Word: pinochets
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...When Judge Guzman handed Pinochet an official military document from 1973 listing a number of detainees executed on the orders of the commander in the chief of the army, Pinochet responded: "I am not a criminal. Anyway, those in charge of the [judicial] processes, of the detainees, were the commanders of the different garrisons...
...Judge Guzman followed up by asking, then, if when he learned of the excesses committed during the officers' tour, he took any action, to which Pinochet replied that those in charge of the detainees' fate had been the commanders of the garrisons where they'd been held...
...General Pinochet: "For me to remember everything now is impossible. I myself never ordered any executions. There was an order from the government junta which said that shots could only be fired in self-defense...
...General Pinochet: "If that happened, it was because the bodies were often reclaimed by their own relatives. In other cases, because they were terrorists and were undocumented, identification was difficult - nobody knew where the bodies were because they weren't claimed...
...brief but telling interview. The sort of gibberish offered up by Pinochet in answer to specific charges might charitably be imagined as the playing out of his legal defense strategy of pleading senile dementia so as to evade his day in court. But there's something else in those answers. Something particularly disturbing to the Chilean military, whose leaders have by and large stood by Pinochet through his legal ordeal...