What's on Pinochet's mind?
A psychiatric examination will determine
Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, will be forced to undergo a psychiatric examination. Within a month, doctors will determine whether he is finally fit to stand trial.

Pinochet is now 84 years old. He ruled Chile since 1973, and in 1990 renounced his lifelong presidency, receiving the status of senator, which provided the general with immunity from prosecution in Chile. However, he was charged by a Spanish court. During Pinochet's reign, not only Chileans, but also citizens of other countries went missing or were tortured. The charges brought by the Spaniards include 177 cases of “criminal offenses based on human rights violations,” that is, torture.
At the request of Spain, the elderly dictator was arrested in 1998 in England, in a hospital. The litigation over whether to extradite him to the Spaniards lasted more than a year. During this time, doctors doubted Pinochet's mental normality and placed him in a psychiatric clinic "for the sake of safety and health."
Now that the general has a real chance of being tried in Chile, he again refers to illness. Indeed, the former dictator suffers from diabetes, his back hurts, and his heart works with the help of a pacemaker. Last Sunday he was admitted to a military hospital with pneumonia. Once again, the doctors came to the conclusion that a psychiatric examination was necessary.
The question, in fact, is whether Pinochet is crazy or weak-minded. Judge Juan Guzman, the prosecutor at the trial, said: "General Pinochet will either be declared mentally ill and lose his authority as a result, or he will be forced to answer the charges brought against him."
Both of these mean the end of the legends about the enlightened dictator - the author of the "Chilean economic miracle." Information about how it was created found its way into the press several years ago. It became known that the CIA spent huge sums of taxpayers' money to undermine the Chilean economy during the reign of Salvador Aliende and on a campaign to create a negative image of the socialist president. After the ambitious but controlled Pinochet came to power, the CIA began pouring money into the Chilean economy. Documents containing exact figures will be declassified within several months at the request of US government and public organizations.
This, however, is not about economics. Could a mentally normal person do everything that Pinochet did in Chile—this question arose from the first years of his rule. A well-thought-out mechanism for creating an atmosphere of terror in the country, torture put on stream... In the 80s, England broke off relations with Chile after a British journalist was detained on the street. The English government and the public were struck not only by the routineness and mass scale of torture, but also by the fact that the equipment for torture was mass-produced, the executioners were competently trained, the torture was developed by psychologists, and even the dogs that raped the journalist underwent training specially designed for this. All this was done with the knowledge and on the direct orders of Pinochet.
Nevertheless, even now in Chile there are still defenders of the dictator. A spokesman for the Pinochet Foundation, an influential group of supporters of the general, said of the general's placement for psychiatric examination: "It is terrible that the Chilean courts have been infiltrated by Marxist collaborators who are trying to tarnish the name of a great man."

IVAN Kommersant-FEDIN

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 209 dated 05.11.2000, page 3