38 Londres Street, page 3
Transported to Miami in handcuffs and weeping, Townley insisted to US prosecutors that the DINA and Contreras were to blame for the crimes committed. Under pressure, Contreras privately admitted his role and threatened to implicate Pinochet, to save himself. I always acted ‘on direct orders from him’, was his line. Pinochet insisted he only gave Contreras general instructions on the mission, not details or the means.
In August 1978, a US Grand Jury indicted Townley, along with Contreras and Espinoza, and five Cuban exiles. The American request that Contreras and Espinoza be extradited to the US created a major crisis in Santiago. As US criminal investigators concluded that Pinochet was involved in the cover-up of Letelier’s killing, if not the crime, the CIA reported that he was ‘deeply troubled’, drinking and aggressive. The CIA worried that the US government was now at risk of becoming entangled.
Fearing a raft of extradition requests, Pinochet and Contreras cut a deal, on the basis of a lie and a quid pro quo: they agreed that Townley was on a frolic of his own, and Contreras would protect Pinochet provided he himself wasn’t extradited to the United States.
Pinochet duly took steps to prevent the Chilean courts from acceding to a US request to extradite Contreras or Espinoza. He ordered the Supreme Court’s President to rule that the two men could not be extradited, which Judge Israel Borquez duly confirmed.
The Borquez ruling was appealed to the full Supreme Court, so Pinochet intervened once more, to toughen up the draft judgement in order to extinguish any risk of extradition. ‘The language was changed to comply with Pinochet’s order,’ the CIA reported. On 1 October 1979 the Supreme Court confirmed Borquez’s ruling, allowing Contreras and Espinoza to be released from detention.
Pinochet had saved himself, learned much about courts and extradition, and the power of Washington, D.C. He opened numerous bank accounts in the United States under various names, into which moneys were deposited, in amounts that could not have come from his modest presidential salary.
Townley now cut a deal of his own with US prosecutors. He pleaded guilty to the killing of Letelier, and agreed to be a witness for the prosecution, against his Cuban helpers. I obtained a first-hand account from Lucy Reed, an American lawyer with whom I sat as an arbitrator in international disputes. ‘I remember the Townley case well,’ Lucy told me, to my surprise, ‘as I was the judge’s law clerk during the case.’ One exchange stood out for her. Do you regret your actions, the prosecutor asked Townley. ‘No sir, Letelier was a soldier and so was I,’ Townley replied, ‘I received an order and carried it out to the best of my ability.’ He said he did regret the death of Ronni Moffitt.
Townley took care not to implicate Pinochet. He said nothing about the DINA’s role in the killings of Carlos Prats and Carmelo Soria, honouring the secret agreement negotiated by Miguel Schweitzer and the Americans. ‘I don’t think the judge was aware of that agreement,’ said Lucy Reed, when I described it to her.
The judge sentenced Townley to ten years in prison. He was paroled after forty months, and on release entered a witness-protection programme in the United States. To this day his identity and location are secret, and the US has consistently refused to extradite him to Chile, to face charges for other crimes.
Pinochet had bought himself ten more years as President. Only after he stepped down in March 1990 did the Chilean courts investigate, prosecute, convict and imprison Contreras and Espinoza, for the murders of Letelier and Moffitt, the Supreme Court having ruled that the Amnesty Law didn’t apply to crimes committed abroad.
As Pinochet prepared to travel to London in October 1998, no senior figure had been convicted by the Chilean courts for the crimes of his regime. His role in the ‘Caravan of Death’ case was being investigated by Judge Guzmán, but the Amnesty Law and parliamentary immunity protected him at home, and the rules of diplomatic immunity applicable to a former head of state would protect him abroad.
That is not to say he wasn’t warned about the risks of foreign travel. There was a growing recognition of the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allowed the courts of any country to prosecute crimes against humanity and genocide wherever – and by whoever – they were committed. On 11 September, shortly before he travelled to London, Chile signed the Statute of the International Criminal Court, recently adopted in Rome.
