Augusto Pinochet

By a 9-8 vote, the court said Pinochet should be stripped of the legal protections he enjoyed as a former president. The ruling came in a case involving 19 dissidents who were slain in the 1970s and '80s as part of "Operation Condor," a top-secret program among dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay that coordinated repression of political opposition across South America, and spirited bodies to foreign countries.

The ruling was the latest in a long legal saga played out in courtrooms from Santiago to London, where Pinochet spent 16 months under house arrest beginning in October 1998 as part of a failed attempt to have him extradited to Spain to face human rights charges.

In all, more than 3,000 people died in kidnappings and extrajudicial executions during Pinochet's rule, which ended in 1990.

The Japan Times Weekly: Sept. 4, 2004
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