Marc Cooper

The fiery death of Allende’s revolution three years after his election turned out to be much more than a temporary setback in what we thought was the great unstoppable forward sweep of history. Then came the massacres in Cambodia and East Timor, the dirty wars in Argentina and Guatemala, CIA Central American murder manuals, the rise of Thatcherism in Europe, the Reagan regime here at home.

For all these reasons, and more, that September 1973 morning of Pinochet’s coup is hard-wired into my memory. I can still feel the fledgling sun, the fresh chill in the air, even smell the thickly sweet scent of newborn jacaranda in that Santiago spring. But what has lingered most indelibly were Allende’s last words.

Since daybreak, Pinochet’s troops had been shooting their way into power — occupying shanty towns, universities and government buildings. He choked the capital with a ring of steel and armor. The coastal cities squirmed under naval infantry occupation while U.S. gunboats smiled on from just offshore.

Learning of the coup under way, I turned the big tuning wheel of a friend’s Grundig radio and heard a wall of military marches. Then came two Orwellian communiquis from Pinochet’s junta: Allende must surrender or face bombardment. And the same punishment for any radio station not linking up with the military broadcast network.

Rolling the Grundig dial another quarter-turn I found the last electronic holdout. The left-wing Radio Magallanes was still defiantly on the air. Via a primitive telephone link-up from inside the Moneda Palace, President Allende addressed the nation. Knowing he was doomed, Allende’s metallic voice assured us that one day there would be a “moral sanction” for the “treachery and felony” being imposed that morning. Within an hour, two Hawker Hunter jets dive-bombed and strafed the Moneda. Soon, Allende — along with 100 years of Chilean democracy — was dead.

Allende had warned of the encroaching darkness in that farewell speech. But the full horror imposed by Augusto Pinochet and his collaborators could never have been completely anticipated.

I was lucky. Given refuge in a diplomat’s house, and with help from the Mexican Embassy and the United Nations, I escaped alive. But many of my friends didn’t. Some were herded into the National Stadium, tortured and murdered. Others were “disappeared” by Pinochet’s men. I gasped when, a decade later in a Beverly Hills movie house, viewing the Costa-Gavras film “Missing,” I saw two of these friends — Americans Charlie Horman and Frank Teruggi — materialize on the screen like celluloid ghosts.

Through 17 years of Pinochet’s rule the body count mounted. More than 3,000 executions and disappearances. Mass graves and lime pits filled with the general’s victims. Ten of thousands of Chileans passed through the jails and were routinely tortured. The regime’s secret police hunted down Gen. Carlos Prats, Pinochet’s constitutionally minded predecessor as commander of the armed forces, and blew him up in a Buenos Aires car bomb. The moderate but anti-military politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife were cornered on an Italian street and shot by the general’s agents. Pinochet brought international terrorism to the U.S. capital when his secret police exploded another car bomb to wipe out former Allende foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronnie Karpen Moffitt.

Through this long night we survivors clung — tenuously– to Allende’s final promise of justice. That’s why this month of Pinochet’s detention assumes such dramatic importance. Most of the outside world had long forgotten Allende — let alone his last words. That’s natural. But it had also forgotten — or perhaps never bothered to even know — Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet used the naked power of his dictatorship to fashion a cloak of respectability, naming himself president, commander-in-chief, captain general, and then writing a constitution that allowed him to sit as senator-for-life in the civilian government that succeeded him. He became an object of adoration for William Buckley, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the reporters of the New York Times, the claque of conservatives at Heritage and Cato and the Baroness Maggie Thatcher, with whom the obsequiously Anglophile dictator was sipping tea just days before he was collared by Scotland Yard. Even the Chilean civilian government that came to power in 1990 after defeating Pinochet in a national plebiscite tiptoed around the general, leaving him in charge of the army until this past spring, respecting his self-granted “immunity” and then scurrying to defend him when he fell prisoner in London.

But after the imposed silence of the last two decades, today in Chile there is no more important subject of public debate than Pinochet’s legacy.

