Saul Landau
Juan
Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s new foreign minister, will meet with Secretary of State
Madeline Albright to ask her to help return Augusto Pinochet to Chile. Since
last October, British authorities have held Pinochet on a request from the
Spanish Judge Baltazor Garzon. In September Pinochet will get a British Court
hearing to determine if the Spanish charges conform with British law. If so,
Pinochet heads for Spain to stand trial for crimes against humanity, genocide,
and terrorism.
Juan
Gabriel Valdes, like Chile’s last foreign minister, belongs to the left. Indeed,
I knew him as an exile during the early years of Pinochet’s military government.
In 1976, he was my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies where we both
worked with Orlando Letelier, who had served on Allende’s Cabinet. Valdes had
come to help Letelier in his campaign to restore democratic government to Chile.
At
IPS, we believed in Letelier’s cause, but saw his campaign to restore democracy
as just beginning. Pinochet saw Letelier as an immediate threat — so much so
that he mentioned his name twice in a June 1976 conversation with Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger, who was blessing Pinochet with an official state visit.
An official record of their conversation has Kissinger assuring Pinochet that he
"approved of his methods."
It
shouldn’t have surprised Kissinger that three months after their meeting in
Santiago, Pinochet dispatched his agents to assassinate Letelier in Washington
DC. On September 21, 1976 Pinochet’s agents detonated a bomb they had placed
under Letelier’s car, killing him and Ronni Moffitt, an IPS colleague.
Juan
Gabriel Valdes mourned with the rest of us. But soon after the murders he
departed, leaving Letelier’s widow as the sole representative of Chilean
democracy in Washington. Valdes, like most of Letelier’s comrades in high places
in the exiled Popular Unity government, did little to seek justice for their
murdered comrade. Perhaps the bombing terrified them, just as Pinochet had
intended.
But,
why is Valdes working so hard to bring Pinochet home, where his chances of
facing his accusers are slim. He argues about Chile’s sovereignty and Chile’s
right to try the 83 year old ex dictator. But Chile’s left and center parties
have acceded to Pinochet’s immunity requests, have gone along with his amnesty
provisions, have accepted the bitter fact that he made himself Senator for Life
— further fortifying himself against trial.
Juan
Gabriel, I want to shout, let the British extradite him to Spain where he will
answer to the charges. Juan Gabriel, instead of asking Ms. Albright to help free
the old criminal en jefe, ask her to work to indict him in the US for murdering
Letelier and Moffitt.
Why
can’t he hear my cries and those of others — his old friends and comrades here?
Has the new world trade order in Chile created a sense of moral deafness?
Saul
Landau is the Hugh O. LaBounty Chair of Interdisciplinary Applied Knowledge at
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, 3801 W. Temple Ave. Pomona,
CA 91768 tel – 909-869-3115 fax – 909-869-4751
