REVIEW 2000-CHILE: The Year Justice Returned – and the Transition to Democracy Stalled

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Dec 22 2000 (IPS) - The personality of the year in Chile was Juan Guzmán Tapia, the magistrate who personified the vindication of justice by daring to prosecute General Augusto Pinochet, despite the armour protecting the former dictator, which until recently looked impenetrable.

The close of the year 2000 has highlighted the fact that Chilean politics is often built on paradoxes, because the clear signs of the steady deterioration of Pinochet’s power have been offset by the increasing remoteness of the possibility of dismantling the institutional holdovers from the dictatorship, and of completing the transition to full democracy.

A year ago, Chile was in the midst of the campaign for the second round of presidential elections, in which current President Ricardo Lagos, a moderate socialist, closely defeated right-wing leader Joaquín Lavín on Jan 16.

At the time, Pinochet was still under house arrest in London – after his Oct 16, 1998 detention – and hoping for a gesture of clemency by British authorities that would allow him to return to Chile and escape extradition to Spain, where Judge Baltasar Garzón wanted to try him for crimes against humanity.

A team of British physicians examined Pinochet on Jan 5, and their report formed the basis for British Home Secretary Jack Straw’s decision six days later to release the elderly retired general on humanitarian grounds, arguing a deterioration in his mental and physical health.

On Mar 3, Pinochet landed in Santiago. Received with full military honours, the former dictator (1973-90) was smiling and defiant, getting up from his wheelchair to walk several metres without even his cane, extending greetings alongside army chief General Ricardo Izurieta.

Thus concluded 503 days of house arrest – in a mansion in an upscale London suburb – for the former dictator, who since Mar 11, 1998 held a seat as life-senator in accordance with a controversial clause in the constitution which the dictatorship introduced and had approved by referendum in 1980.

The military fanfare surrounding Pinochet’s return drew fire from the centre-left governing coalition – the ‘Concertación por la Democracia’ – and from victims of the dictatorship’s repression. It also brought the civic-military talks underway since August 1999 in search of a solution for 1,000 pending cases of disappearances to the brink of collapse.

On Mar 6, Judge Guzmán filed a petition with the Court of Appeals for Pinochet to be stripped of the immunity from prosecution he enjoyed as a life-senator.

The crowd that gathered outside the La Moneda presidential palace to celebrate Lagos’ inauguration on Mar 11 loudly chanted “Try Pinochet”.

Lagos responded that the case was a matter for the courts, and stressed that as president he would fully guarantee the independence of the judiciary – a phrase he has repeated at each legal twist and turn in the Pinochet affair and with respect to other human rights cases as well.

In his first address to Congress as president, on May 21, Lagos urged the right-wing opposition to stop standing in the way of the elimination of the authoritarian throwbacks to the dictatorship – a task his Christian Democratic predecessors Patricio Aylwin (1990- 94) and Eduardo Frei (1994-2000) had also taken on, but without success.

The existence of nine designated senators, four of whom represent the armed forces and Carabineros police, and of lifelong seats in the Senate for former presidents who have served for at least six years, are among the biggest hurdles to Chile’s democratic transition.

The system used in the legislative elections, in which only two lawmakers are elected per electoral district, is also seen as a curb on democracy, since it keeps smaller parties, like the Communist Party, out of parliament, while favouring the largest minority, the right.

The National Security Council, on which the military chiefs have a decisive presence, and the Constitutional Court are other institutions that the governing coalition believes must be dismantled or overhauled before full democracy can be achieved.

Lavín, who was legitimised as the leader of the right after the presidential elections, appeared inclined to negotiate constitutional reforms with the ruling coalition, while he steadily distanced himself from Pinochet and from the most hard- line sectors of the right.

But seven months after Lagos’ plea to the right to allow the elimination of authoritarian throwbacks, no progress has been made towards democratisation in Chile.

The right-wing opposition, whose votes in parliament are indispensable for bringing about any change, have proposed negotiations that would condition any reform of the constitution on a “solution” for the Pinochet affair and all human rights cases involving members of the military.

On the eve of the Aug 8 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the removal of Pinochet’s parliamentary immunity, Lagos definitively ruled out the possibility of negotiating constitutional reforms with the right in exchange for a “full stop law” putting an end to the human rights cases once and for all.

The year 2000 has thus seen steady progress made by the courts, marked not only by the prosecution of Pinochet, but also by legal proceedings against six other retired generals in connection with rights abuses like the murder of trade unionist Tucapel Jiménez in 1983 and Operation Albania in 1987.

Each new court decision drew howls of outrage from retired officers, signals of concern from the military commanders, and reiterated calls from right-wing politicians for a “political solution” to the pending human rights cases.

The government and the opposition have thus engaged in a kind of “dialogue of the deaf”, to which, like it or not, the deteriorated figure of the former dictator continues to form the backdrop.