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The family of an economist killed in the Pinochet era accuses a Chilean ex-major who lives in Miami.
By DAVID ADAMS
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 13, 2000
MIAMI -- When Gen. Augusto Pinochet arrived back in Chile earlier this month, he was given a hero's welcome by his followers.
After 16 months under arrest in Britain, it seemed he had escaped the legal clutches of a Spanish judge seeking to put him on trial for human rights abuses.
But despite efforts to bury the past, the crimes of the Pinochet era continue to fester. And the cries for justice that reached around the globe have now landed in a Miami courtroom.
It has been almost 27 years since Winston Cabello, a young economist, was arrested and killed in Chile during a military roundup of left-wing activists known as the Caravan of Death.
For all that time, it seemed that Cabello's killers would never be brought to justice. For one thing, they were protected by a sweeping amnesty for crimes committed by the military.
Even so, Zita Cabello-Barrueto refused to give up hope. And her efforts paid off last year.
She learned that her brother's alleged killer, a former major in the DINA, Chile's feared secret police, was living in Miami.
In April, Cabello-Barrueto, who fled to the United States in 1974, filed civil charges against Armando Fernandez Larios in a Miami court.
Backed by human rights advocates, Cabello-Barrueto, 53, her mother and two siblings are seeking to apply international human rights statutes that allow families of victims to sue in U.S. courts for crimes committed abroad.
Her quest for the truth is suddenly on course to dovetail with the general's homecoming.
Chilean Judge Juan Guzman is investigating 71 cases against Pinochet alleging his involvement in the systematic kidnapping, torture and murder of leftists who were hunted down after he took power in a bloody 1973 coup that overthrew the elected president, Salvador Allende.
Last Monday, Guzman initiated legal proceedings to strip Pinochet of the immunity he enjoys as a senator for life, a status the dictator engineered for himself before stepping down in 1990.
Key to the efforts to prosecute Pinochet are the victims of the Caravan of Death.
Winston Cabello was arrested Sept. 12, 1973, the day after the coup. Five weeks later he was taken from his cell along with 15 other political prisoners and executed.
According to the civil case filed in Miami, Fernandez was a member of a military death squad that toured northern Chile by helicopter for several weeks in October 1973. Potential political opponents of the Pinochet regime were tortured and executed.
The death squad was allegedly headed by Gen. Sergio Arellano Stark, an army officer who claims he was acting on Pinochet's instructions.
Cabello was picked out by the death squad because he worked for Allende's socialist government as head of a regional planning office. "The military had so much hate for those who were working for Allende in the economic area," said Cabello-Barrueto.
According to a Truth Commission set up to investigate abuses, Cabello was one of 3,197 people who disappeared or were killed after the coup. At least 50,000 others were interrogated and later released, often after being tortured. Another 50,000 people fled the country.
Cabello was being held at a military garrison with other political prisoners, including Cabello-Barrueto's husband, Patricio, who worked in the same office. "The military came one night and took Winston," she said. "The next morning, the guards told my husband he was dead."
According to court documents, after a night of heavy drinking, Fernandez's unit loaded 13 of the prisoners, including Cabello, onto a military truck and drove to a secluded area. As the prisoners got off the truck they were shot. Cabello was allegedly stabbed repeatedly by Fernandez with a military knife.
All the bodies were buried in an unmarked grave.
The next day, local newspapers reported that the prisoners died while trying to escape. "Even though the guards yelled "halt' several times and even shot in the air to frighten them, they did not stop," stated an official military communique. "In view of this situation, they proceeded to shoot at the fugitives, wounding 13 of them, and they died on the spot."
But in 1990, an official judicial inquiry came to a different conclusion after the bodies were exhumed.
"It does not seem very likely that in order to crush an escape attempt by 13 prisoners it should be necessary to kill all of them on the spot," it reported. "The state of the remains ... indicates that these people were executed in a situation in which they were totally under the control and at the mercy of the soldiers, and that is quite inconsistent with the official account."
Shortly after the killings, Cabello-Barrueto's husband was released. But he continued to face military harassment.
