I OFTEN WONDER WHAT went through Slobodan Milosevic’s mind in October of 1998 when he heard the news, perhaps at about the same time I was being shocked by it in California, that Augusto Pinochet had been arrested in London by detectives of Scotland Yard. Did Milosevic—at that point quite firmly the president of Yugoslavia—tremble at the idea that a foreign court could put former heads of state on trial in the name of the very humanity that those rulers had violated? Did he foresee in the Chilean General’s fate what might befall him? Could he suspect that less than four years later he would be facing the International Criminal Court in The Hague?
As I made the rounds of radio and TV programs defending the need to put former dictators on trial in countries other than their own if those lands were incapable of doing so, I was invariably greeted by the misgivings of commentators and call-in listeners alike who were certain that indictments like the one Pinochet was facing would encourage oppressors to stay in power against all odds and settle into their bunkers until their last round of ammunition was spent. Wasn’t it better to let the dictators go quietly with their spoils into the night of retirement and relieve the people suffering under their boot from the distress of a protracted civil conflict? Wasn’t that a small price to pay for the lives saved? And wasn’t this an affair best left to the citizens of the affected nation to decide?
Of all the arguments against the Pinochet trial, this seemed to me then and still seems to me now to be the most dangerous and the most specious. It presumes that tyrants leave when they feel like it and not when they are thrown out. In other words, it postulates that the people themselves are not the protagonists of their own history, the true and often secret architects of democracy. In the Chilean case, for instance, Pinochet tried to ignore the results of the 1988 plebiscite until the rest of the armed forces and the international community declared that they recognized the victory of the democratic forces. Don Augusto’s weakness and isolation were the outgrowth of a vast mobilization of the Chilean people that cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of exiles and torture sessions and expulsions and beatings and persecutions—just as the struggle for liberty in Poland and Nigeria, in Indonesia and Haiti, South Africa and Czechoslovakia, was decisive in the collapse of the authoritarian regimes in those countries.
Tyrants don’t leave because they are good. They leave because they have no other alternative, because they lost the battle for the imagination of the future, because millions of their compatriots were able to dream, deep in the private walls of their hearts and out there on the riskier streets of their city, another sort of world, a world where impunity does not and should not eternally reign.
My impassioned hymn to the power of ordinary citizens fell on deaf ears. Look at Milosevic, I was told. Wait and see, I was told: The trial of General Pinochet will delay the end of Milosevic indefinitely. Wait and see.
We waited and then we saw. We saw the people of Serbia rise against Milosevic in October 2000, barely two years after Pinochet’s detention in London. We saw no pampering of the Yugoslav despot, no safeguards offered against future prosecutions in order to convince him to leave office. We saw that the predicted bloodbath did not materialize, despite the fact that no guarantee of total immunity was offered to Milosevic and his cronies, their position and popularity undermined, it is true, by the NATO bombing campaign. And it took less than a year for the former strongman of Serbia to be extradited to The Hague, where he is now trying to defend himself against charges of genocide at the United Nations tribunal. What I had hoped would happen to General Pinochet—his victims confronting him—has become the fate of Milosevic.
Such a scenario is not, of course, possible, without intense pressure from abroad (which, in the case of Milosevic, was made even more conspicuous by the U.S. threat to withhold a billion-dollar loan—a coercion that was not, of course, ever applied to Chile; the U.S. never demanded that Pinochet be extradited for the terrorist bomb that killed Letelier less than twenty blocks from the White House). If that watchfulness on the part of the international community, this insistent demand from outside the country that officials of the former government who committed crimes be held accountable, turns out to be so essential it is because of a bizarre moral sickness that infects transitions to democracy in our time. I have seen the situation in my own Chile and again in the case of the former Yugoslavia. And Cambodia. And Romania. And the Philippines. And in far too many other unfortunate lands across the globe as new leaders attempt to usher in an era of peace and stability.
It is members of the new government, often the very people who led the resistance against the dictatorship, who are all too often the ones who preach a selective amnesia, asking their citizens to focus on the future and not on what happened yesterday. Investigating the horror, they say, dragging up old crimes, putting former officials on trial, only diverts attention from the most urgent task at hand, the primary goal of national reconciliation. In the case of Chile, the newly elected democratic leaders failed to realize that this mythic coming together of a fractured nation could not possibly be attained by ignoring the pain of the past. They did not realize that the cost of allowing the former ruler and his followers utter impunity led to the erosion of the rule of law and the mortgaging of our ethical future. If a judge in Spain—with the concurrence of the British court system—had not embarrassed us into prosecuting Pinochet, he would still be giving self-congratulatory speeches in the Senate. In his case, as in the ongoing trial of Milosevic, it is clear that the increasing authority and vigilance of international tribunals help rather than hinder the search for justice at the local and national levels.
