Let’s consider the tale of two extraditions.

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

On October 16, 1998, London police arrested Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s military ruler from 1973 to 1990, at the request of Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón, whose indictment against Pinochet included genocide, murder, and torture of thousands.

The Vatican, at the direction of Pope John Paul II, implored the Blair government to reject the Spanish request and free Pinochet for his unyielding defense of capitalism and Catholicism (and persecution of Liberation theologists and their communist allies.)

During his detention, Margaret Thatcher sent the former dictator a bottle of single malt whiskey with a note reading, “Scotch is one British institution that will never let you down.” In the end, neither did the Blair government, whose Home Secretary Jack Straw ruled in January 2000 that the former dictator should not be extradited to Spain.

The contrast with the UK’s treatment of journalist Julian Assange is revelatory. Assange has effectively been under detention since he sought (and was subsequently granted) asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London in 2012. During that time, Assange’s health deteriorated, his ability to work was curtailed, he was placed under constant surveillance and was the subject of an assassination plot by the Trump-era CIA. For the past four and a half years, Assange has been confined to a dank cell in Belmarsh Prison, awaiting extradition to the US on charges brought by Trump’s Justice Department alleging that Assange had violated the Espionage Act.

As with Assange, every British court ruling in Pinochet’s case affirmed Spain’s right to extradite Pinochet. Yet in the two-years it took to adjudicate his case, the dictator never spent a single night in a British prison or jail, despite the heinous charges pending against him, before the Blair government flouted international law and set him free. By contrast, Assange, who did nothing more than expose crimes that both the British and American governments had desperately tried to conceal, has repeatedly had his life put at risk. And here we get to the rub. Both the British and American governments were deeply complicit in the coup that brought Pinochet to power and supportive of the repressive regime that ruled Chile for the next 20 years. Much of the support for Pinochet was covert and they were (and remain) desperate to keep the details of that blood-drenched aid secret.

If you need a reminder of the crimes of the Pinochet regime, which both Thatcher and the Vatican begged the Blair government to turn a blind eye toward, consider the account of Luz de las Nieves Ayress, a 25-year-old graduate student, who was arrested by Pinochet’s secret police shortly after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. In a sworn statement, Ayress recounted that after her arrest she was stripped naked, had an electrodes attached to her mouth, ears, breasts, vagina and anus, then was repeatedly shocked with electric currents. But this ordeal, Ayress wrote, was “the easy part.” They “electroshocked everyone,” she said. Then the torture got much worse. During her four-year prison term, months of which were spent in solitary confinement, Ayress says she was repeatedly raped, had her breasts and stomach slashed, and was sexually assaulted by dogs. Ayress was one of 38,000 Chileans who were tortured under Pinochet’s dictatorship and her horrific experience was a routine, not exceptional, case.

Julian Assange has also been enduring a kind of torture for the last 11 years, inflicted by governments that have abetted torturers and rented out their torture chambers around the globe, those chill bureaucrats of the dark arts who are unlikely to condemn themselves by setting him free.