Sir, - Three brief comments on the House of Lords decision to allow extradition procedures to commence against Chile's former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Firstly, as a Latin American specialist who has experienced fear and intimidation at the hands of military authorities during regular visits there since the mid-1980s, I have some small sense of the joy shared by the relatives and loved ones of all those who were tortured, murdered or "disappeared" under Pinochet's brutal dictatorship. A frightening - albeit brief - period of imprisonment by the military in El Salvador in 1988 certainly helps me understand the jubilation on the streets of Santiago today.
Secondly, this decision is to be welcomed because it gives new strength to all those fighting to bolster civil society in Chile. Ever since the 1980s the Chilean people, like others in Latin America, have been bringing down dictatorship and edging towards a politics of the centre. All sorts of new social collectivities have been involved in this process. These have included the women's movement, the trade unions, peasant organisations, the intelligentsia, radical church groups, those operating in Latin America's informal economy, and ordinary people living in shanty towns and squalor in city slums throughout the length and breadth of Latin America. This decision can only give new confidence to these groups.
Finally, the decision by the Lords now suggests that the judiciary in Britain, and presumably also in Spain, France and Switzerland, is unwilling to sanction a situation wherein the law in Chile is used to protect and serve the interests of the dominant, including the military, by refusing to place on trial all those responsible for gross infringements of human rights. It also shows how we in the West can contribute to the difficult process of democratisation in Chile. We can do this by ensuring that Pinochet, a living and very chilling symbol of that country's dictatorship, is not returned home as the hero of a triumphalist right wing. This is what would have happened if the law lords had not voted the way they did.
One final point. The government now in power in Chile is in many ways representative of other Latin American governments. It has had to deal with abuses of human rights on terms laid down, not by the thousands of innocent victims of dictatorial rule, but by leaders like Pinochet and others in the officer class. The latter have insisted on their right to prominent positions in government as guarantee of their immunity before the law.
Chile is also a political and economic laboratory for much of Latin America. That which is tried and tested here - including monetarist policies that "cure" the economy by killing the welfare state, the suppression of democratic traditions and an arrogant indifference to international legislation on human rights - is often imitated elsewhere in Latin America. This most recent decision against Pinochet means that the rule of law may not now allow him to return in triumph to a Chile where, until recently, ordinary people literally risked their lives when engaged in democratic activities that we take for granted. - Yours, etc., Dr Jim MacLaughlin,
Department of Geography, University College Cork.