According to recent polls, two-thirds or more of Chileans want the general tried somehow, somewhere. At last count, seven European countries have joined in the clamor to try him as an international human rights criminal. And now comes word that even the U.S. government — his original sponsor — is actively weighing the possibility of asking for Pinochet’s extradition on charges of murdering Horman, Teruggi, Letelier and Moffitt.

In the meantime, three dozen other Chilean notables — among them former Pinochet cabinet ministers, military junta members and cronies — have been named by the Spanish courts in the same arrest warrant that bottled up Pinochet. Now — finally — they too will be publicly known for what they are: no longer respected leaders of the Chilean right, but accused accessories to organized murder.

Any day now, a five-man committee of the British House of Lords will render its decision as to whether Pinochet will be extradited to a Spanish courtroom or if he will be released as ordered by a British court the previous week. But it matters little how that decision comes down. If the general gets sent to Spain, then a clear-cut, earth-shaking victory will have been achieved for the cause of international human rights. But even if Pinochet is freed, it will be his defeat.

Waiting for him in Santiago is Chilean Judge Juan Guzman Tapia (who has gotten virtually no coverage in the American press), who is vowing to try Pinochet — with or without his self-imposed immunity. Just this past Tuesday, the Chilean journalists’ guild filed a case with Guzman charging Pinochet with the murder or disappearance of 20 reporters. Of course, he could decide not to return to Chile, becoming an exile from his homeland.

But if he does return, Pinochet will face an entire Chilean population that has been given back its most precious resource — its collective memory. Chileans no longer need to hold tight to the faint, fading words of Salvador Allende. They are now free to publicly remember Pinochet. To recoil in horror and disgust. To scorn and despise him. And with a bit of luck — to see him judged and condemned.

Salvador Allende can now rest quietly in his grave. The day of justice he promised us is now upon us.

Reading that account in the papers, I remembered that only a few weeks before I had met a young radical university student with the same last name. When I went to look up Christian Pinochet again he confirmed that the general was, indeed, his uncle. But be advised, he said, the old man was a “fascist” and this certainly wasn’t the last we would hear from him.

The rest, of course, is history. Two years later, on Sept. 11, 1973, just days after he had been promoted to top commander of the army and after personally swearing his loyalty to President Allende, Pinochet seized power in one of the bloodiest coups in Latin American history.

The presidential palace, where I was then working as Allende’s translator, was attacked by troops, tanks and British-made jets. Allende killed himself rather than surrender. Heavily armed troops crashed through the poorer neighborhoods, dislodged workers from factories, occupied the universities and drew down a dark cloak of terror on one of the continent’s most advanced, civil and polite democracies.

I was lucky enough to escape eight days later as a United Nations-protected refugee. Others weren’t so fortunate. During the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship, more than 3,100 people would be murdered, tens of thousands tortured, and hundreds of thousands sent into political and economic exile. Chile’s century-old democratic institutions were systematically demolished, and even the political parties that supported the coup were outlawed. The country’s poorer half was effectively criminalized, and an orgy of harsh free-market “reforms” — instituted at gunpoint — rendered Chile’s already deep social divisions ever more stark.

While the more naive thought Pinochet would be a mere transitional figure, that he would soon restore democracy after overthrowing the polarizing Allende administration, the general had completely different plans. First, he consolidated his personal power over the four-man governing junta, then over the entire nation, boasting, “Not a leaf moves without my knowledge.”

Those words would come back to haunt him when, after 25 years of absolute impunity, he was arrested in London in 1998. A crusading Spanish magistrate looking into the deaths of Spanish nationals in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship triggered an international arrest warrant. And from high tea with his pal Maggie Thatcher, Pinochet was transferred into 503 days of British custody. He was ultimately allowed to return home to Santiago, but not before the now discredited and disgraced dictator had been bombarded with accusations and investigations. Half a dozen other nations had joined the clamor for his prosecution on charges of murder and torture. He was forced to take refuge in a claim that he was mentally unfit to stand trial. All of a sudden, the once-omnipotent Pinochet seemingly couldn’t remember the details of anything.

