Man who made people vanish

Chile's General Augusto Pinochet, who made people vanish, added a word to the dictionary of horror. Los desaparecidos -- the disappeared ...

Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet, who made people vanish, added a word to the dictionary of horror. Los desaparecidos — the disappeared — still haunt his surviving victims. Twenty-five years on, Luis Munos says: “There are times I can’t walk, my stomach is falling apart, there is terrible pain in my testicles, I can’t sleep. It’s with you every day, it’s for life. I’m carrying the dead bodies of loved ones on my back. Too many. Too many.”

Munos was tortured. His wife vanished. His story was one of many: there were about 3,000 murders after that day in 1973 when Pinochet with brutal force brought to an end the democratically elected Salvator Allende’s chaotic three-year dash to socialism. Two thousand victims have never been found.

The world watched it start on television. British-made Hawker Hunters bombed the presidential palace. Inside Allende died. It was said he took his own life; others believe he was murdered. Thousands were herded at gunpoint into the National Stadium in Santiago and detainedfor weeks. Hooded informers identified “subversives”. In cubicles people were tortured and murdered.

Firing squads executed hundreds. The musician Victor Jara was one victim, shot to death, his hands broken. Others were buried in mine shafts, in unmarked graves, in places still to be found.

Munos has every reason to hate the Latin American despot who became the darling of the economic Right. The military came for his wife, 24-year-old journalist Diana Aron in November 1974, acting on orders from the top. She ran and they shot her in the back. He was arrested a month later and taken to the Villa Grimaldi, one of the grimmest places in Pinochet’s gulag. “They gave me three months in that place where I saw horrible things and they did horrible things to me. “They took people’s nails out, burned people with cigarettes, asphyxiated people with plastic bags, tortured people with electric shocks in front of their children.

He adds: “I haven’t been able to sleep since Pinochet arrived in this country. Thethought of him being here, getting away with everything. It was torture. And now this, after 25 years, they’ve arrested him. At last he is not able to move freely where he wants to. Jesus, that’s something.”

Pinochet’s influence did not stop at the Chilean border. Exiles were tracked down to foreign capitals an assassinated. His feared secret police, the DINA, struck in Washington on September 1976 when Orlando Letelier, former Chilean chancellor under President Allende, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a US citizen, were killed by a bomb planted in their car.

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FBI agents tracked the murders to the DINA. A 1978 Washington Grand Jury indicted the DINA hitmen, and two FBI agents who worked on the case have declared they believe Pinochet was responsible for the murders. Law enforcement agencies in Italy and Argentina are also investigating Pinochet. But it is the personal testimony of surviving victims that offers some insight to the horror his name inspires.

Santiago Lopez was a student fired by dreams ofrevolution, a teacher’s son just 23 years old, working as a regional union organiser.

On average, they tortured him three times a days for about 40 days. He cannot be exact because he lost track of time. Santiago not his real name, he is still afraid of Pinochet’s people now lives in Sheffield, where the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture has helped him get treatment for soft-tissue damage, possible spinal injury and other lasting gifts from the Pinochet regime.

Ricardo Figueroa, now 68, was luckier. The soldiers were just getting started on him when a Red Cross commission arrived at Chillan Prison. He was released after three years because his wife was English. Figueroa said he had been “really offended” by the unwillingness to call Pinochet to account. He said: “This is really positive news. It has raised my hopes of seeing justice done.”

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A spokesman for Amnesty International said: “We are very pleased that the authorities in the UK have made this step. It’s an important move towardsbringing Pinochet to justice. The evidence that Pinochet was aware of the disappearances, tortures and the killings is very strong.”

Helen Bamber, director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, told The Observer: “It’s a powerful message to all leaders who abuse human rights that they cannot expect to get away with cruelty.”

Jon Lee Anderson, who interviewed Pinochet for the New Yorker, found him utterly unafraid of arrest or retribution. “He was staying in one of the modern five-star hotels on Park Lane he hadn’t called his friends; even his tea with Margaret Thatcher had been scratched. “Pinochet was in a good mood, and after we talked for a while he set off to Madame Tussaud’s for the umpteenth time; the British National Army Museum; and then to lunch at Fortnum & Mason.”

Pinochet is one tourist who may regret his trip to London.