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Today's
Stories
August 9, 2004
Gary Leupp
Why
Iraqi Christians are Moving to Syria
August 7 /
8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
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Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
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August 6, 2004
Joshua Frank
David
Cobb's Soft Charade: the Greens and the Politics of Mendacity
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Stan Goff
Mike Whitney
The
Arbitrary Imprisonment of Jose Padilla
William S. Lind
Corruption in the Marine Corps
David Price
In
the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 5, 2004
Mike Ferner
The Kerry Show: When Peace is Off
Message
Bruce Anderson
Two
Rejections
Robert Fisk
The Tale of Saddam's Cameraman
Todd Chretien
Florida
Comes to California: the Democrats' Plot Against Nader
Peter Linebaugh
Doing Time for Political Crime:
Paul and Silas, Bound in Jail
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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August
9, 2004
Pinochet
Must be Tried
A
Murderer and a Thief on the Loose
By
TITO TRICOT
It was a cold and misty day when the
clouds unleashed their massive tears of disbelief as three diplomats
were killed in the Chilean embassy in Costa Rica. Only a day
earlier, a priest was slain by an irate youth in the country's
cathedral. Now, in the middle of the northern desert, an army
tank crushed into a school bus. Unusual events indeed, but even
more unusual is the fact that General Augusto Pinochet is being
investigated, both in the United States and Chile, for holding
millionaire secret bank accounts.
Only two months ago the country's
Court of Appeal stripped Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution
opening the way for a new trial on human rights violations during
his regime. He is being investigated in relation to the infamous
"Operation Condor", an intelligence network organized
in the 70s to persecute, arrest, torture and murder political
opponents in Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and
Brazil.
Thus, the earth seems to be
moving under the ageing dictator's feet, but do not be deceived,
for in spite of being responsible for horrendous crimes in Chile
and other Latin American countries, Pinochet has never spent
a single day in prison and it is highly unlikely that he ever
will. His lawyers have pleaded insanity to avoid prosecution,
the courts have accepted this argument and the Government is
pleased that the General is not going to prison, because his
freedom and impunity from prosecution were part of the negotiations
between the Armed Forces and the civilian opposition over a decade
ago.
Here in Chile, everyone knows
that Pinochet is neither insane nor senile, not only because
he frequently goes shopping to luxurious Malls or travels to
the coast on holidays, but because the majority of Chileans are
aware that his release from house detention in England on so
called "humanitarian grounds", was nothing but a political
negotiation. It was precisely while he was in London that the
New York based Riggs Bank transferred millions of dollars from
his bank accounts to avoid detection by investigating judges.
The question arises then: How did a person mentally unfit to
stand trial manage six bank accounts and set up two offshore
corporations in the Bahamas? Were the Ashburton Company and Althorp
Investment Firm used for money laundering? Where did all this
money come from? How could a General with a salary of less than
15 thousand dollars a year manage to save eight million dollars?
In September of 1975, two years
after coming to power in a bloody coup d'etat, General Pinochet
categorically stated: "This is a honourable government,
that's why we have the support of the Chilean people. When the
time to go comes I will go to the Notary's Office and I will
take away the envelope where my possessions are listed. Nothing
else. May be I'll leave with less of what I had when I took over".
29 years later and 8 million dollars richer, it is clear that
General Pinochet did not fulfil his promises. In any case, this
is not the first time that Pinochet, his family or the military
are involved in obscure financial dealings. Right after the coup,
the military organized a massive campaign to collect money for
what they called the "National Reconstruction Fund".
Conspicuous army officers, right wing politicians and businessmen
declared they had donated their gold wedding rings to contribute
to this Fund. Many a Chilean believed in this and donated their
rings too. No one knows what happened to all this gold and money.
Back in 1990, Pinochet's oldest
son, Augusto Pinochet Hiriart, was responsible for a major fraud
involving State funds. He made over 2 million dollars profit
by selling the bankrupt Valmoval Company to the army that knowingly
paid well over the market price for the company. The Chilean
parliament set up a special committee to investigate the fraud,
but the army mobilized its troops and Pinochet threatened the
first civilian government after 17 years of dictatorship with
another coup if the investigation did not cease. Needless to
say the case was shelved and the committee promptly dissolved.
In 1995 the State Defence Council tried to reopen the case, but
the government ordered the Council to drop the charges arguing
"Reasons of State". Right now, Pinochet's son is under
custody on a new fraud charge. It remains to be seen whether
he will be sent to prison or not. What it is clear is that Pinochet
is not the only one that became rich during his regime, on the
contrary, the profound structural changes carried out by the
military created a market economy where the poor became poorer
and the rich richer. By the time the military left power in 1990,
five million Chileans lived under the poverty line, over 40%
of the population. On the other hand, a handful of economic groups
became powerful economic and political actors. The head of the
Angelini group, whose fortune was based on the Fishing, Energy
and Forestry industries, became the country's first multimillionaire,
with a personal fortune of over 3 thousand million dollars.
General Pinochet is a vulgar
thief that continues to lie to the Chilean people arguing that
the money found in his secret bank accounts comes from donations.
But, no matter how corrupt he might be, this is not his worst
crime. He is responsible for the illegal detention, torture,
rape, murder and disappearance of thousands of Chileans. This
is his worst crime and for this he must be tried and sent to
prison.
Tito Tricot is a sociologist and director of the
Center For Intercultural Studies- ILWEN Chile.
Weekend
Edition Features for July 31 / August 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerry:
He's the (Any) One
Merlin Chowkwanyun
Five Questions with Noam Chomsky: "The Savage Extreme of
a Narrow Policy Spectrum"
David Lindorff
The Shame of the DNC
John Chuckman
The
Disturbing Words of John Edwards
Brian Cloughley
All Slam and No Dunk; All Blame and No Responsibility
Christopher Brauchli
"Being Poor is a State of Mind": the Frowning Face
of Compassionate Conservatism
Fred Gardner
A World of Pain
Michael Donnelly
How Big Pharma Bilks the Elderly
David Nally
Genocide in Darfur?
Joshua Frank
Forest Battles Escalate in Oregon
Sam Bahour
Colin Powell and My Grandmother
Diane Farsetta
The IMF and the Indonesian Elections: The Invisible Hand in the
Voting Booth
Harold Gould
Was Iraq a Mutual Charade?
Van Bergen / Stephens
Election 9/11: Surreal Political Theater
Lee Sustar
A New Model for the Labor Movement?
Ron Jacobs
The Lost Art of Hitchhiking
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview with Palestinian-American Rapper, The Iron Sheik
Poets Basement
Albert, Ford, Krieger, St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Cross Cultural Poetics
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