Legal Tide May Be Turning Against Chile's Pinochet

SANTIAGO, Chile - Damaging testimony from a former secret police agent and new reports that Augusto Pinochet's health is not as bad as his lawyers claimed mean the Chilean ex-dictator could be about to face trial on human rights charges, rights lawyers and experts say.

Pinochet has been under house arrest since last week, charged with responsibility in the disappearances of six leftists presumed dead since 1974, and with tax fraud related to an estimated $27 million he hid in foreign accounts.

Chilean courts have convicted dozens of military officers and former secret police officials for rights abuses during the 1973-1990 military regime.

But cases against Pinochet, 90, have always been thrown out when his defense team argued that his mild dementia made him too ill to face a criminal process.

"I am under the impression that today more progress can be made (against him) than before, mostly because it is more certain that Pinochet was never crazy, but fooled the courts," said Hugo Gutierrez, a human rights lawyer working on cases against Pinochet.

Doctors on a court-appointed medical panel that examined Pinochet in the new cases against him found he was exaggerating his symptoms and that he was fit to undergo trial.

Pinochet ruled the country from 1973 to 1990, a period when over 3,000 people died in political violence and tens of thousands more were tortured or exiled.

While Pinochet is appealing the two recent indictments against him, another case is building against him.

Immunity Under Attack

Rights lawyers on Wednesday argued before the Santiago Appeals Court that he should lose his immunity from prosecution in the torture of 23 political prisoners and the disappearance of 36 others in the 1970s from a house at the edge of Santiago called Villa Grimaldi that served as headquarters of the DINA secret police.

The issue of Pinochet's immunity, a privilege of former presidents, must be decided on a case-by-case basis.

"We are optimistic ... that it is now clear Pinochet was the DINA chief and that in the case of Villa Grimaldi there are multiple testimonials and confessions of systematic torture," said human rights lawyer Hector Salazar.

Unlike in other rights cases, where prosecutors tried to prove Pinochet's involvement through the chain of command, in the new case there is a witness who can tie Pinochet to torture at Villa Grimaldi.

A former secret police agent has testified that he was with Pinochet when he visited a communist leader at an army base after he was tortured at Villa Grimaldi. The communist leader, Victor Diaz, was later executed without trial and his body has never been found.

"Now the judges can build a case not just on logic about the chain of command but also on testimonial evidence," said Sebastian Brett, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Chile.

The DINA was created two months after the coup that brought Pinochet to power on Sept. 11, 1973 and consisted of 1,000 security personnel who also developed chemical and biological weapons.

Former DINA chief Manuel Contreras, who is in prison for human rights crimes, has testified that Pinochet directed the DINA.

Contreras' testimony is key in the case that Pinochet is currently under indictment for, called Operation Colombo, in which 119 members of the Revolutionary Leftist Movement were killed in 1975.

Pinochet is accused of responsibility in the disappearances of six of the 119 and in the cover-up, which involved planting false press reports saying the armed rebels killed each other.

Additional reporting by Fiona Ortiz