It is quite accidental that, at this moment, General Augusto Pinochet happens to be in a private clinic in London, convalescing from a minor back surgery. It's always been like that. At the end of the day, after a busy schedule in supervising jackboots, death squads, prisons and genocide, you would actually like to retire into villa, wine and fireplace - and playing solitaire in the afternoon. But destiny can be as ridiculous as a malfunctioning cell, or, as in Pinochet's case, a herniated disc. He had come to London because London was thought to be a friendly place. After all, Chile has been a British ally since the Falklands war. Then that warrant from the Spanish judge. But the high court ruled that Pinochet, still a Senator for life, could not be extradited, that he enjoyed diplomatic immunity. Now the House of Lords has ruled that Pinochet enjoys no immunity from prosecution. Does it mean a trial in Madrid? Bad news. Wife Lucia Hiriart cannot even tell him the truth: ``If Augusto knew the truth, hewould have an attack of rage and die''. Augusto Pinochet dying in rage? Augusto Pinochet dying under the weight of truth?Well, dictators don't die in rage. Nor for that matter in truth. Especially in Latin America, where the curse of Simon Bolivar is still raging. When the Liberator, with his unrealised dream of continental unification, took his last journey, he was a shrunken, abandoned dictator, much smaller than his historical size. In a prophetic passage in Garcia Marquez' The General in His Labyrinth, the Liberator, from his deathbed, envisions a chaotic future for Latin America dominated by worst rulers. That way, Pinochet is a stereotype. He came to power in 1973, overthrowing the socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens in a bloody coup. For 17 years, he ruled Chile with the iron first of an abundantly medalled dictator. Some 3,000 people just `vanished'. Today some of them exist on the placards held aloft by the victims' relatives. Before he became a wanted man for ``crimes of genocide andterrorism that include murder'', Pinochet was that familiar rightist strongman in uniform, paranoid about communists, and approved by the US for that reason. Today, a Pinochet trial in Chile is almost impossible; the `icon' has a large right-wing constituency. Also, when it comes to dealing with the demons of the past, Latin America plays safe. Some nominal punishment apart, amnesty is the option favoured by the elected leadership. There are no truth commissions in Latin America. And those who remember want the truth to be known. They want Pinochet to be punished.Punished after a show trial? At 83, is he worth it? Since hand-over-the-killer has become such a familiar cry in a world where justice is subordinated to the politics of ethnicity and self-determination, Pinochet can at best serve as an example. For, people like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are still out there. And a day will come when Saddam Hussain will have no bunker to hide. In a century dominated by the art of the dictator, thepossibility of a Pinochet trial signifies not the final triumph of truth but the search for justice, the revenge of memory.