After he received a summons to appear before a military court, the couple decided to flee the country in December 1974.
Carrying a suitcase and their 2-year-old son, they nervously boarded a plane for Los Angeles, worrying that they would be arrested.
"We took a chance," Cabello-Barrueto said. "That was one of the scariest things in my life."
Meanwhile, Fernandez and other members of the Caravan of Death unit were promoted.
In 1976, Fernandez was part of another hit team of Chilean agents that was sent to Washington to assassinate Allende's former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier. Traveling under an assumed name, Fernandez's job was to identify Letelier's car and provide details of his daily routine.
The diplomat, who was one of Pinochet's most outspoken opponents, died almost instantly when a bomb exploded under his Chevrolet a few blocks from the White House. His American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, also was killed.
In January 1987, an apparently repentant Fernandez returned to Washington. In a deal with the U.S. Justice Department, details of which remain secret, he provided information implicating the head of the DINA in Letelier's assassination. Fernandez pleaded guilty, but only as an unwitting accessory to murder. Sentenced to seven years in jail, he served five months.
Since his release, Fernandez has been living in Miami, where he works in an auto body repair shop. He declines to talk about his past.
After civil charges were filed by the Cabello family last year, Fernandez signed a brief statement denying the charges.
"I have never committed acts of torture or murder on anyone," it reads.
Fernandez's lawyers have sought to have the case thrown out, arguing that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction.
Although Fernandez has admitted being part of Arellano Stark's unit, he says he was not present the night Cabello was killed.
"He's a convenient scapegoat. He's just a speck in all this," said his Miami lawyer, Steven Davis. "He didn't execute anybody and he didn't see anybody executed."
But lawyers for Cabello's family say the evidence indicates otherwise. "He was very much a part of what took place," said Shawn Roberts, legal director of the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, which represents the Cabellos.
They are not the only ones with suspicions.
In October, the Chilean Supreme Court approved a request for Fernandez's extradition from the United States for his role in the Caravan of Death.
Fernandez's lawyer said he was confident the request would be denied. Although Davis declined to explain, he hinted that Fernandez's secret plea arrangement with the Justice Department protected him from being removed from the United States.
The Justice Department did not return several phone calls inquiring about Fernandez's status.
But his presence in the United States is becoming increasingly harder to ignore. "His case is going to tie the United States to the pursuit of justice in Chile," said Peter Kornbluh of the Washington-based National Security Archive, a non-profit group dedicated to the declassification of government documents.
Fernandez also could turn out to be a key witness if Pinochet is prosecuted, Kornbluh added. In the Letelier case, Fernandez testified that he had tried to quit the DINA years earlier, even confronting Pinochet over the assassination.
"He is a critical witness to Gen. Pinochet's obstruction of justice in the Letelier case," Kornbluh said.
Cabello-Barrueto would like to see Fernandez tried in Chile, but extradition seems unlikely. She thinks she has a better chance of justice in a U.S. court.
Whatever the truth about Cabello's death, any member of Chile's military would be protected under a sweeping amnesty passed in 1978. The law covers almost all political crimes committed during the first five years of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Last year, Chile's Supreme Court made an exception for cases of "disappeared" people whose bodies remain missing. The court argued these cases could be considered unresolved kidnappings, a crime not covered by the amnesty.
However, because Cabello's body was one of those exhumed in 1990, his case does not fall within the exception. Instead, the Caravan of Death case rests on 19 bodies that were never found.
In June 1999, Judge Guzman applied the Supreme Court's ruling to indict five military officers -- including Gen. Arellano Stark and Fernandez -- on charges of aggravated kidnapping.
Cabello-Barrueto thinks Chile still has a long way to go before there can be true justice. She doubts Pinochet will ever be put on trial.
"(Judge) Guzman is good. I'm really happy what he's trying to do," she said in a phone interview from California, where she is a university teacher. "But there's a lack of political will to back him up."
The red carpet Chile's military rolled out to welcome Pinochet home was a reminder that prosecuting the general will not be easy, she said.
"It showed how powerful and arrogant they are. The military still feel they are on top of the political institutions."