Word: chileanizing
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Last Thursday, October 23, the Chilean Ambassador to Washington treated the Harvard community to a defense of the Chilean Supreme Court's refusal in October 1979 to extradite three Chilean military officers to the District of Columbia. Small wonder that he should have justified the Court's action, for this decision frustrated an important U.S. legal initiative. It precluted the trial of these officers in the District for their alleged role in the September 1976 car-bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier, a highly vocal Chilean exile with diplomatic status, and Ronni Moffitt, an American citizen riding in the front seat...
Speaking at the Harvard Faculty Club courtesy of the Pan American Society of New England, Ambassador Jose Barros offered a two-pronged defense. He first reproduced the essence of the Chilean Foreign Ministry's position on the Court's behavior. In refusing the extradition request, Ambassador Barros said, the Chilean Supreme Court behaved as an independent judicial body. Ambassador Barros then provided a desparaging view of the U.S. response to the Court's action. His comments unmistakably characterized official U.S. displeasure as impatient, fundamentally disrespectful of due process, and impolitic...
...fact, Ambassador Barros' empirical claim about the Chilean Supreme Court is misleading, we must regard his attack on American action with great skepticism. After all, the circumstance surrounding this matter of extradition are extraordinarily disturbing. Enough evidence has emerged to strongly suggest that the assassination of Letelier and Moffitt was planned and executed with the knowledge and approval of Gen. Pinochet, Chile's chief executive, in much the same way the Col. Qaddafi knows and approves of Libyan-financed terrorist activity in Europe. That feature alone argues that we should not let Ambassador Barros' characterization of the U.S. response...
Many considerations suggest that Ambassador Barro's portrayal of the Chilean Supreme Court as an independent institution is implausible. The most important of these, is the Chilean judiciary's status under the current regime. A brief review of the Chilean judiciary's history from September 11, 1973, the date of the military coup against the Unidad Popular government, to the formal U.S. request for extradition in September 1978, plainly shows that during these five years the Chilean judiciary led only the most fugitive kind of institutional existence...
...definition created a system of military justice in which defendants were routinely sentenced to imprisonment or death without any appeal whatsoever, often on the basis of "evidence" extracted under the most excruciating torture. Military officers with very little or no legal training conducted these trials. Throughout that year, the Chilean Supreme Court refused to supervise the system of military justice...