Chile's 'never again' general charged in 'Caravan of Death' killings.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
A former Army chief who played a leading role in Chile's post-dictatorship political transition is now being called to answer for his actions decades earlier, at the outset of the brutal military regime led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
Juan Emilio Cheyre, a retired general, turned himself over to authorities on July 7 after a judge in Santiago, Chile's capital, charged him with complicity in the 1973 murders of 15 political prisoners. The victims were among the thousands of people rounded up during and after the coup because of their suspected sympathies for the deposed president, Salvador Allende (1970-1973), who died during the military uprising. Cheyre, 69, spent five days in a military detention facility outside of Santiago before being released on bail (of less than US$500) pending further proceedings in the case, one of several linked to the infamous "Caravan of Death."
The Caravan of Death was an elite military unit that, in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 1973, putsch--and on direct orders from Pinochet--traveled by helicopter between various military outposts, selecting specific prisoners at each stop for summary execution. Rights groups believe the death squad ordered or directly killed nearly 100 people. The unit's leader, Gen. Sergio Arellano Stark, died earlier this year. He was 94. Overall, the Pinochet regime is believed to have killed and/or disappeared at least 3,000 people. Thousands more were arbitrarily detained and tortured.
One of the Caravan of Death's murderous stops was at an Army base in the northern city of La Serena, where Cheyre, then a 25-year-old lieutenant, was stationed. The visit took place on Oct. 16, 1973, and left 15 people dead. Though only a junior officer at the time, Cheyre was presumably aware of the killings as they occurred and thus bears legal responsibility, Mario Carroza, the investigative judge in charge of this and a number of other high-profile dictatorship-era cases, concluded. "The essential element is his knowledge of what took place during the three hours that the convoy (Caravan of Death) was in La Serena," Carroza told reporters.
The judge implicated a handful of other former military men in the case as well, including Ariosto Lapostol, the base commander at the time. for now, though, all the attention is on Cheyre, whose notoriety in Chile has less to do with his record during the dictatorship than it does with the star turn he took as a forward-looking "peacemaker" during the presidency of Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006), Chile's third-post Pinochet leader. Lagos's...
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