The Condor Years by John Dinges Read Free Book Online

governments gave way finally to constitutional rule, the new political leaders—despite their democratic impulses—chose not to prosecute the crimes of the past. Protection of those who had committed unspeakable crimes was the price of peace with a still powerful military. Impunity, sanctioned by the democratic governments, was the rule in Chile and the other Condor countries.
    As a sideline to his successful commercial law practice in Madrid, Garcés became one of the respected pioneers in the emerging field of human rights law. One day in the spring of 1996, on the one-hour flight from Barcelona to Madrid after a business trip, Garcés read a short newspaper article that would again return Chile—and the pursuit of Pinochet—to the center of his life. A criminal court in Madrid had begun the prosecution of former members of Argentina’s military junta for alleged human rights crimes committed in Argentina two decades before.
    “As you can imagine, in a matter of seconds I made the extrapolation,” Garcés said. When he landed in Madrid, Garcés made inquiries about the case. It had begun with a hypothetical question discussed by a group of public prosecutors: If Argentina was not able to prosecute its generals for human rights crimes, would Spain have jurisdiction? The prosecutors concluded that Spanish law, combined with international law precedents going back to the Nazi trials at Nuremberg, allowed such charges to be brought in Spain as long as the crimes involved could be considered crimes against humanity.
    The prosecutors resolved to test the theory by bringing a case to court, acting not in their official capacity as prosecutors but in a private capacity allowedunder Spanish law. On March 28—within days of the twentieth anniversary of the coup that brought the Argentine military to power in 1976—the association’s secretary general, Carlos Castresana, drafted and filed a formal accusation ( denuncia ) charging the members of the Argentine junta with genocide and terrorism against ten victims of Spanish nationality. The case had been assigned to a special court in Madrid, called the Audiencia Nacional , and to investigating Judge Baltasar Garzón. Garzón had earned a reputation as a press-savvy, crusading judge for his relentless prosecutions of drug traffickers and of police abuses against the Basque separatists, ETA, a group that frequently used terrorist tactics.
    Garcés went to talk to Castresana. “Look, I told him, you have the same juridical foundation to bring a case for the same kind of crimes in the country next door,” he said. Castresana was interested. He considered Pinochet to be in the same category as the Argentine generals. Garcés offered to provide the factual material for a parallel case against Pinochet. He had the recently published report of Chile’s National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, known as the Rettig Report, which contained the country’s most complete human rights investigation, conducted in the first year after Chile’s return to democracy in 1990.
    Using the information from the report, the prosecutors’ association—this time represented by association President Miguel Miravet—presented a second formal accusation, on July 4, naming Pinochet and the other members of the Chilean military junta as the presumed authors of crimes against humanity in Chile, including torture, kidnapping, and disappearances. Seven victims were named, all Spanish citizens.
    In a separate, meticulously detailed filing on his own behalf, Garcés linked the Argentina and Chile cases in a way that was later to prove crucial. He charged that the leaders of Chile and Argentina had committed human rights crimes together, as participants in a criminal conspiracy. Little was known in 1996 about that alleged conspiracy, except its name, Operation Condor.
    He wrote:
    The persons cited in the current case [against Pinochet et al.] conspired with those of equal rank in the Military Junta