A Knocking at Midnight

Before he gave up power to a democratically elected government in 1990, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte erected a legal fortress around himself. His 17 years of iron-fisted, right-wing military rule had been blamed for the death or disappearance of 3,400 suspected communists and leftists, not to mention the torture of thousands of others. With that legacy hanging over his head, Pinochet rammed through an array of constitutional measures that made him immune to prosecution, including a lifetime Senator’s seat that he took amid widespread protest last March, when he retired as an army general. “The locks and bolts made him untouchable,” says Christian Democratic Congressman Andres Palma. “And he believed they would accompany him wherever he went in the world.”

They didn’t. Late last Friday night, while still recovering from surgery in London for a herniated disc, Pinochet, 82, was awakened by police and told that he was under arrest. A Spanish court, which has been trying Pinochet in absentia for allegedly ordering the execution of leftist Spaniards living in Chile in the 1970s, had issued an extradition warrant days earlier. Scotland Yard detectives said Pinochet, who is being held at the London Clinic, would eventually appear at an extradition hearing before a British magistrate. The move stunned Pinochet’s boosters and critics alike, making it clear that the wounds caused by his regime are as open as ever. Waking to the news last Saturday morning, the families of Pinochet’s victims in Santiago declared that his arrest had “broken the cycle of impunity.”

That might be a premature verdict, however. As a Chilean Senator, Pinochet was traveling with a diplomatic passport. Though the government of Chile’s President, Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, is hardly a Pinochet ally, it had little choice but to protest formally “what it considers a violation of the diplomatic immunity that Senator Pinochet enjoys,” and demanded “an early end of this situation.” But the British Foreign Office argued that such immunity would apply only if Pinochet had been on a diplomatic mission. Last weekend Pinochet’s allies in Congress were scrambling to determine if his visit had any official purpose beyond his operation at London Bridge Hospital.

In Chile almost half the citizenry still revere Pinochet as a strong leader who saved the nation from economic and political collapse after his bloody U.S.-backed 1973 coup, in which leftist President Salvador Allende was killed. Since becoming a Senator, he has tried to project a more benign, grandfatherly image. But in countries like the U.S., where Pinochet assassins executed one of his exiled opponents in 1976, he’s unlikely to get much sympathy. “The international community is sending a very positive signal for democracy and human rights,” says Palma. Retired Chilean army General Luis Cortes Villa, head of the Pinochet Foundation, called the London arrest “an act of cowardice” for rousting Pinochet out of bed at midnight in his frail condition. Perhaps, but compared with the brutal days of Pinochet’s rule, it seemed civilized enough.

–By Tim Padgett. With reporting by Helen Gibson/London and Elizabeth Love/Santiago