Word: pinochets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's a palpable sense of fear in General Augusto Pinochet these days. Not that the former Chilean dictator will ever know the terror of the thousands of his countrymen his regime tortured to death in prison cells, or tossed screaming from aircraft high over the ocean. The fear Pinochet knows is the anxiety of the former strongman discarded by history and forced to face justice; to account for himself stripped of his uniform and the power to inflict unimaginable pain on others...
...sure, Pinochet's life over the past three years has been a miserable story of unending flight - from legions of prosecutors the world over determined to bring him to book for crimes he is alleged to have authored. And his fight to evade prosecution appears to have taken its toll on the 85-year-old general, who only last weekend spent a night in the hospital after suffering what doctors called a "mini stroke...
...Well, there have been a lot of talks between the army and Pinochet's legal advisters, his family and the government, which has in turn been talking to Judge Guzman, to work out how best to go about this process. Obviously there are strong disagreements among those parties. Some want Pinochet prosecuted, others want him left untouched. But they're in contact to establish mechanisms that allow these conflicts to be resolved through the courts, allowing for some flexibility, as in the agreement to reschedule the interrogation. Pinochet's lawyers had tried everything to stop, delay or interrupt the process...
...Sunday, President Ricardo Lagos released information provided by the military on the fate of some 200 people who disappeared during the dictatorship. Many of them had been tortured and then thrown out of airplanes over the ocean. How have those revelations impacted on the discussion over Pinochet's fate...
...unhappy with the process. They want justice, not just the truth. The object of this process is only to gather information; it was never designed to prosecute. Those people in the military who provided the information had their identities concealed. So although it exposed further atrocities by Pinochet's regime, the revelations didn't really change much...