38 LONDRES STREET: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia, by Philippe Sands
On March 3, 2000, after an airplane carrying Gen. Augusto Pinochet landed in Santiago, Chile, his entourage pushed him in a wheelchair onto a mechanical lift as he smiled at the jubilant scene before him. Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, had been detained in Britain while his lawyers fought attempts to extradite him to Spain, where a judge had issued an international arrest warrant for human rights violations committed by his regime.
After nearly 17 months, the British government eventually abandoned extradition proceedings; the 84-year-old Pinochet, who had been staying under house arrest just outside London, was deemed too ill to face charges in Spain. Yet upon his return to Chile, the old general appeared to be in robust health, standing up once his wheelchair touched the tarmac to give a military colleague a hearty embrace. Still beaming, Pinochet then walked toward the cheering crowd as a brass band played a German marching song.
Years later, a woman whose husband was disappeared in 1974 remembered a broadcast of the moment as if it showed someone literally getting away with murder: “I felt consternation and rage, and a deep sense of impunity.”
Impunity is the central theme of “38 Londres Street,” a marvelous and absorbing new book by the British-French lawyer and author Philippe Sands. In 1973, Pinochet and the Chilean military overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende and proceeded to crush opposition and dissent, unleashing state-sanctioned sadism as a means of both retribution and deterrence.
The title of Sands’s book is the address that used to serve as headquarters for the Socialist Party in Santiago, before it became one of the military dictatorship’s centers for torture and disappearance. Sands calls the proceedings against Pinochet “the most significant criminal case since Nuremberg.” Never before had a former head of state been arrested in another country for international crimes.
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The post How to Get Away With Crimes Against Humanity appeared first on New York Times.
