Passions Deep but Divided Over Pinochet

As diplomatic and legal fights raged in three nations Monday over former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Chileans reacted to Britain’s sudden arrest of their once-untouchable tyrant with all the fury and political conflict that are his legacy.

There was little sympathy among the many who suffered the ruthlessness of the dictatorship. The daughter of a Spanish diplomat whom its secret police kidnapped and tortured to death saw a grim irony in Chile’s claim that Pinochet’s diplomatic passport shields him from prosecution.

“My father had diplomatic immunity, and no one respected it,” said Carmen Soria, 38, recalling Carmelo Soria’s death in 1976. “The dictatorship always based themselves on force. They thought they could walk the world without fear. They did not realize that when you do something, you have to pay for it.”

Outside Carmen Soria’s house in Santiago on Monday was a symbol of the ghosts of the past that were disturbed by the arrest: A police jeep full of flak-jacketed officers was guarding the slain diplomat’s daughter, a persistent anti-Pinochet activist, after she received a weekend flurry of death threats.

Meanwhile, the 82-year-old general and senator-for-life remained in police custody in his hospital room in London, where British police arrested him over the weekend at the request of Spanish judges investigating atrocities during his 17-year regime.

Also Monday, one of two Spanish judges investigating Pinochet expanded the number of crimes for which he wants the former Chilean leader extradited. Judge Baltasar Garzon, whose career is studded with big-name prosecutions of terrorists, drug lords and corrupt officials, filed a motion encompassing 94 cases of genocide, torture and other crimes, as well as the deaths of 79 Spaniards who were killed in Chile after being abducted by an alliance of South American intelligence services.

But as a convoluted international legal battle intensified, Spanish prosecutors who had previously questioned the merits of Garzon’s case filed a motion to block the arrest order. And on the diplomatic front, centrist Chilean President Eduardo Frei cut short a trip in Spain, pointedly canceling an appearance at a celebration in Madrid of Chilean-Spanish ties.

Frei warned Spain and Britain to respect Chile’s sovereignty and reminded Spaniards that no foreign nations intervened to judge Spanish leaders after Spain’s 40-year dictatorship ended.

“We are a nation of laws, and we do not accept that crimes committed in Chile are judged in the courts of other nations,” Frei said. “Spain has not experienced the human rights trials that are demanded of our Latin American nations.”

Alarmed about strife at home, Frei’s government appealed to Chileans to stay calm.

Rightist senators declared a boycott of all Senate activities unrelated to the Pinochet matter, dispatched a delegation to London and called for an emergency meeting of the military-dominated National Security Council. The vehemence of hard-core Pinochetistas revealed once again that, despite all of this nation’s economic modernization, Pinochet embodies a streak of fortress-like, militaristic nationalism.

As riot police ringed the Spanish and British embassies here in the capital to prevent a repeat of Sunday’s violent rightist protests at those buildings, the conservative mayor of Providencia, the Santiago neighborhood housing Spain’s embassy, said he was retaliating against Spain by cutting off the mission’s parking privileges and other municipal services.

“We aren’t even going to pick up their garbage,” declared Mayor Cristian Labbe, a former army colonel.

On the other end of the spectrum, moderate and militant leftists criticized Frei’s defense of Pinochet, further straining the president’s center-left coalition.

Those leaders share a sentiment that has electrified the Spanish-speaking world since Saturday: By circumventing Chile’s amnesty laws, human rights activists say, Spain and Britain have achieved a victory with historic implications for Latin America, where justice trails economic modernization.

“This is a victory not only of the Chilean people but of all humanity,” Ariel Dorfman, a noted Chilean author, wrote in Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. “It means that crimes will not always go unpunished. “

The divided passions over the role of Britain and Spain are intriguing. Chileans like to call their country “the England of South America,” referring to their orderliness and island-like insularity. Many Chileans see Spain as a model of transition from dictatorship to democracy.

If Spanish and British authorities ultimately approve Pinochet’s extradition, he will stand trial for murders that have been well documented and for which some suspects have even been tried, only to have their punishment blocked by Chile’s amnesty laws. Along with the murders of two priests, the Soria case is notorious. It resulted in the 1991 indictments of seven officers linked to the DINA, the feared secret police that carried out assassinations in Chile and around the world. But an appeals court dismissed charges in 1996, ruling that Carmelo Soria’s diplomatic status did not nullify the amnesty for the security forces.

Soria was a sympathizer of the Anarchist and Communist parties who fled Spain after the 1936-39 civil war there and settled in Chile. He had diplomatic status because he edited publications for a United Nations think tank in Santiago. He knew that his ideological leanings exposed him to danger after the 1973 military coup, but he decided to stand his ground, his daughter said.

In July 1976, when Carmen was 16, her father disappeared. His body turned up in a canal two days later, brutally battered and doused in liquor in an effort to fake a drunken accident. Witnesses later testified that he was the victim of torture at the hands of DINA agents.

Soria worked tirelessly on the Chilean court case. More recently, her mother testified in the Spanish investigation, which has raised new and suddenly tangible prospects of justice.

“I’m not going to go running into the streets to celebrate, but I feel good,” Soria said. “They finally did the right thing. We had lost our sense here of what it was to do the right thing.”