No matter. He no longer seemed untouchable. Back home in Chile, the indictments, the bookings, the house arrests continued. He was stripped of immunity from prosecution and buffeted by charges ranging from murder to torture to tax evasion. On three occasions, including last week, when he was hospitalized for the heart attack that would eventually kill him, he evaded going to formal trial by claiming he was too sick. So be it. None of this will alter history’s harsh judgment.

His very name, his surname alone, has entered our common lexicon as a stand-alone synonym for all the brutal inhumanity that comes with arbitrary and repressive military dictatorship. In some ways, it has been an unusually quick historical transition for Pinochet. Just a few decades ago, in the Reagan-Thatcher era, he was celebrated as the sometimes excessively tough but equally determined prophet of the free market. With economic populists, leftists and even socialists now in power in virtually every Latin American capital, who even remembers those days?

What is remembered, however, is the sheer horror. The soulless barbarity imposed by the Pinochet regime traumatized the Chilean nation in a way that it is still struggling to assimilate. There’s an old political slogan in Spanish: “The Color of Blood Is Never Forgotten.” Indeed, 33 years after his seizure of power, Pinochet’s human rights record remains as politically volatile as ever. It took a post-Pinochet civilian government almost a decade before it was literally forced into prosecuting him and a few other implicated officials. Only relentless pressure from surviving relatives, a small corps of human rights attorneys and a sprinkling of principled magistrates kept the unfinished investigations alive. That, and the unfathomable, lingering specter of the innocent being swept up by hooded soldiers in the middle of the night, tortured with electrical shock, waterboarded, submitted to faux executions, then shot, disemboweled and either buried in secret graves or thrown into the ocean from helicopters.

That’s a legacy from which you never escape. Those are ghosts that are impossible to exorcise. They will stalk you, torment you and seek justice and vengeance whether you’re shopping at Harrods, having tea with Thatcher or trying to convalesce in a hospital bed after a crippling, and ultimately fatal, heart attack. Having been afforded no mercy, they know no mercy.

After his arrest in London, Gen. Pinochet could no longer safely travel outside of Chile. Warrants for his capture loomed in almost every civilized nation on earth. The same traps awaited — and still await — some of his lesser-known collaborators. Even the mighty Henry Kissinger now travels only on a strictly scrutinized itinerary thanks to judicial inquiries stemming from his own collaboration with the once-butcherous regimes in Santiago and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Pinochet’s precipitous slide from vaunted political hero to death as a disgraced and wanted war criminal sends a somber message to those who today ride high on their arrogance and hubris. The color of blood is not forgotten. Neither are the curdling images of wired-up prisoners in hoods, nor the chilling nightmares of being tied to a plank and being drowned in the name of freedom.

The stories go on from there: Innocent suspects beaten till they vomit blood. Evidence fabricated to justify sweeping anti-gang injunctions. Cops dealing dope, perjuring and covering up for each other. An entire elite anti-gang unit running amok while police brass avert their eyes.

One more L.A.-based neo-noir movie? A sequel to “L.A. Confidential”? No such luck. Barely seven years after the most serious domestic civil disturbance in a century, and an equal number of years into what was supposed to be profound police reform, the LAPD is once again bleeding blue all over the evening news.

The cop who got caught with the coke is no fictional character. Former LAPD officer Rafael E. Perez is single-handedly obliterating the infamous code of silence — dishing all the dirt he can in a frenetic attempt to save his own butt. The result? It’s what the Los Angeles Times has called the biggest LAPD corruption scandal in 60 years. But it’s worse than that.

What we see in Los Angeles today is the result of the LAPD’s persistent refusal to submit to civilian oversight. “You can draw a straight line from the Watts riots to Rodney King’s beating right up to the events of last week,” says former Police Commission president, Rabbi Gary Greenebaum.

