RIGHTS-CHILE:
Pinochet Caught in the Condor's Nest

Gustavo González


SANTIAGO,  (IPS) - An appeals court in Chile opened the door Friday to clarifying the role played by former dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) in the creation of Operation Condor, a coordinated effort by South American military dictatorships to eliminate opponents in the 1970s and 1980s.

In a surprise decision, the full Santiago appeals court voted 14 to nine to lift the 88-year-old retired general's immunity from prosecution, clearing the way for him to testify in a case heard by Judge Juan Guzmán involving human rights lawsuits filed in 1998.

The details of the ruling will be released next week, and Pinochet's defence lawyers will immediately appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which on Jul. 1, 2002 declared him mentally unfit to stand trial in connection with another case, based on a diagnosis of mild senility.

The retired general, who overthrew the constitutional government of socialist president Salvador Allende in a bloody Sep. 11, 1973 coup d'etat, is once again facing the legal charges that led to his house arrest in London from October 1998 to March 2000.

He was arrested after undergoing back surgery in Britain in late 1998, under an extradition request brought by Spanish prosecuting Judge Baltasar Garzón, who was handling the first lawsuit in Spain to involve crimes against humanity committed by South American military regimes.

But the extradition request was turned down and British officials released the former dictator and allowed him to return to Chile on ''humanitarian grounds'', after he was diagnosed in controversial medical exams to be suffering from ''mild dementia'' and physical ailments.

It was also mental and physical health grounds that were cited in July 2002 when the Supreme Court ruled that Pinochet was unfit to stand trial in connection with another case heard by Judge Guzmán involving 18 murders and 57 kidnappings (or forced disappearances) committed by the ''caravan of death'' -- a special military operation that executed leading opponents around the country in October 1973, shortly after the coup.

Since then, the elderly former dictator has been observing from afar the uneven progress made by legal proceedings against other military officers implicated in Operation Condor, in cases heard by Garzón in Spain and by judges in other European countries as well as Argentina and Chile.

Starting in the second half of the 1970s, Operation Condor coordinated intelligence and military efforts by the de facto regimes ruling Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to kidnap, torture, kill and ''disappear'' leftist activists and other opponents, in a covert plan that recognised neither borders nor legal or ethical limits.

According to the information available, the operation originated in a meeting between the security and intelligence chiefs of those countries called together in Santiago by then-colonel Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA -- the dictatorship's now-defunct secret police -- to coordinate the so-called ''anti-subversion fight''.

The official history thus identifies Contreras as the man who planned and promoted Operation Condor, while the role played by Pinochet -- the DINA chief's superior -- has never been clarified.

Loyal to the end, Contreras has never testified against Pinochet in the successive trials for human rights crimes that the former head of DINA has faced since democracy was reestablished in 1990, in which he has already been handed three prison sentences.

It is the Supreme Court that could now clear the way for Chile's justice system to finally determine Pinochet's role in Operation Condor.

Chilean army chief General Luis Emilio Cheyre declined to comment on Friday's appeals court ruling against Pinochet, but said he was ''distressed'' that Chilean society remained ''divided by and tangled up in'' events that occurred 30 years ago.

But Viviana Díaz, vice-president of the Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared, said the verdict is ''great news that will do our country good, because it indicates that Augusto Pinochet is not unfit'' to stand trial.

The July 2002 Supreme Court decision that ruled that the former dictator was mentally unfit to face trial set a precedent for the appeals court to throw out two other cases against him in 2003, involving the murders of former Chilean army chief Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife, committed by DINA in Buenos Aires in 1974, and the 1976 kidnapping and killing of 10 members of the Communist Party's clandestine leadership.

Ironically, Pinochet himself provided elements that contributed to the appeals court decision to rule out ''dementia''.

On Nov. 24, 2003, a Miami, Florida-based Spanish language TV station broadcast a one-hour interview with the elderly former dictator, who appeared to be completely lucid, and said he had no need to ask for forgiveness from the victims of human rights abuses, which he described as ''excesses'' committed by lower-ranking members of the military.

''I harbour no hatred or rancour. I am good, I feel like an angel,'' Pinochet said in the interview.

''If (Pinochet) can respond to a reporter's questions for nearly an hour in a coherent and logically reasoned manner, even remembering events that occurred over 30 years ago, then he can very well answer the questions of a judge,'' said one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs.

According to an official truth commission report, more than 3,000 people were killed or ''disappeared'' by the de facto regime.