Pinochet knew too that human rights groups had tried to have him arrested in the past. The efforts failed, but senior Army figures counselled against the trip. Britain has a new Labour government and Prime Minister, Tony Blair, he was told, much less sympathetic than Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives.
Pinochet ignored the advice. He bore no responsibility for any excesses during his years in power, he was protected. He had a clear conscience, the British were a decent lot, and the Letelier affair happened long ago.
‘I am an angel,’ he would say, and truly believed it.
5
Eighty-two years old, on a vague mission to purchase weapons for his country, Pinochet travelled with his wife Lucía. The couple dined with friends in fancy restaurants. ‘I love London!’ he told Thatcher over tea. The couple went shopping – a coat from Burberry’s, a book on Napoleon from Hatchards on Piccadilly – and he prepared for a minor operation on his back.
He found time to give an interview to the New Yorker magazine. Jon Lee Anderson arrived at his hotel with a photographer, for a shoot at the nearby Grosvenor House Hotel, in a room filled with white cupids. Pinochet found the décor to be unsuitable – ‘Too gay!’ Anderson told me – and wanted something more dignified.
‘I was only an aspirante dictator,’ Pinochet joked over tea, while repeatedly banging his fist on the table if a question irritated him. ‘It was the closest that Pinochet ever came to showing me his fear,’ said Anderson.
I want a gesture of reconciliation, Pinochet told him. Meaning? ‘An end to the lawsuits!’ Although protected by his Amnesty Law and immunities, nine criminal lawsuits were pending against him in Chile, a development he did not like. The allegations included charges of genocide and illegal expropriation of property, filed by Gladys Marín, Secretary-General of Chile’s Communist Party (whose husband Jorge Muñoz was disappeared in 1976). Mere talk of such matters agitated Pinochet. ‘An end to the lawsuits!’ He repeated the words, banged once more on the table. More than eight hundred lawsuits, he complained, some closed, others reopened. ‘They always go back to the same thing, the same thing.’
A few days later, Pinochet checked into The London Clinic in Marylebone and the New Yorker published its article, ‘The Dictator’, by Anderson. A photograph portrayed Pinochet as serene, powerful and untouchable, a civilian in a pale-blue tie to match his eyes.
The medical operation went smoothly.
As he recuperated, on the evening of Friday, 16 October, and looked forward to going home, there was a knock on the door. A police officer from Scotland Yard entered room 801, with a lady as an interpreter. Within a few minutes, he understood he had lost his freedom.
Detained in London, said shocked friends.
Arrested for genocide and crimes against humanity, said the newspapers.
6
Two decades passed before I came to know of the events that led to that momentous evening in London. I first heard the details from Juan Garcés, a Spanish lawyer I’d come to know in the context of a case brought by Victor Pey, his Chilean client. Pey’s newspaper El Clarín was closed by Pinochet on the day of the Coup, and he wanted compensation. I wasn’t able to assist Garcés, but it allowed us to meet, in November 2018, at his home in Madrid.
Quiet and scholarly, with a gentle face dominated by a grey, walrus moustache, he has sparkly eyes and a soft and philosophical voice. In September 1973 he was a twenty-nine-year-old Spaniard working as a political adviser to President Allende. On the day of the Coup, as the Moneda Palace was being bombed by British-made Chilean Air Force Hawker Hunter jet fighters, Allende instructed him to leave. ‘Someone has to recount what happened here, and only you can do it.’ Garcés didn’t forget the instruction.
He went to Paris to study for a doctorate in law, returning to Spain only after General Franco died in 1975. Garcés opened a law office in Madrid, handled cases on narco-trafficking and extradition, and in the mid-1990s, Chilean exiles sought him out. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War on hold, the United Nations created international tribunals for crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the first such bodies since Nuremberg (1945–6) and Tokyo (1946–8), and negotiations were underway to create an International Criminal Court.
