The Condor Years (6 page)

The cable was an intelligence report written a week after that assassination by the FBI man in Argentina, Robert Scherrer:

Both court filings made the impunity argument: In Chile there had been “not even a single judicial investigation” against the military leaders despite
many futile attempts by victims families to bring such charges in Chile’s courts. To the contrary, the military leaders had decreed a “self-amnesty” in 1978 to prevent such court actions. By the end of July 1996, Court numbers 5 and 6 of the Spanish National Court (
Audiencia Nacional
) had ratified the legitimacy of the criminal cases, allowing the investigating judges to examine evidence for formal indictments of the accused Chilean and Argentine officers.

The aggressive judicial actions were unprecedented. Neither the crimes, nor the alleged criminals, nor the victims were in the territory of Spain at the time of the events. Yet, once the specific legalities were cleared away, the courts’ decisions in accepting the cases were based on a fairly simple principle of international law: that truly egregious crimes, those that rise to the level of crimes against humanity such as those forever engraved in human consciousness by the Nazi atrocities of World War II, are matters of universal jurisdiction. In other words, if the state in which they are committed is unable or unwilling to bring such crimes and criminals to justice, any other state is empowered to do so.

It was a principle buried in disuse during the tense decades in which the anti-Communism of the Cold War superceded the struggle against German Nazism. But in Spain that summer of 1996, a few determined lawyers and risk-taking judges revived and fortified the principle.

The actions taken by Castresana, Garcés, and the Spanish judges went virtually unnoticed in the international press in the summer of 1996. Yet the filings set in motion legal proceedings that were destined to change the course of international human rights law. In addition, the resulting judicial investigations led directly and indirectly to the release of voluminous new documentation on the inner workings of the secret security agencies and their allies in the six Condor countries.

A few months after filing the case, Garcés flew to Washington, D.C., and called his old friend Saul Landau. Landau was a fellow in the moderate left-leaning think tank the Institute for Policy Studies, an organization with a unique history in the battle against Pinochet. Founded by two former White House officials from the most idealistic wing of the John F. Kennedy presidency, the Institute’s fellows were in the front lines of the 1960s intellectual and political battle against the war in Vietnam. In the 1970s it naturally evolved into a center
of opposition to U.S. government alliances with South American dictatorships such as Pinochet’s.

At Landau’s invitation, Orlando Letelier came to the Institute soon after his release from a Chilean prison camp in 1974 and used it as a base of operations in lobbying U.S. and European political leaders to throw up obstacles to the dictatorship. Letelier was on his way to work at the Institute’s Dupont Circle offices the day he was assassinated. After Letelier’s assassination, his widow, Isabel Margarita Morel de Letelier, continued as a fellow at the Institute, and with Landau mounted an unrelenting campaign to push forward the U.S. investigation of Letelier’s murder.

Arriving in Washington, Garcés asked Landau to arrange a meeting. He wanted to enlist the support of the prosecutors and FBI agents, now retired, who had conducted the investigation of the Letelier assassination. That investigation had produced an enormous body of information about the workings of the Pinochet military and had led to the public discovery of Operation Condor. Most importantly, the still secret files held by major U.S. agencies—the Justice Department and FBI, the CIA and the State Department—contained what was undoubtedly the most complete investigative record of the inner workings of the Pinochet government and its relations with the United States.

The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation had been the only successful international prosecution of crimes committed by the Chilean dictatorship. But its success was limited—the conviction of several Cuban exiles who assisted Chilean agents in the assassination. One of the assassins, American-born Michael Townley, pleaded guilty and cooperated with the U.S. prosecution. Colonel Manuel Contreras and other DINA officers were indicted, but Chile refused to extradite them to the United States. In 1990, Pinochet ended his seventeen-year dictatorship (while remaining as chief of the armed forces). For the first time, Chilean courts began an untainted investigation of the Letelier assassination, and in 1995, DINA Chief Contreras and his deputy, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, were convicted. Both were serving sentences in special military prisons at the time of Garcés’s arrival in Washington.

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney E. Lawrence Barcella, one of two lead prosecutors in the case, hosted the meeting at his law offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, just three blocks from the White House. Lead FBI investigator Carter Cornick also attended. Garcés laid out his plan and progress so far since the charges had been filed in Spain. The goal, he said, was to achieve a formal indictment
by the Spanish court and an order of arrest, which would have the effect of preventing Pinochet from traveling freely abroad. Finding the truth and documenting it in a credible international court, sending a message for history about the end of impunity—these were measures of justice as important as any possible punishment of the guilty.

The Spanish judge, García-Castellón, calling on the provisions of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), a 1990 agreement signed by Spain and the United States, had made a broad, bold request—called “letters rogatory”—for U.S. secrets about Chile and Pinochet, both subjects of nettling historic sensitivity. Garcés knew the request for cooperation would languish in benign neglect unless he could neutralize the expected knee-jerk opposition from those in the U.S. government who thought it best to bury embarrassing secrets about U.S. support for Pinochet in the obscurity of the past. The letters rogatory asked for all documents in U.S. archives about Pinochet, his secret police, and Operation Condor. CIA operational files, which had never been released, were specifically requested. The CIA was sure to hold a trove of information on its relationship with Chile’s DINA, but no one was optimistic about prying loose such potentially embarrassing information.