So far a dozen cops have been suspended and as many as 50 are under investigation. The kid shot through the head, Javier Ovando, has escaped his 23-year prison term — though he’s confined to a wheelchair since the shooting. Two phonied-up gang injunctions have been lifted. And multi-million-dollar civil suits are piling up against the offending officers and the city.

In what might be the greatest understatement yet mumbled in this affair, City Attorney James Hahn, a leading mayoral candidate, says “this could wind up being very expensive.” Literally hundreds of criminal convictions could be overturned by what now appears to be serial police perjury. Meanwhile, internal LAPD investigators, as well as federal and state officials are widening their probe of the department. Former Officer Perez is expected to fill the week of Sept. 27 by continuing to name names and the city fathers are nervously bracing for the worst.

Civil rights attorney Leo Terrel, for example, says he’s trying to arrange federal protection for three other cops who want to sing. “They want to talk about planting evidence and about ‘kill parties’ — officers getting together to celebrate police killings.”

At the epicenter of the scandal is the rough-and-tumble unit known as CRASH — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. They now look like some of the biggest hoodlums in the city — macho police gunmen who rumbled through their mostly Latino territory competing with and shaking down the drug dealers they were supposed to be arresting. Published reports portray the CRASH unit as little more than another gang itself.

New unit members were “jumped in” — a gang term used for initiation beatings. Other reports tell of CRASH officers shouting gang-like slogans and hanging handcuffs on their rear-view mirrors as a taunt to the local gang-bangers. The “war” on gangs, on crime, on youth was apparently so internalized by CRASH that its members saw themselves as elite warriors exempt and above the normal rules of engagement.

It’s all part of what reform-minded former San Jose Police Chief Joe McNamara calls a frightening new trend in policing: “A drift toward a military mind set on the national level,” he calls it.

The police brass, the political establishment and the local media have scurried to put the usual spin on the crisis: This is all a matter of a few rotten apples giving a clean department a bad name. But, inescapably, the central questions underlying this scandal are these: Will the LAPD ever truly accept effective civilian oversight? And can its dark internal culture ever be transformed?

These question have festered since at least the 1966 McCone Commission report that — in the wake of the Watts riots — called for independent civilian review structures. That idea was left dormant until the videotaped beating of Rodney King shockingly revealed the department’s brutal reflexes. The hastily convened Christopher Commission — named for former Secretary of State Warren Christopher — came up in the early ’90s with another set of proposed police reforms.

The demand for full and independent civilian review was traded in a compromise, approved shortly thereafter in a city election, creating a new office, that of inspector general. The IG would be the “eyes and ears” of the appointed police commission. It was established to make sure the LAPD would at once carry through its reforms, and that it would be responsive to civilian overseers.

For a while it looked like reform was on track. Discredited Police Chief Daryl Gates resigned and was replaced by African-American Willie Williams. New efforts were made to diversify LAPD recruits and the police academy was even teaching sensitivity training. A tough prosecutor, Katherine Mader, won the job as the first inspector general, seeming to promise some hope for real reform.

“The reforms were good, right on the money,” says legal writer Joe Domanick, author of the authoritative history of the LAPD, “To Protect and Serve.” “The problem is that there was no will by the city to implement the reforms. Mayor [Richard] Riordan only paid lip service to them.”

Indeed, even the illusion of real reform was short-lived. When Chief Williams proved to be ineffective, the city council overruled the police commission when it moved to dump him. And when Williams was finally pushed out, in 1997, he was replaced by career LAPD defender, Bernard Parks, also an African-American. Parks rushed to proclaim that the LAPD had already improved “beyond the reforms” advocated by civilian hand-wringers. But his defense of the department hasn’t won him the love of his rank-and-file, who resent him as a controlling disciplinarian.

“Parks is a control freak, a would-be banana republic dictator,” says a source close to the police commission. “He has clamped down on all dissent. He’s like a stern father that only punishes. When he heard that some tea was pilfered from a station house, he ordered the interrogation of 83 cops. He’s more worried about that than what the CRASH unit is tearing up. He has no perspective on the big picture.”

