Arrest Raises Hope for Justice for Ex-Tyrants

The arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile in London dramatizes a curious paradox: Although South America’s former tyrants and torturers have been largely shielded from prosecution at home, they are increasingly under investigation around the world for crimes committed more than 20 years ago.

Pinochet’s arrest shattered the aura of impunity that surrounded the continent’s best-known ex-dictator, who, unlike many contemporaries, had avoided falling into disgrace or exile and is now senator for life. And it raised hope that long-deferred justice may yet be possible.

“I was ashamed to be sitting next to a senator who was being pursued by other nations for murder,” said Sen. Jorge Lavandero, who was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt by security forces during Pinochet’s regime and who serves in Chile’s Senate with Pinochet. “I think it’s correct that other nations are protecting the rights of their citizens who were victims. If Chile does not want to protect its own, that’s another story. The precepts of justice are universal.”

In Argentina, Chile and other nations, the democratic governments that replaced military regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s made pragmatic pacts that traded justice for stability. Despite their well-documented atrocities, amnesty laws were passed to protect active and former officers of the security forces.

As a result, veterans of death squads and concentration camps in Argentina and Chile walk the streets with impunity, appear on television talk shows, and hold government jobs and elected offices.

In Chile, at least 3,000 people were killed during the 1973-90 Pinochet regime, and tens of thousands more were tortured, imprisoned and exiled. Yet after democracy returned, Pinochet remained at the head of the armed forces. His constitution granted the military and right-wing parties disproportionate power, ensuring that most crimes went unpunished.

A rare exception was the conviction of the chief of the military regime’s feared secret police and his deputy in the assassination in 1976 of Orlando Letelier, a Chilean exile leader, in Washington, D.C.

In Argentina, the return to democracy in 1983 brought the acclaimed 1985 trial and imprisonment of the military junta. But a series of military uprisings caused President Raul Alfonsin to pass “due obedience” laws protecting low- and midlevel officers from prosecution. And in 1990, President Carlos Menem pardoned and released the top commanders, along with leftist guerrillas, in the name of national pacification.

Nonetheless, Argentine and Chilean human rights activists have worked closely with European judicial authorities, taking advantage of laws that allow prosecution overseas in cases involving European victims, as well as prosecutions involving crimes against humanity. France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Sweden are among the nations where courts have conducted such investigations, provoking diplomatic tensions.

For example, Spanish courts are investigating hundreds of deaths in Argentina and Chile of victims who, under liberal citizenship laws, were considered Spanish citizens. Arrest warrants have been issued for accused Argentine military repressors.