Frail Honecker Arrives in Santiago

Former East German leader Erich Honecker, worn down by cancer and a long trip from Berlin, arrived Thursday in Santiago and went directly to a hospital for medical examinations.

Released on humanitarian grounds from trial in Germany, Honecker came to join his family here and to spend what are expected to be the last months of his life. His daughter, Sonja, is married to a Chilean, and his wife, Margot, came to Chile in July.

“I thought I would never again see my beloved wife and brave comrade,” Honecker, 80, said in a frail voice at Santiago’s international airport. “With this, my last personal wish is fulfilled, and I thank the Chilean people and their government.”

Berlin courts dropped charges of manslaughter and embezzlement against the former Communist strongman after medical testimony indicated that he would die from liver cancer within months. He left jail Wednesday and flew to Brazil, then on to Chile, arriving here in the hot early afternoon.

“Behind me are many very hard years, with my stay in hospitals and more than five months in jail,” he said, reading a prepared statement. “Soon after the beginning of this serious situation, I learned of my critical state of health. But the solidarity of Chileans, of friends and of comrades throughout the world helped to fortify me.”

Chilean Communists organized a welcoming demonstration outside the airport terminal. His wife, a former East German education minister, met him at the foot of the plane’s stairs. Leaders of Chile’s Communist and Socialist parties greeted him at the terminal.

German Correa, president of the Socialist Party and a former Cabinet minister in the current Chilean government, acknowledged that Honecker’s release has been criticized.

“It is logical that there are people who criticize, and it is legitimate that they do so,” Correa said in televised remarks. “But naturally here, as the court in Berlin considered, there is a superior right, which is the human right to life and to spend the last days or months of his life with his own.”

Even right-wing Chilean politicians commented in conciliatory terms. “What we Chileans wish for him is peace, that he find interior peace,” said Sen. Sergio Diez of the conservative National Renovation Party.

Honecker is expected to stay in his daughter’s house, part of a secluded condominium compound at the foot of the Andes Mountains on Santiago’s eastern edge. His daughter married a Chilean Socialist who was exiled in East Germany after Chile’s armed forces overthrew Socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973. The couple, now separated, has two children.

Honecker gave asylum to thousands of Chilean leftists after 1973. Some of the former exiles have had positions in the current government, elected in 1989 and headed by the centrist Christian Democratic Party.

As East Germany collapsed in 1990, Honecker took refuge in a Soviet hospital outside Berlin, escaping to Moscow the following year. Then, as the Soviet Union dissolved, he took refuge in the Chilean Embassy in Moscow.

Chilean leftists demanded that he be permitted to come to Chile then. But Germany insisted that he be sent back home for trial. Chilean diplomats persuaded him to leave the embassy last July, and he was flown to Germany for trial on charges of ordering the shooting of East Germans who tried to flee the Communist country.