CHILE: Gen Augusto Pinochet, the 89-year-old former dictator of Chile, was put under house arrest in his luxurious residence on the foothills of the Andes overlooking Santiago shortly after midday yesterday.
Explaining his action to the media, Judge Juan Guzmán dismissed defence arguments by the former dictator's lawyers that Gen Pinochet was mentally incapable. He found him "mentally alert". The judge said that one of the elements which led him to the conclusion that the former dictator, who was president from 1973 to 1990, was compos mentis was a television interview he gave 13 months ago to a station in Miami where he lucidly expounded his philosophy.
Judge Guzmán had interviewed Gen Pinochet for 25 minutes at his home on September 25th before the session was ended when the former dictator started sighing and coughing strenuously. During that session, records of which were released yesterday, he was asked whether he had had knowledge of 24 assassinations. He replied, "I was president of the republic, and as president of the republic I was informed of national security, not of petty security matters."
This is the second time Gen Pinochet has been formally accused of murder. The same judge indicted him in 2001 for his "Caravan of Death" initiative, which was launched within a few weeks of Gen Pinochet's military putsch of September 11th, 1973, and which involved the assassination of selected supporters of the civilian government of the late President Salvador Allende, who died during the coup d'état. Gen Pinochet sent military death squads in helicopters up and down the country summarily to liquidate them.
The renewed house arrest comes at the end of some difficult months for the general. In mid-year a committee of the US Senate revealed the multi-million dollar fortunes of the Pinochet family held in accounts at the Riggs Bank in Washington and London. The funds, which are now estimated at some $300 million, were accumulated during the massive privatisations of state-owned companies in the insurance, mining and chemical businesses in the wake of 1973. The general's annual pay itself never rose beyond some $16,000.
Other evidence has pointed to the general having taken profits from a cocaine marketing operation run with the Chilean army and Chilean arms dealers, various Middle Eastern businessmen and a former corporal in the US Marine Corps, Cpl Frankell Baramdyka. A trader in cocaine who appears to have been active in selling drugs for US officials in order to obtain funds for the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, Cpl Baramdyka was subsequently extradited from Chile and jailed by a court in California.
The Chilean judge's decision has revived memories of the clemency shown to Gen Pinochet in 2000 by Mr Jack Straw, then the British home secretary, when he let the former dictator avoid house arrest in England and extradition to Spain for health reasons.
The last remnants of the facade of probity and righteousness that the former dictator and his many Chilean and foreign friends tried to maintain were swept away last month when a government commission under the chairmanship of Sergio Valech, a former auxiliary bishop of Santiago, confirmed the worst accounts of abuse which circulated in the 1970s during the first years of the Pinochet regime - the torture of heavily pregnant women, the violation of others by specially trained dogs, the torture of babies and children in front of their parents and the ejection of suspected opponents of Gen Pinochet from aircraft over the high Andes or the Pacific Ocean.
Having stood by him for more than 25 years, the Chilean armed forces are rapidly distancing themselves from him, conscious that they are tarred with the actions which made the former dictator's name a byword for bestial behaviour.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy is the author of Pinochet: the Politics of Torture