Critic's Grade: A-

"Pinochet's Last Stand" is a made- for -TV dramatization of the 1998 legal process in England against the Chilean Dictator.
The first legal process against Pinochet was in 1976 and had my name in it.That is because it was prepared by famed ACLU attorney Herb Semmel with whom I had collaborated at the University of Illinois many years before he heard of the Orlando Letelier assasination.In addition to charging Pinochet with assasination he was charged with violating the civil rights of Fred Landis.
The idea for the 1998 legal case came from Amnesty International in London.They convinced Spanish prosecutor Juan Garces to issue an arrest and extradition warrant for crimes against Spanish citizens under the Chilean Dictatorship.
The idea was to establish a precedent for going after war criminals anywhere in the world.The movie shows a very divided Cabinet Minister,Jack Straw,who finally approves prosecuting Pinochet.
The movie was released September 11,which is about Twin Towers for Americans but the date of Pinochet's Military Coup (September 11,1973) for Chileans.
The focus was on The Missing,the kidnapping of civilians in CHile many years after the coup.
Before this BBC program,what Americans knew about the subject was largely from the movie Missing by Costa Garvas,starring Jack Lemmon and Cissy Spacek.Missing was about 2 American college students who went missing in Pinochet's Chile.
I was watching 2 movie critics on TV discussing Missing,one said it was his favorite movie,the other responded you had to be very careful because there was a lot of disinformation circulating about Chile.
Certainly a great deal of disinformation has circulated about THE Missing in the US.First there was the Missing In Action hoax,about how thousands of American MIA's were being held by the Communists in Vietnam.
Next this morphed into the Missing Children story which, in the form that alleges that 450,000 US children are missing ,is another hoax.
In Chile there were 5000 missing,in Argentina 20,000 missing,and those were real people who really were kidnapped in a planned covert manner by right-wing death squads controlled by the military.

Pinochet's defense attorney in the UK was Michael Caplan,who has just also become the attorney for the parents of Missing Madeleine McCann!

Michael Caplan is an expert on extradition,and he cleverly shifted the emphasis from Pinochet's guilt to a national conflict between England and Chile over who had the right to try him.No doubt this will be the strategy of Michael Caplan in the Madeleine McCann case,to shift attention from what happened to the Missing child to a conflict between England and Portugal over jurisdiction.
In Pinochet's Last Stand a representative of the Chilean Communist Party is against the use of crosses to symbolize Chilean Missing.Being an atheist he wants no part of crosses.This brings up the question of how much pettyness and vengeance was involved in this case.Once you go after some ailing 80 year old,for events 30 years ago,you are getting into the same murky waters as Nazi hunters and prosecutions of KKK members for civil rights violations in the 1950's.
This issue of petty vengeance reached an extreme in both England and Chile when the left openly expressed disbelief at Pinochet's genuinely deteriorating medical condition.That is cowardice pure and simple.
In a sense Pinochet did get away with bloody murder,but it is not true that he did not face prosecution in Chile on his return.From October 16,1998 to his death in 2006,Pinochet was never a free man.
THe conditions of Pinochet's house arrest in the UK are recreated in detail.He rented a house in a middle class suburb not for its alleged luxury but because it met the security requirements of his arrest.Following the British mania for closed circuit surveillance cameras,they were installed all over the house,inside and outside.
One day the police monitoring the cameras are shocked by the unnanouced arrival of Lady Margaret Thatcher.Thatcher has a press conference in which she calls Pinochet the hero of the Falklands,a very clever way of dividing the Chilean and Argentine left,and gaining British support.
In the movie Missing,Jack Lemmon has a meeting at the US Embassy in Chile in which he is introduced to a British/Australian jounalist claiming to have secret knowledge of his son's whereabouts.This journalist was Robert Moss,who worked as a speech writer for Margaret Thatcher and wrote a book supporting Pinochet,identified by the NYTimes as CIA financed.

Pinochet and his accomplices faced 2 criminal cases,the 1998 case in London and the Riggs Bank affair-which on October 4,2007 led to the incarceration of Pinochet's family-neither of which was initiated by the Chilean government.
The Riggs case was uncovered by the US Government as a case of money laundering-23 million dollars worth.The London case was pushed by a Spanish judge.
On balance,the Chilean government has opted for national reconciliation rather than revenge-except in those specific cases of such international notoriety as was impossible to ignore.

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