I Think I'm Going to Open Up a Bottle of Concha Y Toro

Or another fine Chilean wine. You know I warned him. I warned him here and here, but now he's gotten into it:

A court ruled Friday that former dictator Augusto Pinochet can be sued for a bloody wave of repression in the 1970s and 80s, after a TV interview in which he appeared lucid raised questions about Supreme Court rulings that he is unfit for trial.

[...]

The court has yet to explain its ruling, and a judge's report outlining it was not expected for two or three weeks. Still, prosecution lawyers and victims' relatives believe the interview played a key role in persuading judges that Pinochet is fit to stand trial.

"Pinochet had been granting interviews, going to restaurants, going out shopping and he continues to administer his assets," prosecution lawyer Hugo Gutierrez said. "He's not crazy or sick."

I'll never forget his speedy recovery on the tarmac in Santiago after he flew back from the UK. From a practical standpoint, I don't expect too much to come of this. With the glacial pace of legal decisions and the fact that he is 88 years old, it's probably more likely for him to be pushing up daisies than seeing a judge's gavel marking the start of his trial. I also don't think that his financial assets will be impacted much by this. When he was in England awaiting the proceedings against him there his legal expenses were paid by cronies, by the UK and by fundraising efforts. His son also started bottling a Pinochet wine after his father's return to Chile. I hear it goes great on a salad . . .

In any event, I won't be completely satisfied, but if his twilight years are spent in meetings with lawyers and a lot of grief and anxiety instead of a queit dotage playing with his grandchildren, it is a small and insufficient measure of justice, but better than nothing.

I just hope some day he has to explain this:

In power, Pinochet oversaw the murders of enemies real and imagined. One of them was Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Her offense was to sit alongside an exiled Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letelier, as they rode to work at a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 21, 1976.

The car exploded.

Letelier was torn in half. Michael Moffitt, Ronni's husband, was hurled out a rear door. Flying metal slashed open an artery in Ronni Moffitt's neck. She drowned in her own blood on the streets of the western hemisphere's oldest democracy, killed by the men who had overthrown its second-oldest.

What a bastard.

[Cross-posted at Southern Exposure. Click over and check us out!]