On the Lam

So, you're the former head of international operations for DINA, the Pinochet-era secret police, you've been convicted of kidnapping, sentenced to five years in prison, your appeals are exhausted and you have to report to prison on Monday, June 11, 2007. What do you do? Apparently, rather than face justice like an adult, you go on the lam:

Government authorities Thursday alerted border police and promised to track down and jail former secret police leader (r) Gen. Raúl Iturriaga Neumman, who this week defied court orders to begin serving a jail term for a Pinochet-era human rights crime.

Iturriaga was to report to prison on Monday to begin a five-year sentence for ordering the 1974 kidnapping of 22-year-old Luis San Martín Vergara, a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). Iturriaga at that time was part of the DINA secret police, in charge of international operations.

He can't go to Italy as he has been convicted in absentia of attempted murder of Bernardo Leighton and his wife in 1975 and he can't go to Argentina as he is wanted for questioning in the murder of General Prats and his wife in 1974. One has to love his crocodile tears:

"I was subjected to undue prosecution, just like approximately 500 other members of the armed forces, several of whom have been convicted for the same reason, under the complacent gaze of the government and institutions that do not defend our rights, which we are justly claiming," continued Ituriaga in his TV statement. "I have put up with many things, including detentions, endless depositions, identity parades with false witnesses, humiliations, double standards, bias, psychological exams, suffering on the part of my family and friends, loss of work, personal financial chaos, judicial political persecution, and so on."

"Must we continue to put up with this? I won't any longer!" he declared.

Among the things he will not have to endure are being disappeared only to have his remains turn up in an abandoned mine or buried two to a grave in a cemetery in Santiago, being tortured and being drugged, put on a helicopter and tossed out live over the ocean, all of which the victims of the  regime in which he gladly served, suffered. What a coward.