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."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing