Pinochet’s difficulties came not from his ostensible crimes, but from something far worse:
He favored capitalism and proved that it worked. He will never be forgiven.
Gordon Tullock did not consider Pinochet — or Milosevic — nice, but did not believe that their crimes fully explained their “legal” difficulties:
Pinochet, although not the beau ideal of the Chilean people, was not particularly unpopular during his reign. I was in Chile for a few days and saw him drive by. I presume his car was armored, but he had only motorcyclists as an escort. I was in Jerusalem when Clinton visited it and saw him also drive by. His security precautions were a high multiple of those of Pinochet. Pinochet did not find it necessary to close off the street in front of his house. He finally put his continuance in office up to a vote, and although he lost, he didn’t do badly. His policies are not only being adopted in Europe by nominally socialistic, governments, but his successors in Chile have mainly continued them.
Now all of this does not indicate that the specific charges against him are false, indeed I think they are mainly true. But I also think that these charges have little to do with his legal difficulties. In my opinion, it is his general image as a rightist that causes the trouble. No person on the left has been similarly been charged even though many of them have committed similar acts. To take but one example, Castro was in Spain when the Spanish magistrate tried to extradite Pinochet. The Chilean government promptly requested the extradition of Castro on exactly the same charges. The newspapers reported this at the time, but it was quickly forgotten. Since Castro makes Pinochet look like a piker, this would at first seem surprising. But Castro has what may be the most socialistic (and unsuccessful) government in the world. His immunity is not surprising if the actual gravamen of the charge is not killing or torturing, but successful capitalizing.
The newspapers sometimes publish lists of potential defendants in these trials. Interestingly, none of them (except Pol Pot to be discussed below) are on the left. Wulfe in Germany is a particularly interesting case. He was in change of the East German equivalent of the Gestapo. The deal entered into by Kohl to get the Russians to leave not only involved a large sum of money to build officers quarters for the Officers who left, it also provided that no one could be convicted on the basis of activity which was legal at the time.
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In the various areas that are now considered east Europe, the situation is similar. Former members of the Communist apparatus are not prosecuted. Indeed many of them have been elected to positions of power in such places as Poland and Serbia. The United States and its allies who prohibited similar developments in Germany and Japan after the war, made no attempt to keep politicians in their more recent enemy regimes from high positions in the successors. The mere fact that a man was involved in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or pushing the boat people out to sea off Vietnam is not regarded with anywhere near the revulsion given a simple guard in a German Concentration Camp.
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Milosevic is another victim of the same phenomenon. He was in fact an elected official, but in a government which is now perceived as rightist. He is far from a nice man, but he did permit an opposition to exist and hold demonstrations. They had newspapers that did face difficulties, but still existed. It is possible to argue that Serbia was as democratic as Chicago.
Milosevic did not start the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, although he participated. He and some of his officials are the only ones threatened with criminal prosecution for it. Interestingly Holbrook in his book “To End A War” mentions his effort to get the Croats to advance into territory inhabited by Serbs in full knowledge that they would carry out ethnic cleansing without the slightest signs of feeling guilty. Nor has he been criticized for it.
Returning to South America, a minor but significant case of the violation of amnesties for rightist occurred in Argentina. During the dirty war both sides committed fairly numerous crimes. It was ended by a treaty in which the military were given an amnesty for their fairly numerous killings. For reasons that have always rather puzzled me, they did not announce the names of people they killed, and hence the term “disappearances”. In some cases these people had children, and the military arranged for them to be adopted. At the present day this set of acts which, given what had happened to their parents, seems more or less virtuous, is being called kidnapping and the amnesty did not specifically cover kidnapping. As a result a number of officers who would have been quite safe if they had simply killed the children are in danger of imprisonment.
A provocative piece.
This reminds me of the Alexander Boot column “They still sputter venom at Franco.” Since the Spanish Republic was a cause of the Left, Franco is an ogre. Perhaps he was. But if you view Franco as the man who saved Spain from becoming a Soviet-guided communist satellite, you have a different view.
Pinochet was never vilified for his actual crimes, but for his lack of them. Had he actually been the mass murdering ogre the left claimed they never would have troubled him because his vileness would have been self evident. But because he was not the mass killer (his total victims amount to around 3000) they claimed, because he did not loot or misgovern his country, because he had the temerity to be right wing and unambiguously successful, his vileness needed to be proclaimed as loudly and frequently as possible, lest the flock loose faith.