In that context, Parks made it known in no uncertain terms that he resented the IG poking her nose into police business. And last fall, Katherine Mader dramatically quit, complaining she was “bottled up.” Throughout the political tug-of-war between the IG and the police chief, Mayor Riordan’s hand-picked police commission essentially sided with Chief Parks and let Mader twist in the wind.

And the tension continues. Just a few weeks ago, on the eve of the current upheaval, Mader’s successor, Jeff Eglash, echoed her complaints that his access was being sealed off by Chief Parks. “The problem with the department command is its firm conviction that it understands its job better than anyone else in the world,” says the pro-reform former LAPD Assistant Chief Dave Dotson. “It believes there just isn’t very much that any civilian can contribute to a better understanding.”

Just last week the police commission secured a ruling from the city attorney recognizing it as the supreme authority over the LAPD. “The commission is in charge of the police department,” commission president Gerald Chaleff told a local radio station. But rhetoric aside, it’s unlikely the commission will try to assert itself over Chief Parks. “Gerry Chaleff is too worried about whether the chief likes him,” says a veteran city commissioner in another department.

No one on the commission objected, for instance, when Parks announced that the principal investigation of the current corruption scandal will be carried out by a department board of inquiry — an internal investigation of the cops by the cops.

“Here once again we have Chief Parks resisting the role of independent civilian investigation,” says Stanley Sheinbaum, a former police commission president who helped broker the exit of Daryl Gates. “Now Parks says he needs six weeks to carry out the investigation. If proper oversight had been taking place all along it would take six days, or better, none of this would ever happened.”

The ACLU, also lacking confidence in the LAPD to clean its own house, has demanded that some sort of independent permanent special prosecutor be created, to ensure not only a more neutral probe but ongoing scrutiny. So far, no comment on that proposal by Los Angeles’ notoriously timid political leadership.

This new LAPD crisis is exploding just as a field of candidates for L.A.’s next mayoral race are jockeying for position. And just about every major potential candidate has some link directly to the crisis. City Attorney Hahn, the expected front-runner in the 2001 mayoral race, has enforced numerous gang injunctions potentially tainted by false police testimony. It will also be his task to limit the city’s legal exposure in the torrent of civil suits now gathering. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, another possible first-rung contender, last week demanded that District Attorney Gil Garcetti re-institute the special police-shooting investigation units he disbanded three years ago.

Other potential candidates, ranging from current Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa on the left to Riordan crony Steve Soberoff on the right, have so far made noncommital statements simultaneously expressing outrage at and confidence in the department. But will any one of these potential candidates have the courage to admit that police reform in L.A. has been a sham? And will any one of them step forward to propose what LAPD has always resisted: effective civilian review of the cops?

Again, not very likely. “Where are [the politicians] going to be three months from now, six months from now?” asks Rabbi Greenebaum “All those people saying the right things now, OK. But they tend to fade away over time.”

“As always, they are praying like hell the whole thing blows over and everyone forgets,” says a prominent local defense attorney active on police-abuse issues. Mayor Riordan for his part, has said little except to reaffirm his support for Parks. “Riordan has been quick to take credit for the police when they look good,” says Heather Carrigan, public education director of the local ACLU. “But shouldn’t the mayor make it his responsibility that not even the slightest blemish be allowed on the police? Don’t count on it.”

The only hope, say police critics, is that former Officer Perez will spill so much more dirt out of his files this week that no force will be powerful enough to sweep it back under the rug.

“I’m skeptical that any long-term commitment to really doing anything is going to come out of this crisis,” says former Assistant Chief Dotson. “My fear is that an investigation will be had, a few people will be disciplined, and even some command staff will be transferred or demoted. Then they’ll all say this crisis is over.

“Meanwhile, no one will have looked at the organizational structure, management practices, systems for accountability — at training and selection of personnel, and at all of the myriad factors that have contributed to the situation we are confronted with: this huge inert mass that is the culture of the LAPD.”