Chile: Pinochet’s Ghost, Bachelet’s Swamp

“Early on the morning of Thursday, 4 October 2007, Chileans awoke to the stunning news that the investigative judge Carlos Cerda had delivered a damning resolution on the case of the embezzlement of public funds by the late dictator Augusto Pinochet and his cohorts. A week after the Chilean Supreme Court had authorized the reopening of Cerda’s enquiry, he issued twenty-four arrest warrants for members of Pinochet’s immediate family and associates.

Cerda’s investigation has built on the United States Senate enquiry of 2004 that unearthed multi-million-dollar accounts in Pinochet’s name in the Riggs Bank in Miami. The final report shows how, over 31 years, Pinochet and his henchmen systematically siphoned off millions from Chilean army reserve funds; used false passports to open foreign bank accounts; earned huge kickbacks in international arms deals; set up ghost companies and purchased a string of luxury properties. It concluded that after the family fortune was totaled up, there was $20,199,753.03 that couldn’t be “reasonably accounted for.”"*

Stumble it! | |