the money, jewelry, and property titles they extorted from prisoners and the desperate relatives of desaparecidos...
...Crimes against humanity have no statute of limitation and can be tried at any time in any nation...
...his phones are bugged...
...Hundreds of Argentines have now testified in Madrid...
...It is further buttressed by Spanish domestic law, which allows the country to prosecute international crimes in notably progressive and innovative ways...
...The investigation has already prospered...
...Torture," she declared, "is a national crime...
...Castresana smokes nonstop and talks intensely in long, well-crafted paragraphs...
...Even though amnesty laws frustrate the resolution of some fourteen pending prosecutions, attorneys have recently renewed their efforts...
...1. Sue Quinn, "Torture a State Function—Pinochet Defence," The Guardian, February 2, 1999...
...and that torture, hostage-taking, and forced disappearance are in no wise legitimate acts of state...
...In 1974, Almada was himself kidnapped and tortured in Argentina...
...When the Chilean investigation was re-opened last October, Garcia CastellOn voluntarily stepped aside so that GarzOn could take it over...
...I N THIS case there are three main groups of plaintiffs: the Argentine Association for Human Rights in Madrid...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
