RELEASING PINOCHET

March 2000
		After 17 months under house arrest in Britain on alleged human rights abuses, Augusto Pinochet is back in Chile. Should he have been set free? Mark Falcoff from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and Harley Shaiken, director of The University of California at Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies, respond to your questions.

Forum introduction Don't Chileans have the right to have their grievances against Pinochet redressed? Should human rights organizations dictate who gets prosecuted for what? Should we care about Pinochet's medical condition? Is sovereign immunity too important to be tampered with? How do Chileans feel about Gen. Pinochet?     Online Special: Politics in Chile Online Special: NewsHour coverage from Chile's Pinochet years.   The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research The University of California at Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies Spotlight on Chile The British House of Lords Pinochet Decision from Human Rights Watch

Frank Nitti of Santa Fe, New Mexico asks: During his time of leadership, Pinochet was fighting the most dangerous political organization in the history of mankind: Marxism, which has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of innocent people. Maybe Pinochet saved millions of lives by fighting Marxism. Who are the human rights organizations to dictate who gets prosecuted for what?   Mark Falcoff responds: I have weighty doubts that Pinochet "saved millions of lives by fighting Marxism". I certainly think that there were people in the Allende government who had plans to convert Chile into a totalitarian dictatorship, but whether they would ever have achieved their goal is open to question, particularly since they never had much of a hold on the armed forces. The best that can be said for Pinochet and his colleagues is that they put an end to a regime which most Chileans wished to see ended--and fast. But instead of an orderly coup which would set the stage for new elections and a resolution of the acute political polarization in which the country had fallen at the end of the Allende regime, the Chilean military went far beyond their patriotic duty and carried out their task in a grisly manner--torturing and murdering thousands of people. In so doing, they probably over the longer term rendered a greater service to Marxism than to any other ideology, giving it a new myth and erasing overnight the harsh facts about misgovernment during the Allende regime itself.   Harley Shaiken responds: The principal accusers of General Pinochet have been the families of the murdered and disappeared. Human rights organizations have supported these claims as have prosecutors and judges in Spain, Belgium, France and other democratic countries throughout Europe. Moreover, 60 criminal complaints have been filed against Pinochet in Chilean courts for murder, torture and kidnapping. Laws, both in Chile and internationally, are dictating the prosecution. General Pinochet led the overthrow of a democratically elected government under circumstances in which open electoral challenge to that government was possible. He chose to destroy democracy rather than utilize it. The crime of overthrowing a democratic government, however, pales in relation to the terror that his authoritarian regime unleashed over the next 17 years in an effort to crush all conceivable opposition. The more than 3,000 people who were murdered or disappeared and the tens of thousands who were tortured or forced into exile bear very somber witness to the intensity and widespread nature of the attacks. What is particularly chilling is that this campaign of intimidation represented the ordered and efficient implementation of state policy, not personal excesses. It is particularly tragic given the democratic traditions of Chile.