Ideas about international justice were springing into life and seeping into public consciousness. After fifty years of quietude, genocide and crimes against humanity were back on the agenda, along with related issues of the right of leaders or former leaders to claim immunity from prosecution.
In Spain, as in other countries, ideas were floated. Could Pinochet be indicted before Spanish courts for international crimes, on the basis of universal jurisdiction? This was a matter of honour and justice, not revenge, Garcés believed, a nod towards justice and international cooperation. ‘Victims and their families came to me, to ask about cases.’ They did so because he was President of the Salvador Allende Foundation, which dealt with torture and disappearances in Chile.
Garcés gathered together people’s stories. One was shared by the widow of the United Nations official abducted, tortured and killed in July 1976. His name was Carmelo Soria, and his wife Laura wanted to target Pinochet in the Spanish courts, as there was no justice for him in Chile. Garcés gathered evidence, talked to lawyers, met prosecutors.
When we first met, he mentioned Soria, but the name didn’t resonate. Three years later, in February 2021, a prosecutor in Madrid with whom Garcés had contact wrote to me. His name was Carlos Castresana, and he’d read an interview in El País on the Spanish edition of my book The Ratline. The article mentioned that I was writing on the Pinochet case in London. I can tell you how the case really started, Castresana told me.
7
Carlos Castresana and I first spoke over Zoom in May 2021. He took me back to the spring of 1996, when he worked at Spain’s anti-corruption unit and was a member of the Union of Progressive Prosecutors. Newspapers were writing about the twentieth anniversary of the military dictatorship in Argentina, and two decades was a significant moment in Spain, the time limit under the country’s statute of limitations for bringing a case for crimes committed abroad.
Cases were underway in Argentina, as well as in France, Germany and Italy, Castresana told me. In Spain, however, despite the presence of many Argentine exiles, nothing was happening. ‘I wanted to find a way to act on behalf of Spanish victims, on the basis of universal jurisdiction.’
Castresana returned to the origins of modern international criminal law. ‘I loved the Nuremberg precedent, a victory for justice, done with a sense of fair play, a trial that was also a truth commission,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed very much your book East West Street, how personal, historical and legal issues came together.’ He saw Nuremberg as a form of storytelling, and was curious about how the crimes were defined and the defendants chosen.
He delved into bringing a case, under Spanish laws, old or new. He worked out that Spanish courts could exercise universal jurisdiction over three international crimes committed in Argentina: terrorism, torture and genocide. ‘The idea that the victim is not an individual with a particular nationality, but humanity as a whole, was significant for me.’
Terrorism was introduced as a crime in Spain in the 1970s, with a broad definition. ‘General Franco considered terrorism to be almost anything,’ Castresana said wryly. Curiously, he also introduced the crime of genocide into Spanish law. ‘Franco took care not to ratify the Genocide Convention until 1969, thirty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and introduced it into the criminal code only in 1971.’ Franco’s legislators did not, however, follow the language of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which defined ‘genocide’ as certain acts committed ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Instead, Franco’s version mentioned ‘national ethnic, social or religious’ groups: it omitted racial groups altogether, merged national and ethnic groups into one category, and introduced the notion of social groups.
Unwittingly, Franco’s lawyers introduced another significant change: they left out the last two words of the definition in the 1948 Convention: ‘as such’. The redaction meant that a Spanish prosecutor didn’t have to prove that the act was motivated by a focus on those groups. ‘By removing those two words,’ Castresana realised, ‘you define genocide like crimes against humanity, so you only have to prove that the attacks on certain groups occurred, not that they were motivated by an intention to destroy those groups as such.’ In short, Franco unintentionally made it easier to prosecute genocide – adding ‘social groups’ and removing the ‘as such’ requirement lowered the bar. Ironically, Franco’s legislation opened the door to the prosecution of Pinochet in Spain, for genocide perpetrated in Chile.
