Restoring Chile’s Past

When the names of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger popped up intertwined in the news last week, it was a magical moment for human rights activists worldwide. For Kissinger, no doubt, it was something very different: a source of great displeasure, certainly, and perhaps a harbinger of worse things to come.

Last Monday, an appeals court in Santiago ordered Pinochet to submit to the humiliation faced by any common criminal: to have his fingerprints and mug shots, front and profile, taken by the national police. The former general’s defense lawyers are still fighting bitterly to spare him this humiliation.

But the battle was lost even before their defeat last week. For those of us who survived Pinochet’s 1973 military coup and his ensuing 17 bloody years of dictatorship, and especially for the relatives of those who didn’t, the fight has never been about the narrow issue of hauling the 85-year-old former general before a police camera or a magistrate’s bench. Much more important has been to correct the historical record and to forever bestow upon Pinochet and his collaborators their soiled legacy: primary responsibility for the murder, or “disappearance,” of more than 3,100 civilians, and the systematic torture and jailing of ten of thousands of others. The human rights battle in Chile transcended individual trials and focused on rescuing and restoring a collective, historic memory that was nearly expunged by the powerful and the arrogant.

Which brings us to Kissinger. At roughly the same hour that this latest decision in the Pinochet case came down, agents of the French police arrived at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where Kissinger was participating in a seminar, and served him with a summons requesting that he testify as a witness in the investigation of five French citizens who disappeared under Pinochet’s rule.

The summons, which carried no legal obligation for Kissinger to appear, was issued at the request of William Bourdon, a lawyer representing the French victims. Bourdon insists it is “essential” that the former secretary of state testify, given the manifold exchanges between the U.S. and Chilean intelligence services at the time Kissinger was overseeing the U.S. foreign policy apparatus.

Kissinger, who first served as President Richard M. Nixon’s national security advisor and then as secretary of State from 1973 to 1977 under both Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, was neck deep in U.S. intrigues that led to Pinochet’s ascension. Kissinger was point man in the covert plotting by the U.S. to destabilize and overthrow the elected Chilean government of Socialist Salvador Allende, for whom I served as translator in the early 1970s. One of those plots resulted in the kidnap and murder of Chilean Army Chief of Staff Rene Schneider. Recently declassified U.S. documents suggest that Kissinger and the Nixon administration actively supported Pinochet’s 1973 coup against Allende, in which the Chilean president perished, and more than a century of Chilean democratic rule was ended.

Those same documents further reveal that Kissinger’s State Department had knowledge of “Operation Condor,” a scheme concocted by Pinochet and other South American dictators to coordinate the assassination of opposition leaders. The most dramatic of those killings took place just blocks from Kissinger’s Foggy Bottom offices in September 1976, when Pinochet’s secret police set off a car bomb in downtown Washington D.C., killing Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and his American associate Ronni Moffit.

While Kissinger obviously has much he could tell about these dark chapters, he ignored the French summons and flew on to Italy. The U.S. Embassy in Paris told the French court that issued the subpoena that it did not want Kissinger questioned, and that he had other pressing “obligations.” It was not surprising. As the Chileans like to say, in this world there are Big Dogs and Little Dogs. And Kissinger is about as big as they get.

But he should neither be cocky nor confident, for his circumstances are starting to become tantalizingly similar to the discredited dictator he once coddled. When Chilean courts originally refused to prosecute Pinochet, his victims turned to international venues for justice. In 1998 Pinochet, while on a private visit to London, was finally arrested by British police acting on a warrant issued by crusading Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon. Garzon has been investigating the deaths of Spanish citizens in Operation Condor.

In Kissinger’s case, it is Parisian Judge Roger Le Loire who has been investigating the disappearance of his countrymen into the macabre abyss of Condor, and he has already issued his own warrant for Pinochet’s arrest. Two years ago, Judge Le Loire reportedly sent a request to the Clinton administration asking permission to question Kissinger, but his request was ignored. So when Kissinger showed up on his own private visit to Paris last week, the judge allowed attorney Bourdon to send police to his hotel with the written request to testify.

In Argentina, yet another magistrate, Federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, told reporters a few days ago that as part of his own probe into Operation Condor, he will most likely subpoena Kissinger as either a “defendant or suspect.”

The Argentine judge, nevertheless, went on to muse that getting Kissinger to actually show up would be “very problematic.” After all, Kissinger’s place in history still rests primarily on his reported mastery at shuttle diplomacy, on his reputation for brilliance as a geo-political strategist, on his lucrative corporate and media consultancies, and on his winning of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.

But then again, as recently as 1998, Pinochet was also a snarling and fearsome Big Dog, considered absolutely untouchable by human law. In the face of overwhelming prima facie evidence of massive crimes, only a single courageous Chilean judge dared to entertain even the most basic charges against him. When the general retired from his armed forces command in 1998, the U.S. press celebrated him (with only casual mention of his human rights record) as the prescient architect of a pro-American, free-market economic model. The post-Soviet Russians held him up as an example of inspired anticommunist governance. His own country lauded him as a “liberator,” rewarding him with the title of senator-for-life.

And yet, a scant three years later, reduced to something more like a whimpering puppy, stripped of his parliamentary immunity, wanted by a long list of European courts and under formal indictment in Chile, Pinochet pathetically scampers to avoid putting inked fingers to paper.

One way or another, the registry of Augusto Pinochet’s fingerprints and mug shots will take place. And the images of the fallen hero that will flash around the globe will be sure to haunt the midnight nightmares of Henry Kissinger. As they well should.