1. The latter was one of the reasons why the Argentine military thought they could count on Washington’s neutrality when they invaded the Malvinas in 1982. The Americans instead stuck with their British NATO ally—and it is now coming out that Pinochet secretly aided that war effort against his Argentine neighbor. This is one reason why Thatcher is demanding that Westminster free the man who was crucial to her winning that battle in the South Atlantic and the subsequent general elections. How history twists and turns!
2. Thanks to Geoffrey Robertson, in whose book Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000), I first read about these specific cases. The longer version I reproduce here is translated from Judge Baltasar Garzón’s indictment as reproduced by the FASIC Foundation in Chile.
3. I thank Carmen Hertz for having sent me a facsimile of this letter. I had read its contents before (on a Web site), but to see the handwriting of Carlos right there, to feel the immediate intimacy of his hands writing to Carmen and writing also to us, those of us who in the future remember him and have become in some way the guardians of his memory, to have been able to share that closeness turned out to be a gratifying experience in the midst of the pain that this book has wreaked upon me in ways I could not have foretold.
4. And even had something of a political career, eventually becoming the minister-spokesperson of the government of Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle, Eugenio’s very own cousin.
5. Exactly one year later, in July 2002, when this book was going to press, the news arrives that five judges of the Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 to 1, have once and for all dismissed the case against Pinochet due to the irreversible deterioration of his mental faculties. This shameful capitulation of the judicial system was followed a few days later by the farce of the former dictator resigning, for the good of the fatherland, from his post of Senator-for-Life, though, of course, he kept his immunity as ex-president, his security detail, and his salary. In a letter which the “mentally ill patient” personally wrote, he defends with considerable acumen and rationality his government and his historical conduct. This grotesque spectacle was accompanied by his public statements of “I am not crazy.” If the announcements by the government that “justice was done,” have not transformed us into the laughing-stock of the world, it is only because some time ago the world had already lost any hope that the promise trumpeted when Pinochet returned to Chile would be honored.