On January 29, Chilean investigative judge Juan Guzman Tapia announced the indictment of former dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte on 57 counts of homicide and 18 of kidnapping, as co-conspirator in the October 1973 Caravan of Death, in which 74 political prisoners were murdered by Pinochet's military regime.
On January 31, Pinochet was officially notified of the charges against him and was placed under house arrest at his Los Boldos vacation home in Bucalemu. On February 1, Pinochet's defence team appealed the indictment and the arrest order, arguing that Pinochet's ill health should prevent him from standing trial.
The indictment followed Guzman's January 23 interrogation of Pinochet, in which the ex-dictator denied any responsibility for the Caravan of Death and instead blamed the murders on his subordinates, apparently disregarding advice from his lawyers that he say as little as possible. Pinochet told Guzman that Sergio Arellano Stark, his former intelligence aide and now a retired general, had been instructed only to expedite court proceedings for the "Caravan" prisoners, to sentence those responsible and release the innocent — not to execute anyone. Arellano Stark, who has been charged in the case and is under house arrest, has denied wrongdoing.
In a January 25 interview on government-run Television Nacional, retired general Joaquin Lagos Osorio, who commanded the third army division at the time of the killings, responded to Pinochet's denial, charging that Pinochet personally selected the Caravan of Death prisoners to be executed by hit squads.
The executions were brutal, said Lagos Osorio: "They cut eyes out with daggers. They broke their jaws and legs." Even when a firing squad was used, he said, it killed the prisoners slowly: "They shot them to pieces, first the legs, then the sexual organs, then the heart, all with machine guns."
On January 26, following Lagos Osorio's accusations, Pinochet was taken to the military hospital in Santiago after reportedly suffering what appeared to be a very mild stroke. He was released the next day.
[From Weekly News Update on the Americas.]