Franco’s definition remained in force until 1983, when it was amended to follow the language of the 1948 Convention. This meant that the 1971 definition applied in September 1973, at the time of the Chilean Coup, and for the next ten years.
So the Franco definition covered Pinochet’s crimes in that period?
‘Correct,’ Castresana replied. ‘I was the first to think about using Franco’s law on genocide.’
To reach Pinochet?
‘Absolutely! In a humble way, I hoped to create a legal precedent, without knowing exactly what the consequences would be.’
Castresana gathered evidence on crimes committed in Argentina against Spaniards and others. Working with exiles, in March 1996, he filed a first case before the Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s National Court. ‘It was for international crimes committed in Argentina by General Jorge Videla (who seized power in 1976), against Spanish victims. I knew my colleagues, conservative Spanish magistrates, would be less likely to run a case with no Spanish victims.’
He persuaded Carlos Granados, the Spanish Attorney General, not to object. ‘Most prosecutors were against the initiative, but Granados was decent, a Christian, honest, with a sense of history.’ We must not be remembered as prosecutors who abandoned Spanish victims, Granados told him. Spanish victims were necessary to persuade conservative judges and the press. Without opposition from the top, the Argentine case took off. At the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid, it was assigned to Court No. 5 and the investigating judge Baltasar Garzón, who accepted the complaint.
Castresana now focused on Chile. ‘Around 20 April 1996, I received a visit from the lawyer Juan Garcés. He said to me: “I have waited twenty years for what you have done with Videla and Argentina, please do the same thing with Pinochet.” ’
Castresana enquired about Spanish victims. Garcés proposed several names, including Carmelo Soria, who had worked for the UN’s Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre in Santiago. He disappeared on 14 July 1976, and two days later, his mutilated body was found in a canal, near his car, in the capital. As a diplomat with Spanish nationality, his death caused a stir in Spain.
‘The Soria case was notorious,’ Castresana recalled. ‘He was well-known, with a street in Madrid named after his grandfather, Arturo Soria’ (an engineer who, at the end of the nineteenth century, proposed the idea of ‘La Ciudad Lineal’, the linear city arranged with buildings on either side of a single wide central avenue). Soria’s murder gained broader attention when the European Parliament passed a resolution to deplore Chile’s failure to find the perpetrators. ‘I had a clear idea that the Pinochet case in Spain must be built around Carmelo Soria,’ said Castresana.
He faced two obstacles. First, criminal proceedings in Chile were still pending on the Soria case, so he had to await a final ruling before starting a case in Spain. Second, the limit for bringing a case in Spain under its statute of limitations was 14 July 1996, the twentieth anniversary of the murder. ‘I could only start proceedings in Spain if the Chilean courts closed the case before that date.’
He monitored the proceedings in Chile and prepared a lawsuit. On 4 June 1996, Chile’s Supreme Court ended the Soria case, because of the Amnesty Law. To save himself in Chile, Pinochet unwittingly opened the door to a case in Spain. A month later, Castresana filed the case in Valencia, in relation to Soria and a dozen other victims. He named Pinochet and three other Junta members as defendants.
Simultaneously, the sister of Antonio Llido, a disappeared Spanish priest, filed a complaint, as did the Salvador Allende Foundation, on behalf of more victims. The Valencia court transferred the cases to the Audiencia Nacional, where they were assigned to Judge Manuel García-Castellón, in Court No. 6. ‘In this way, Carmelo Soria’s murder was the starting point for the case against Pinochet,’ said Castresana. ‘At the time we didn’t think about immunity, because we never imagined he would be arrested!’
Much later, I met with Castresana and Garcés. We talked of the legitimacy of Spain addressing crimes in Chile, when it hadn’t addressed its own Civil War crimes, and those of the entire Franco era.
‘I have always been clear that the case against Pinochet in Chile was about exorcising the ghost of Franco in Spain,’ said Castresana.
‘We wanted to do to Pinochet what we weren’t able to do to Franco,’ said Garcés.
