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Pinochet goes before judge

After the failure of his lawyers to stave off questioning by an investigative judge, General Augusto Pinochet, Chile's dictator from 1973 to 1990, was officially interrogated on Saturday about his involvement in an effort by six South American military governments to hunt down and kill exiled political opponents in the 1970s.

The judge, Juan Guzman Tapia, was able to ask Pinochet only six of the 14 questions he had prepared before the general, 88 and ailing, grew tired and the session was cut short. But the information he obtained is seen as increasing the likelihood that Pinochet, whom the Chilean Supreme Court stripped of his immunity from prosecution in the case in August, will once again be indicted for human rights violations under his rule.

"I am quite satisfied," Guzman told reporters in Santiago, the Chilean capital. "General Pinochet's declaration lasted 20 or 30 minutes. I found him to be quite tired. He answered all of my questions directly. I would say that it was an encounter between gentlemen."

Both the questions put to Pinochet, who seized power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a US-supported coup, and his responses are supposed to be kept secret. But accounts published in the Chilean press said that when he was asked about the deaths of 19 Chileans in what was called Operation Condor, he responded that he had no knowledge of such "small stuff" because he was too busy running the country.

Operation Condor was conceived in Santiago in November 1975 at a meeting of state security and secret police chiefs of South American countries, with a second meeting there in June 1976 authorizing assassination missions. Besides Chile, the driving force behind the effort, the right-wing military governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay also took part.

The account attributed to Pinochet would contradict that of General Manuel Contreras, chief of the Chilean secret police, known by the Spanish acronym DINA, during the worst years of the dictatorship. Contreras says he reported daily to Pinochet about his agency's activities, a version of events that coincides with statements in US intelligence documents that have recently been declassified.

"Pinochet would meet Contreras every morning and drive to work with him and be briefed on what DINA was doing," said Peter Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet File and a researcher at the US National Security Archive. "All the contemporary US intelligence reports are clear and repetitive in saying that Pinochet was directly involved in and exercised clear authority over Chilean secret police operations."
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