RIGHTS-CHILE: Argentine Court Seeks Pinochet’s Extradition

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 27 2000 (IPS) - An Argentine court sought the extradition Friday of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-90) in connection with the 1974 assassinations of former Chilean army chief Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires.

Cecilia Prats, one of the couple’s two daughters, said Friday that she was pleased with the court decision, which she and her sister had requested earlier this month, after 26 years of seeking legal remedy. “We are all equal in the eyes of the law, and Pinochet should clarify” his role in the murders, she said.

General Prats was Pinochet’s predecessor as army chief, and also served as vice-president and interior minister under socialist president Salvador Allende (1971-73).

After the 1973 coup in which Pinochet overthrew Allende, Prats and his wife went into exile in Buenos Aires, where they were killed by a carbomb.

In a parallel case that opened in Buenos Aires on Oct 9, Enrique Arancibia Clavell, a former agent of DINA, the Pinochet regime’s secret police, is charged as an accomplice in the murders of Prats and his wife.

The Chilean state is a plaintiff in that case, along with Prats’ two daughters.

Another former DINA agent, Michael Townley, has confessed to being the material author of the two murders. He was also involved in the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, in Washington, D.C.

Townley confessed to preparing the bomb that killed the Prats’, while his wife, Mariana Callejas, allegedly set off the explosion.

But since Townley is part of the witness protection programme in the United States, the case is now focusing on Arancibia Clavell, who has been under arrest since 1996.

According to witnesses, Arancibia Clavell helped plan the assassinations of Prats and his wife. He, however, denies having served as an intelligence agent, and says he was not in Argentina at the time of the murders.

Argentina’s justice system, meanwhile, is seeking those who gave the orders for the double assassination, which the courts here consider a “crime against humanity”, to which no statute of limitations applies.

On Friday, federal Judge Juan José Galeano issued arrest warrants for Pinochet, four other military officers and one civilian, requesting their extradition to Argentina, where they would be tried for masterminding the murders of Prats and his wife.

Sought for extradition along with Pinochet are General Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, identified as the head of DINA operations outside of Chile, Brigadier-Generals Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza, who have served time in Chile in connection with the Letelier case, Brigadier-General José Luis Zara, and Callejas, Townley’s wife.

Prosecutor Jorge Burlando said that if extradited to Argentina, Pinochet would be put in prison, because the charges against him require incarceration.

The elderly former dictator is suspected of ordering the assassinations of opponents committed by DINA agents outside Chile.

In the trial against Arancibia Clavell, testimony by a number of witnesses has implicated the former agent in the murders of Prats and his wife. Some of the testimony has come from former political prisoners, Argentine and Chilean nationals, who said they had been seized by joint commandos made up of agents from both countries, and that the accused was one of those agents.

One expert witness, Rafael Castillo, who took part in the Chilean police investigation of the Letelier assassination and interviewed Townley in the United States, said the former intelligence agent “told me that Arancibia was the DINA link in Buenos Aires.”

Castillo stated in court that his investigation indicated that DINA had set up a small, secret structure that operated in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Italy and the United States.

The witness added that the Pinochet regime provided agents with false passports, to pursue and murder the dictator’s opponents, including Prats, who was loyal to Allende.

However, Arancibia Clavell’s defence lawyers insist that Townley’s testimony was provided behind closed doors, and that in any case it cleared their client of any blame, because Townley said he met Arancibia Clavell in 1975, a year after Prats’ assassination.

Another witness was lawmaker Isabel Allende, the late president’s daughter, who recalled that Prats was highly respected among the Chilean armed forces, and provided the court with letters written by the general when he was in Buenos Aires, in which he spoke of Pinochet’s “betrayal”, “small-mindedness” and “spiritual perversity.”

Prats’ brother-in-law, Harold Cuthbert, said his sister Sofía and Prats had pressed the Chilean government to move faster in issuing passports which would enable them to leave Argentina and take refuge in Europe. However, the documents never arrived.

The delay in the delivery of the passports made it impossible for the Prats to accept invitations from Spain and Britain, which offered them asylum to escape the threats and harassment of which they were the targets in Buenos Aires during the last government of Juan Domingo Perón (1973-74).

Documents that survived the carbombing indicated that Perón had welcomed Prats to Argentina, and that his economy minister had found the Chilean general a job. However, Perón later sent Prats a letter advising him to leave the country, because he could no longer protect him.