The Increasing Historical Importance of the Pinochet Arrest of 1998

I think this article really does a great job in showing how increasingly important the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet is becoming, not just in Chile (where, just this week, his wife and children had arrests issued for their roles in laundering money Pinochet embezzled during his 17-year dictatorship, a great sign that, despite his death, justice seems to be marching on), but around the hemisphere and the world. The article points to Chile's extradition of Alberto Fujimori to Peru last month as a possible watershed in bringing (self-) exiled dictators and human rights abusers to trial, but I think we can really look at the decision in London as the watershed moment here. That decision at the time was huge, simply because somebody was finally saying to Pinochet, "You're no longer immune", and while he never faced trial for the crimes in Spain, he did continuously fight a losing battle in the Chilean courts for 9 years. Of course, the Chilean justice system, the human rights organizations that kept the cases going, and the families who lost loved ones are responsible for that battle as much as anything, but without the catalyst of the decision in London, it's unclear all of that would have happened.

Why does all this matter? The article makes that pretty clear - since Pinochet, human rights violators have been increasingly susceptible to charges of the crimes they committed as leaders of countries. There is no more easy, peaceful, quiet exile for these men. Fujimori is the most recent example of this, and Milosevic was perhaps more notorious in the West, but it doesn't end with these two men. Jorge Videla remains under house arrest in Argentina; other Argentine military men are increasingly scrutinized and even prosecuted for their role in Argentina's dirty war; even in Colombia, Álvaro Uribe has had to answer tough questions as cabinet members around him fall for their ties to the paramilitaries.

I think there are really two factors that explain this change since the late-1990s. First, there is the recent shift in international law and policy that the article mentions, in which international courts no longer are impotent to let mass-murderers and dictators go free. Secondly, and just as important to my view, there is the increasingly mobilized, interconnected, and fearless human rights movement. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and hundreds of other international, national, and local groups, have been able to push their quest for justice in the last 10 years, aided in no small part by the technological revolution of the internet, where they can communicate between groups via e-mail and get their message out easily to a broad audience via webpages, thus keeping somebody in Australia up to date with what is going on in Peru, or somebody in the U.S. updated on the current crises in Africa.

While all of this is good news, there is still a long way to go. Unfortunately, our notions of "human-rights violations", particularly in the United States and in Western Europe, are still too strongly framed in the imperialist worldview in which only the so-called "third-world" countries and leaders who (if not openly hostile to one's nation-state) are on less-than-friendly terms can be guilty of such crimes. Our own leaders who openly support repressive regimes or who ignore the inhumane conditions in our own countries are not and (to many eyes) cannot be guilty of crimes against their people. We still operate under the notion (defined by the U.S. and Europe in the wake of World War II) that, to be guilty of such crimes, you have to wage a campaign of "mass murder", again with the dominant hegemons defining "mass" in such a way to exclude them from inclusion of these crimes. Thus, while we can condemn Jorge Videla, Henry Kissinger, who not only openly supported Videla but, in papers released last year, explicitly told the Argentine junta in 1976 that they could do whatever they wanted carte blanche and the U.S. would support it, is still making tens of thousands of dollars offering his "wisdom" on the lecture circuit. As the article says, "some atrocities against civilians offended not just the laws of a country, but also international standards of human rights."

The emphasis here should fall on some. Until we redefine our notion of crimes against "human rights" to include actions that our own governments, past, present, and future, have perpetrated, the quest for justice in international human rights will be one-sided, punishing only those of the "developing" world, while leaders of the "developed" world will remain able to act in any way they wish with no worries of paying the consequences someday, relying on their impugnity for their actions.