Pinochet Case Over

by Gustavo Gonzalez

"Pinochet remains the criminal we have always said he was, but he is now a mad criminal," lawyer Hugo Gutierrez, one of the prosecutors in the case against the 86-year-old former dictator, said after the verdict was handed down.

The 4-to-1 ruling by Chile's highest court means all charges have been dropped against Pinochet in a case in which he was charged with covering up the October 1973 murders of 57 political prisoners and the abduction of 18 others.

The former de facto leader who ruled Chile with an iron fist from Sept. 11, 1973 to March 11, 1990 was formally accused by Judge Juan Guzman on Jan. 29, 2001, after the Supreme Court stripped him of the immunity from prosecution he enjoyed as a life senator, on Aug. 8, 2000.

Today's Supreme Court ruling stated that the elderly retired army chief's mental problems rendered him unfit to defend himself in a trial.

However, the verdict did not declare Pinochet innocent of the crimes committed by the "caravan of death," a special army mission that the then-dictator and army chief created to "expedite" the trials -- and executions -- of political prisoners.

On Jul. 9, 2001, the Santiago Appeals Court ruled in favor of a stay of proceedings against Pinochet, based on controversial medical exams that declared him to be suffering from "mild vascular dementia."

That ruling left open the possibility of reopening the case against Pinochet if he were found, through further medical exams, to be recovering from his mental health problems. But only one of the five Supreme Court judges found that to be true.

"This sentence is sad, because we were hoping to revert the stay of proceedings handed down by the Appeals Court," said Viviana Diaz, the head of the Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared.

"We know that this business about Pinochet's supposed dementia is just a lie. It is nothing but an invention by the Military Hospital, and unfortunately our highest court has endorsed that fabrication," said lawyer Gutierrez.

In early 2000, Pinochet's physical and mental health problems also saved him from extradition to Spain, after his Oct. 16, 1998 arrest in London.

Then-British home minister Jack Straw invoked humanitarian reasons for the former dictator's release, allowing him to return to Chile in March 2000, after 503 days under house arrest in a rented mansion in a posh London suburb.

Pinochet's extradition to Spain was requested by Spanish prosecuting Judge Baltasar Garzon, who began in 1996 to prepare the groundwork for criminal prosecution against former leaders of de facto regimes that ruled the Southern Cone region in the 1970s and 1980s, whose suppression of real or suspected opponents was coordinated by an international plan known as Operation Condor.

According to a 1991 truth commission report, more than 3,000 people were the victims of assassination or forced disappearance at the hands of the security forces under the Pinochet regime. Human rights groups also report tens of thousands of cases of torture.

Once back in Chile, the former dictator found himself facing hundreds of lawsuits against him, which were being investigated by Judge Guzman, who put priority on the crimes committed by the "death caravan."

The Supreme Court underlined that the dropping of charges against Pinochet had no effect on the cases Guzman is handling against retired general Sergio Arellano, who was appointed head of the "death caravan" by Pinochet, and four other high-ranking army officers.

The effects of today's ruling on the rest of the legal proceedings against Pinochet are not yet clear, although legal experts say the most likely scenario is that the Chilean courts will use it as a precedent to free him from further legal action.

"Without a doubt, this ruling will be used by Pinochet's defence attorneys in other cases, to protect him from further prosecution," said Gutierrez.

Among the suits pending against the ex-dictator is a case being investigated in Argentina by Judge Maria Servini in connection with the September 1974 murder in Buenos Aires of former Chilean army chief General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofia Cuthbert.

Servini established that the assassination of Prats and his wife was ordered by the Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Chilean dictatorship's secret police.

The Argentine judge has asked the Chilean justice system to once against suspend Pinochet's immunity from prosecution in order to interrogate him in relation to the assassination of the general, his predecessor as army chief.

However, Pinochet's status as senator-for-life has been cast into doubt. Senator Andres Zaldivar, the president of the upper house of Congress, noted a year ago that a person suffering from dementia cannot function as a lawmaker.

Pinochet was sworn in as life senator in March 1998. But he only actually exercised that function until September of that year, before travelling to Britain, where he was arrested in a health clinic after undergoing surgery on a slipped disc.