Word: gen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gen. Pinochet seized power in Chile in a U.S.-supported coup that toppled socialist president Salvador Allende. The military dictatorship that followed resulted in appalling violence. 3,000 Chileans lost their lives and thousands more were tortured throughout the regime’s 17 years in power...
Since leaving power, Gen. Pinochet has successfully assured himself immunity from prosecution, first claiming that, as a former head of state, he could not be prosecuted for acts carried out in performing the functions of office. That defense ran out of steam in 1998, thrown out by the House of Lords (the United Kingdom’s highest court of appeal), which ruled rightly that murder, torture and hostage-taking fail to qualify as legitimate functions of a head of state and so are not immune from prosecution. Gen. Pinochet then turned to his poor health as a defense...
...return, and efforts to try Pinochet domestically for his alleged abuses began almost immediately. Ever since, the General’s manifold layers of protection have been slowly stripped away. First to go was his senatorial immunity: in August 2000, Chile’s Supreme Court stripped Gen. Pinochet of the protection he enjoyed as a Senator-for-life. There remained, however, the pesky issue of Pinochet’s health: after a judge placed him under house arrest in January 2001, the Santiago Appeals Court ruled that Pinochet was indeed medically unfit to stand trial and so forced prosecutors...
There’s just one small problem: Gen. Pinochet might actually be medically unfit to stand trial. The former president, who suffers from diabetes and arthritis and who has been diagnosed with “moderate dementia,” took ill on Saturday after reportedly suffering a stroke. Leonel Gomez, director of the Santiago army hospital where Pinochet is being treated, has said that the General is recovering and could be released in the next few days, and a statement issued by the hospital says that he has recovered consciousness and mobility and is no longer in critical...
Though at this point Gen. Pinochet’s capacity to stand trial is unclear, Chile’s judicial system has no choice but to proceed with extreme caution, weighing the desire to hold a tyrant to account against an imperative to preserve due process in so doing; and while the preferred result is, of course, to do both, the former must absolutely be held in the weightier regard. If Gen. Pinochet, murderer or otherwise, must be left to live the rest of his life in freedom so that the end of greater justice is accomplished, then...