The first meeting which President Ricardo Lagos was due to hold on his return to Chile from President Vicente Fox's inauguration in Mexico yesterday was with the chiefs-of-staff of the armed forces.
The main item was the legal case against Gen Augusto Pinochet on charges of kidnap and murder under his dictatorship.
Last Friday Judge Juan Guzman ordered Gen Pinochet to be placed under house arrest for his role as the "intellectual author" of the 1973 series of kidnappings and murders of 75 political opponents known as the "caravan of death".
Yesterday the Santiago Appeals Court temporarily suspended the order of house arrest, pending an appeal by Gen Pinochet's lawyers which is likely to go ahead today.
The case has inevitably created some tension between the military and the Lagos government, but the Chilean army has changed considerably since Gen Pinochet relinquished power to a democratic administration in 1989. Yesterday's suspension of house arrest is believed to be a purely judicial decision.
In 1989 Gen Pinochet issued an explicit threat against anyone who wanted to prosecute him or his soldiers for human rights offences, saying: "No one is going to touch one of my men. If they touch even one of my men the rule of law ends."
But the former dictator can no longer rely on the loyalty of the armed forces or the protection of the courts.
The detention of the former dictator in London in October 1998 is believed to have been the pivotal factor in provoking a psychological U-turn within the forces of law and order in Chile. The role of the military in human rights abuses perpetrated in the Pinochet era had long been the subject of an impenetrable code of silence.
That code began to crack in early November, when a former National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent, Maj Carlos Herrera Jimenez, confessed to killing Tucapel Jimenez, leader of the National Association of Business Workers and an outspoken critic of the regime.
The ensuing few weeks have seen an unprecedented acceleration of judicial investigations of crimes committed under the military junta. This acceleration is partially due to the confession of Maj Herrera, which triggered a series of other mea culpas that implicate superior officers and seem likely to unravel a skein of culpability ending at Gen Pinochet himself.
These cases are all running independently of the 186 charges currently lodged against Gen Pinochet himself, which mainly relate to the so-called "Caravan of Death", a military operation which resulted in 75 deaths, allegedly on the general's direct instructions.
Despite this accumulation of legal pressure against military personnel, there is no real fear that the house arrest of Gen Pinochet will lead to a breakdown in civilian-military relations.
The presence of the army commander-in-chief, Gen Ricardo Isurieta, at the Santiago memorial honouring Gen Prats last month confirms recent events suggesting that the army is seeking to distance itself from Gen Pinochet.
The Prats memorial outing comes after a recently published, official 400-page history of Chile's army and its accomplishments in the 20th century.
The book contains only one picture of Gen Pinochet, together with other military junta members. It deals with his 17-year dictatorship in an amazingly brief three paragraphs.