The fact that Pinochet finally was able to avoid prosecution due to spurious health reasons has not, in the year that has followed, deterred this advance towards accountability at a global level. The two war crimes tribunals—for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda—are functioning well, as is the special tribunal for Sierra Leone. Enough countries have ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court so that a discussion of how it will function and who will serve on it is already in the offing. The very circumstance that it will soon start to operate will make future Pinochets and past Milosevics even more wary. As we head into a world riddled by the dilemmas posed by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the U.S. response to them, we will be seeing, I believe, a recrudescence of violations against the rights of people. Terror exercised by rulers against their own people will be overlooked—as in Chechnya and Pakistan, Turkey and Tibet—due to the obsessive American need to focus on that other war, the “war against terrorism,” or the accompanying American lack of interest in any region (such as Latin America or Africa) that does not seem essential to that campaign. Not to mention those major human rights violators in nations like Iraq and North Korea who have been defined as so outside the American orbit of influence that no incentive exists any longer to ease up on the terrible way their own subjects are treated. In short, we seem to be more in need than ever of international institutions accepted by all parties and countries that can hear those crimes against humanity that national courts cannot or will not attend to. It is disheartening, though not unexpected, that the world’s only superpower opposes such an instance and will not recognize its rulings.
Indeed, if such a tribunal had been in place, the whole Pinochet affair might not have happened at all: Chile would have had to give its former dictator up if it was not willing or able to try him. But Chile would not have felt (as Serbia does, with some justification) that there is a double standard at work here. Only the war criminals from weak nations are put on trial. If your country is big enough, you can get away with—say—Tianamen Square or mining the ports of Nicaragua. But of course that is one of the problems with the International Criminal Court: Besides the fact that it will be some time before such an institution is up and functioning, it remains to be seen whether its pronouncements will be accepted by all signatories. Meanwhile, it is encouraging that the Pinochet prosecution has become the model and inspiration for other actions.
Hissène Habré, for instance, the genocidal ruler of Chad, was living in pomp in nearby Senegal with the money he had stolen from his country until a group of Senagalese citizens, galvanized by the accomplishments of Garcés and Garzón, accused him of torture and murder, charges that were accepted by a Senegalese judge. When the “African Pinochet” (yes, that is what they called him) was freed by a superior tribunal—much in the way that a court in Chile finally found a way to exempt Pinochet from standing trial—the Belgians, who have steadfastly been proclaiming their right to judge former heads of state for crimes against humanity—stepped in and demanded Habré’s extradition, a case that is still being argued. The Belgians are also seeking to put Ariel Sharon on trial for his participation in the 1982 Shabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon. There have, naturally, also been setbacks—like the UN withdrawal from the Cambodian courts that were supposed to judge the lethal Khmer Rouge cadres, because there was no guarantee of independence; or the refusal of each and every Argentine government to extradite some of its worse human rights abusers; or the ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the UN’s official judicial arm) that Belgium’s arrest warrant against Yerodia Ndomabasi, the former foreign minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, for genocide was illegal. On other fronts, however, progress is being made: Kissinger cancels a trip to Brazil because Judge Garzón (yes, he’s still at it, going strong) is threatening to have him arrested for his role in installing the Chilean dictatorship in 1973; the former governor of East Timor is arraigned for having arranged the massacre of thousands during the last months of Indonesian occupation of that island; an American judge rules that Shell can be held responsible and put on trial for its collusion with the Nigerian government in the death of poet and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and others. I am not suggesting that these actions and so many others should be directly attributed to the extradition trial of General Pinochet, but historians may well argue many centuries from now that his prosecution, because of its prominence and the precedent it established of universal jurisprudence, indeed constituted a turning point.
We can only surmise whether the defeat of Pinochet expresses a deep change in the moral climate, similar to what happened in the not-so-distant past when the slavery that seemed natural to most of the planet’s elite became, in a matter of decades, absolutely abhorrent. There was a time when working eighty hours a week was not deemed unreasonable, when child labor was considered the lot of every poverty-stricken newborn baby, when a woman was automatically deemed inferior and voiceless—and we can pinpoint, in all these cases, certain major symbolic events that signaled a shift in the consensus of what was and was not permissible. Perhaps we are now on the verge of a similar transformation, the ability to imagine a world where rulers who plunder and kill their own populations are invariably supposed to receive some form of retribution. That is, at any rate my prediction: that the despots of today or maybe of the day after tomorrow will look into the cracked mirror of Milosevic and into the murderous and hunted eyes of Pinochet and see, once and for all, their future.
But wait—didn’t Pinochet finally get off? Isn’t there a counter-lesson in that? Won’t my hypothetical genocidal murderer say to himself, “I can always make believe I was crazy, I can always hang on until I am so senile that it is senseless to try to judge me at all.”5
So—what is the final meaning of Pinochet? How will his story be interpreted many years from now? Isn’t that the ultimate test of where his journey has taken him and us?
