BY TONY HUNT
LONDON - Various liberal and social democratic forces
continued to press British imperialists to extradite former
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain at the same time
London was poised for a military assault on Iraq. Riding
roughshod over the sovereignty of Chile - a nation oppressed by
imperialism - British police arrested Pinochet October 16 at a
London hospital on a warrant issued by a Spanish judge.
Adopting the guise of arbiter of civilized values and "human rights," the British High Court decided October 28 to overturn Pinochet's arrest and block his extradition on the grounds that his acts as a former head of state were subject to "sovereign immunity."
Pinochet came to power in Chile in a bloody September 1973 military coup, backed by the Washington, aimed at stemming the rising tide of struggle by workers and peasants. The reformist government of President Salvador Allende and its backers in the Stalinist Communist Party had refused to arm working people to defend themselves against the military takeover. In the wake of the coup, thousands of union fighters and others were murdered, tortured or exiled.
On October 28 the British Attorney General also turned down an application to put Pinochet on trial in Britain. The ex- dictator remains in custody pending the outcome of an appeal to the highest appeal court based at the House of Lords. This was heard November 5-12, but no decision has yet been announced. Other imperialist governments have taken the opportunity to pose as defenders of human rights, with arrest warrants for Pinochet being issued in France and Switzerland. In Germany, Chilean exiles filed complaints against the ex-dictator.
The October 28 High Court decision was condemned by Amnesty International, the New York-based Human Rights Watch International, the American Association of Jurists, and the International Commission of Jurists. The Labour chair of the Parliament foreign affairs committee said the court's decision would undermine efforts to arrest Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and "other dictators." Another left MP Jeremy Corbyn repeated his call for the British government to extradite Pinochet after a vigil backing this demand held November 12. Corbyn was speaking hours before British warplanes prepared to participate in a massive U.S.-led bombardment of Iraq, which was subsequently put on hold. Isabel Allende, a member of the Socialist Party (SP) in Chile, and the daughter of former president Salvador Allende, who died in the 1973 coup, traveled to Britain early November with other SP members to campaign for Pinochet's extradition.
Pinochet's arrest has sparked renewed activity by the right wing in Chile, who wrap themselves in the banner of defending the nation's sovereignty. A rally of 45,000 rightists took place October 24 in Santiago. According to news reports in Chile, former members of secret police forces, dissolved in 1997, began regrouping in the wake of Pinochet's arrest. Socialist Party and Party for Democracy deputies in the Chilean parliament reportedly received death threats, as did leaders of the Communist Party.
Right-wing mayors launched an ultranationalist campaign. One, Christian Labbe, declared a "municipal war" against the British and Spanish diplomatic offices in the municipality of La Providencia. Labbe called on Chileans to fly the Chilean flag "until Pinochet is liberated." On November 10 Chilean president Eduardo Frei convened the National Security Council, after repeated calls by right-wing politicians. Half of the members of the National Security Council are army or police officers.
Right-wing politicians and commentators in Britain and the United States also opposed Pinochet's detention. Former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher praised Pinochet's assistance to British imperialism during the 1982 Malivinas war against Argentina in a October 22 letter to The Times.
In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal October 30, entitled "Chile's Pinochet Fought Marxist Violence," James Whelan defended the murders carried out by the dictatorship. Whelan also took the opportunity to slander the Cuban revolution. Cuban leader Fidel Castro had made a state visit to Chile in 1971 at the invitation of Allende.
Interviewed by journalists in Spain October 20, Fidel Castro said it would only be "morally right" to arrest Pinochet if the "godfathers and instructors of the tens of thousands of agents of repression who received courses in repression, in the United States" were also brought to justice; "let him be arrested in London; but let all the guilty parties be arrested as well," Castro said. The leader of the revolutionary government went on to point to Washington's involvement in the deaths or "disappearance" of tens of thousands in Latin and Central America and the "dirty war they organized against us from the very first moments of the Revolution."