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From: Maurice Zeitlin <zeitlin@soc.ucla.edu>
Subject: FWD: End the silence: U.S. should bring Pinochet to justice (fwd)
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FYI
Maurice Zeitlin
Professor
Department of Sociology
264 Haines Hall
Box 951551
University of California
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
(310) 825-1313
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Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 19:17:07 -0500 (EST)
To: zeitlin@soc.ucla.edu
Subject: FWD: End the silence: U.S. should bring Pinochet to justice
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Headline: End the silence: U.S. should bring Pinochet to justice
Subhead: For three years before Pinochet's coup began, the Nixon administration turned over every rock trying to find a general willing to overthrow Chile's government.
Maurice Zeitlin
THE WAR of Chile's armed forces against their elected government
was almost a week old on Sept. 17, 1973, when the broken and
bullet-riddled body of the Rev. Juan Alsina, a 29-year-old Spanish
priest, was found on a bridge in Santiago.
Earlier in the day, an army officer and five soldiers had taken
Alsina from the hospital where he served as chaplain. He was
beaten, tortured and shot 10 times as he "tried to escape."
The Spanish embassy claimed his body and returned it home for
burial.
Alsina was one of many Spanish citizens and other foreigners,
including Americans, and more than 15,000 Chileans who were summarily
executed or "disappeared" by the military as part of
the bloody coup and its aftermath led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Now, at last, Chile's ex-dictator and self-appointed "senator
for life," is under police guard in London, after an extradition
request from Spain, for the murder of Alsina and of many other
Spanish citizens in Chile.
Eleven judges on Spain's National Court have ruled unanimously
that under international law, Spain has the legal right to bring
charges against Mr. Pinochet for crimes against humanity and
to seek his extradition from Britain.
This contradicts a ruling by the high court in London that he
is immune from prosecution as a former head of state. But the
court ordered that he remain in detention, pending an appeal
to the House of Lords.
If Spain's exemplary effort to extradite Mr. Pinochet and
try him for murder succeeds, it will be the first judge and jury
that Mr. Pinochet or any member of the junta has faced for the
crimes they committed during a 17-year reign of terror.
Both the immediate post-dictatorship president, Patricio Aylwin,
and current president, Eduardo Frei, have been afraid even to
investigate let alone bring charges against them. The government
is still vulnerable to pressure and threats by the unreconstructed
military.
The crimes Mr. Pinochet would be charged with would certainly
include the murder of three young Americans: Charles Horman,
Frank Teruggi Jr. and Ronnie Karpen Moffit.
No refuge to be found
On that September day in 1973, while fighting was still raging
in Santiago, Charles Horman went to the U.S. Embassy to request
protection for his wife, Joyce, and himself. Embassy officials
turned him away, saying they couldn't help him.
That evening he was arrested by soldiers and taken to the National
Stadium, where thousands of other prisoners rounded up by the
military were concentrated. He subsequently "disappeared."
On Oct. 5, his father, Edmund Horman, came to Chile, and, with
Joyce, sought help from embassy officials. But as Frank Teruggi
Sr. was also to experience months later, they were subject instead
to evasions and indifference. They were forced to conduct their
own investigation; and, on Oct. 18, were informed by the embassy
that Chilean investigators had found Horman's body. He had
been tortured and shot in the stadium, and buried in the wall
of the National Cemetery.
Frank Teruggi Jr., an economics student at the University of
Chile, and his roommate, David Hathaway, were arrested on Sept.
20, 1973, and taken to National Stadium. Somehow the two were
separated.
Mr. Hathaway was later released, as the result of the intervention
of a Chilean businessman, a family friend. Mr. Hathaway never
saw his friend alive again. Frank Teruggi's body was found
days later at the morgue in Santiago. He had been tortured and
shot 17 times.
These facts were disclosed and confirmed only in February 1974,
as the result of an independent investigation in Chile by Teruggi's
father, and a Chicago commission of inquiry.
Car bomb attack
Ronnie Moffit was killed in Washington in 1976 by a car bomb
planted by a Chilean hit squad. She was a passenger in the car
of their target, Orlando Letelier, a former minister in the government
of Salvador Allende, who was also murdered.
In this case, at least, a Justice Department investigation led
to the imprisonment, in 1995, of Manuel Contreras, head of Chile's
feared secret police, and his deputy.
But for none of these murders of U.S. citizens, and the incarceration
and brutal beating or torture of at least eight other Americans
in Chile -- including two Maryknoll priests and two of my own
then-graduate students at the University of Wisconsin -- has
the U.S. government sought to call Mr. Pinochet to account.
The U.S. government was complicit with Mr. Pinochet and his ilk
in destroying Chile's constitutional government. For three
years before Mr. Pinochet's coup began, the Nixon administration
turned over every rock trying to find a general willing to betray
the constitution and overthrow Allende, Chile's freely elected
socialist president.
The CIA, in a shadowy alliance with U.S. corporations, carried
out "massive covert operations within a democratic state,"
as Sen. Frank Church, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, concluded in 1975 "with the ultimate effect of
overthrowing [the] duly elected government."
A quarter of a century later, the U.S. government must acknowledge
its responsibility for what happened in Chile by filing its own
request for the extradition of Mr. Pinochet, to stand trial here
for the murder of U.S. citizens.
Maurice Zeitlin, a professor of sociology at the University
of California at Los Angeles, and a member of the advisory board
of the Latin American Center, has lived in Chile and is the author
of many articles and two books on that country, including "The
Civil Wars in Chile" (Princeton University Press).
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To view this story on the web go to
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