Let me hazard a prophecy: Of all the battles of his interminable life, the one that the General can no longer hope to win is the battle for the way in which he will be remembered beyond his death, how the hard syllables that form his name—Pi-no-chet—will endure and become solidified in tomorrow’s vocabulary. The General has lost, I believe, the battle for control of the language of the future.
During most of my adult life, as I could not restrain what Pinochet himself was doing to me and my loved ones, I was fascinated by the possibility that perhaps we could, in some way, determine at least how the word Pinochet would be transmitted to the future. I was so haunted by the desire to foretell history’s judgment that in one of my novels I conjectured that, thirty thousand years from now, in the mythical country of Tsil (as I suggested Chile might be known someday) children would insult their rivals by calling them “Pinchot,” the name of a particularly treacherous dragon in a cautionary fairy tale that parents in that faraway tomorrowland would presumably tell their offspring. And yet, even while I was merrily prognosticating Pinochet as an expletive for generations to come, I was aware that in the duel for a place in the common tongue of our time, he was, in fact, carrying and conveying an import which was rather less to my liking. Pinochet was not only being associated with sudden military takeovers (such as in the usage Pinochetazo), but with the iron fist supposedly needed to force an underdeveloped country into accepting an economic model which would drag it, kicking and quite literally screaming, into modernity and progress. How often would I not hear in my travels of exile the admiring and admonitory phrase: “What this country needs is a Pinochet!” Meaning: This sad land needs a real macho who will put potential troublemakers in their place. Yes, I thought, and terrorize them so they will not offer resistance to the shock therapy decreed by the global system as a precondition for foreign investment and FMI loans.
This ambiguous incarnation of Pinochet as both bogeyman and paragon to be imitated far and wide did not vanish, as I had hoped, when Chile returned, in 1990, to an uncertain and restricted democracy. Not only was Pinochet held over our heads as a threat of what might transpire if we ever tried to question the prevailing system, but he was now being glorified by other societies that were also undergoing their own turbulent transitions to democracy. Russians of all sorts—and not only extreme nationalists—could be heard proclaiming that a “Soviet Pinochet” was imperative in their land, not to mention the great Vaclav Havel’s vice premier Valtr Komarek who, in a visit to Chile, praised Pinochet as a “great personality” and an “original leader” whose economic model the Czechs would do well to emulate.
So both the man and that word, Pinochet, in spite of a worldwide campaign by the human rights community, managed to escape a connotation that was unequivocally negative. Overlapping and often superseding the image of the bloodthirsty and callous dictator was Pinochet as noble father figure to all those infantile inhabitants of a land who do not know what’s good for them and require discipline. A modernizer, even a liberator, one who is not afraid to spill some blood in order, as Kissinger once infamously remarked, to save a nation from its own irresponsibility. A warning signal: that is what, up until the moment when he was arrested in England, Pinochet had come to symbolize to millions around the globe. Warning rebels not to dream of subversions and alternative versions of humanity, warning the poor about the dire consequences of being too unruly or libertarian or lazy or demanding.
The events of the last four years have, however, drastically reconfigured the semantics of Pinochet. His detention, trials and public abasement have led to an extraordinary transformation of that word warning, resignifying it: It is now the petty and grand tyrants of the world who, instead of their subjects, are filled with fear at the thought of Pinochet.
I would have to be more of an optimist than the history of the past century warrants to convince myself that Pinochet’s example will instantaneously stay the hand of those who, encouraged by their governments to feel invulnerable, commit crimes against humanity and then shrug their shoulders, walk away from that pain smoking a cigarette or popping some candy into their mouth. But that image of Pinochet stripped of his immunity and arrested by Scotland Yard and then vilified by the courts in his own native Chile, must have infiltrated some part of the brain of those men, creeping into their eyes and sinews to remind them of the ominous destiny that could await them. And I also like to think of my friends—or at least some of them, one of them—in the solitary moment before he died, promising himself that the future holds some possible measure of justice, I like to imagine my friends murmuring to themselves that perhaps they are not eternally condemned to be victims perpetually forgotten, I like to think that they may have been right.
If human rights abuses will not cease because of the General’s exemplary punishment, a subtle displacement has nevertheless been validated in the way in which the world imagines power and equality and memory.
For decades, I was ashamed that Chile had unfortunately given humanity the word as well as the person Pinochet.
Who would have thought that this word would end up being instead a legacy of ours to the planet, fervently notifying every child who is born on this earth that he must never, under no circumstance whatsoever, not ever, be a Pinochet.
Or better still, I imagine the children of the future, thousands of years hence, playing in a meadow or a playground.
And then one of them does or says something that warrants a reproach, an insult, a hideous slur, from the other one, who shouts out: “Oh, don’t be a Pinochet.”
“Pinochet?” answers the other. “Pinochet? Who’s that?”
Pinochet?
Who in hell is Pinochet?