The clear conclusion was that Garcés needed the United States government to send a signal, if possible from the very office of the president, that the United States looked on the investigation with at least friendly neutrality. Though skeptical, Barcella and Cornick promised their help.

U.S. response to the request for cooperation moved at a snail’s pace. No documents that had not already been made public were provided to Spain. No new documents were declassified, and the idea of CIA help barely reached the level of hypothetical possibility. Nevertheless, in the hypersensitive world of international law and diplomacy, signals were sent and received. Nothing was done or said to throw cold water on the Quixotic Spanish case. That abstention from discouragement was a positive signal in itself.

But as long as the MLAT request was lodged at the Department of Justice, the position on declassification was a simple “no”—don’t declassify anything in response to a court request. It could set a dangerous precedent and any number of investigations in foreign countries about which there might be information in U.S. files.

After a bit of prodding from U.S. Congressman John Conyers, a Justice Department official promised publicly the United States would cooperate “to the extent permitted by law.” Barcella was given approval to go to Spain to testify. And in January 1998, Judge García-Castellón brought a “rogatory commission” to Washington, and received full Justice Department cooperation. García-Castellón was able to obtain the testimony of the other principle investigators in the Letelier investigation. (Michael Vernon Townley, the principal assassin and chief witness in the case, and the Cuban exiles still serving their sentences, refused to testify because García-Castellón declined to grant them immunity from future prosecution.)

For most of two years, Garcés built a case against Pinochet that was overwhelming in sheer volume. He organized a gigantic pro bono legal operation on several continents that allowed victims of the Pinochet regime to join the suit wherever they were. Volunteer lawyers in Spain, Washington, and Santiago expanded the list of plaintiffs from seven dual Spanish-Chilean nationals to more than 3,000 documented cases of torture, execution and disappearance. Victims’ families joined by organization: the entire membership of the Families of Disappeared Detainees registered with the court with legal representation by Garcés’s team of volunteers. The families of two Americans who had been killed in Chile, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, added their names to the list of plaintiffs.

Court filings ran to hundreds of pages, often reading like narrative history, describing incidents such as the so-called “Caravan of Death” in which Pinochet’s officers traveled from city to city ordering summary executions to clean out the jails of political prisoners. A long section details the systematic use of torture based on the testimonies of dozens of prisoners who survived.

The Spanish and Latin American press covered the developments in some detail. But in the United States, newspapers were fashioning a softer view of the aging dictator. Pinochet was going to step down in March 1998, after almost twenty-five years as commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces. As he prepared to join the pantheon of the twentieth century’s great dictators, writers reflected on Chile’s own emotional ambivalence about their most powerful leader ever: “Chilean Strongman to Exit a Hero; Darker Side of Pinochet Regime Played Down,” headlined the
Toronto Star.
The
Washington Post
, looking
back, saw in Pinochet a “ ‘National Father’ or Bloody Killer? As Ex-Dictator Retires From Military, Chile Is Divided Over His Legacy.”

The grandfatherly Pinochet of 1998 had replaced the forbidding 1973 image of dictator in gray cape and dark glasses. He was poised to become Chile’s respected ex-president and elder statesman.

A little noticed story in London’s
Financial Times
, however, was to prove prophetic. The story said Pinochet, angered at Spain for permitting the criminal case against him from going forward, had ordered the closing of Chile’s military office in Madrid. Established during the Franco regime, it was used to procure military supplies and armaments from European dealers, and had been a major avenue to circumvent the U.S. arms embargoes placed on Chile for human rights reasons.

London was to be the site of the new European procurement office, chosen, the article said, because General Pinochet has been a “frequent, if discreet,” visitor there.

In September 1998, Pinochet arrived in London for what was to be his final, fateful visit.

He and his wife, Lucía, stayed at the Park Lane Intercontinental Hotel. They spent a few gracious hours at formal tea with Pinochet’s longtime friend Margaret Thatcher at her home. Their friendship was based not only on shared dedication to reversing the political gains of the left. Thatcher was also grateful for Pinochet’s military support in the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982, in which Chile was the only Latin American country to oppose Argentina’s attempt to occupy the islands that are Britain’s last colony in South America. Never had a word of criticism for Chilean human rights violations escaped Thatcher’s lips.

For the first time Pinochet was traveling as a civilian. His retirement from the army on March 11 had been less than smooth. Celebrated by his military colleagues with parades and speeches as the man who had saved Chile, Pinochet also faced the repudiation of thousands of protesters, who had to be held back by riot police. Chile’s government, despite its democratic spirit, was placed immediately in the politically awkward position of protecting the retired dictator.

Pinochet had not left to chance the legal impunity he had enjoyed since 1973. In 1978, the toughest years of repression behind it, the military government issued decree law 2191, which granted amnesty to anyone (“authors, accomplices or concealers”) responsible for political crimes since the coup. The law was intended to wipe from the courts all investigations of military actions during the period when most deaths and disappearances occurred, and that was its immediate effect. To that was added parliamentary immunity. Pinochet had rewritten the constitution in 1980 to grant himself the rank of senator for life (
senador vitalicio
), as a former head of state. Within hours of his farewell speech to his high-stepping troops, Pinochet was sworn in as senator. His protection from prosecution was continuous and seemingly air-tight, passing from his position as head of state until 1990, to commander in chief of the armed forces until 1998, to lifetime immunity as a senator.