Santiago, Chile – Gen. Augusto Pinochet, once the all-powerful dictator of Chile, is a lonely man nowadays.
When his former secret police chief shocked the nation in July by claiming Pinochet made part of his large fortune through drug trafficking, his lawyer and longtime supporter issued a denial but other than his family, few Chileans came to his defense.
Just five people showed up this month to mark the anniversary of a failed attempt on 90-year-old Pinochet’s life. And on Sept. 11, the 33rd anniversary of the military coup against socialist President Salvador Allende, only two women appeared at his house for what used to be a day of great celebration for Pinochetistas.
Before, Pinochet could count on legions of supporters to fend off his critics and paint him as the man who saved Chile from becoming another Cuba. Now, the only thing keeping him out of jail appears to be his poor health, which his doctors say includes diabetes, arthritis and mild dementia.
“Pinochet belongs to the past,” Michelle Bachelet said as she campaigned to become Chile’s first female president this year. Her right-wing rivals readily agreed, calling the aging, ailing dictator irrelevant to most Chilean voters.
Even the courts have turned against him. This month the Supreme Court stripped him of immunity, paving the way to try him on charges involving torture and kidnapping at a secret detention center where hundreds of dissidents – including Bachelet and her mother – were held.
It’s a long fall for a man who, for 17 years from his 1973 coup, dominated every aspect of public life in Chile. According to an official report, 3,197 people were killed for political reasons during his rule, including more than 1,000 who remain unaccounted for today.
Pinochet faces scores of criminal lawsuits for the human rights violations, but it’s money, not human rights, that has isolated the general.
“Pinochet has been abandoned mainly because of the bank accounts,” said political scientist Ricardo Israel. “Many people were prepared to accept the large amount of people who were killed during his regime, but this situation of the money has been a very hard blow for him.” The jailed former spy chief, retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, maintains Pinochet made the money through arms and drugs trafficking, but has provided no proof. Through his lawyers, Pinochet insists his money is the result of savings, donations and good investments.
It has taken years for the dictatorship’s darkest secrets to become public. Most of the killings occurred in the early years of the dictatorship. But although democracy was restored in 1990, dissent for years remained muted.
Even after he allowed the 1988 referendum that ultimately ended his rule, Pinochet’s connection to those in power, especially in the military, made him untouchable – until 1998, and his stunning arrest in London on an international warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon.
“There is a before-Garzon and an after-Garzon in efforts to bring justice in the human rights abuses in Chile,” human rights lawyer Alfonso Insunza said.
Human rights charges were filed against Pinochet in Chile after his return from London. Then, in 2004, it emerged from a U.S.
Senate investigation that he had a fortune in foreign bank accounts. A Chilean judge estimated it at $28 million, and Pinochet was indicted for tax evasion.
Now comes the biggest shock – the claim that the money came from drugs and guns.
The army commander, Gen. Oscar Izurieta said, he expects Pinochet to prove the fortune is legitimate, but that all the same the affair has done “terrible damage” to the military.
“It’s very difficult for me to forgive him,” he told the magazine Que Pasa.
Hermogenes Perez de Arce, a prominent newspaper columnist and former right-wing congressman, is one of the few who still defend Pinochet.
“Many right-wing people who supported him have abandoned him or openly adopted a language against him,” Perez de Arce told The Associated Press. “I say they were brainwashed.” He said Pinochet was a longtime hate figure to leftists worldwide, and insisted the accusations of corruption and human rights violations are baseless.
Because of Pinochet’s declining health, the courts have repeatedly dropped human rights charges against him, but the tax evasion case stands.
The victims of the dictatorship continue to seek justice, but the possibility of Pinochet going on trial appear remote, despite his being stripped of the immunity he enjoys as a former president in at least four indictments.
Pinochet’s wife, Lucia Hiriart, has asked for forgiveness on his behalf – while not saying he did anything wrong.
“He has said many times that if he was wrong, he asks the people who fell to forgive him, especially from our side, but also for the adversaries,” she said this month.
Meanwhile, Chileans seem more galvanized by Garzon than by Pinochet. The Spanish judge was here last month to accept an honorary degree from Universidad Central in Santiago, and only 12 Pinochet supporters, none of them prominent figures, showed up to protest.
