Word: pinochets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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General Augusto Pinochet has accepted political responsibility for the atrocities committed by his military junta. Now he may be forced to take personal responsibility. Less than a week after Pinochet issued a statement spun by his handlers as an acceptance of political responsibility for crimes committed by the armed forces during his 17-year reign, a Chilean judge on Friday charged Pinochet with kidnapping. The general is expected to be placed under house arrest shortly, and to go to court to answer charges arising out of the 1973 "caravan of death" - the series of incidents in which some 70 political...
...Judge Juan Guzman's announcement Friday is a sign of how far the political tides in Chile have turned against Pinochet. Ever since he allowed the restoration of democracy, conventional wisdom has held that the former dictator was beyond the reach of the Chilean courts. He'd created an umbrella immunity from prosecution for himself as one of his preconditions for handing over power to civilians, and it was widely assumed that the military that had ruled Chile at gunpoint for 17 years would not tolerate civilians putting their erstwhile leader on trial. Even when Pinochet was arrested in Britain...
...military made a show of welcoming Pinochet home last March after he'd managed to persuade Britain to release him on the grounds of his fading physical and mental capacities. But the generals were castigated by the country's Socialist party government, and prosecution may have become inevitable once the Supreme Court in August stripped Pinochet of his immunity. After all, the country is now a stable democracy and getting on rather nicely without the general, and the military is unlikely to risk instability by going out of its way to protect Pinochet from prosecution. All the general may have...
...latest batch of documents also contains evidence of U.S. intelligence agencies' gathering information about U.S. citizen Frank Teruggi (including his Chilean address), who was later detained at his home by Pinochet's security forces, taken to Santiago's National Stadium and summarily executed. But such individual instances point to a broader pattern of support for efforts to overthrow an elected leftist government - President Nixon tells a National Security Council meeting in 1972 that "we must do everything we can to bring down Allende." And previously released documents point to U.S. government efforts to support the Pinochet junta despite mounting congressional...
...that emerges is far from pretty. But while there are unlikely to be any political recriminations in the U.S. at this point - notwithstanding the fact that former president George Bush was CIA director for some of the years under consideration - the latest documents may be bad news for General Pinochet. Chile's high court has stripped away the immunity he awarded himself as the price for relinquishing power, and only last week courts ordered him to undergo physical and psychiatric evaluation to determine his eligibility for trial on charges arising out of scores of kidnappings and killings. And the latest...