Juan Guzmán is dead, the first Chilean judge to prosecute …

Juan Guzmán Tapia, the first Chilean judge to prosecute Augusto Pinochet for crimes committed during his dictatorship, has died at the age of 81. The magistrate’s family confirmed the complaint, if there were no further details on the cause of his death,

Judge Guzmán has made a career in the Chilean judiciary. In January 1998, he resumed the Caravan of Death investigation, one of the main repressive actions of the Pinochet dictatorship after the 1973 coup. At the time Guzmán took up this case, Pinochet was still at the head of the army. He retired two months later to become a life senator, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution the regime promulgated in 1980.

In October 1998, everything changed: Pinochet, who had traveled to London, was arrested in the British capital at the request of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. A legal and diplomatic battle began which, despite the approval of the extradition request to Spain, led to the release of the former dictator for health reasons in March 2000.

Pinochet returned to Chile, but it was not the same country a year and a half earlier. He lost the privileges of senator and the lawsuits against him were activated. The most compromising was that of the Caravan of Death. On December 1, 2000, Guzmán prosecuted Pinochet for 19 kidnappings and 53 homicides committed by this delegation, which he sent as army chief and de facto leader to be suppressed, under the command of General Sergio Arellano Stark. The judge ordered the arrest of the former dictator, who received the pardon of house arrest. Pinochetism came to question the suitability of the judge due to the fact that in his youth, before the coup against Salvador Allende, he had a small role in the film Site status, a classic of political cinema directed by Costa-Gavras.

The Santiago Court of Appeal overturned the measure by which Pinochet had been detained on Chilean soil. The defense of the former general led the higher courts to take into account his advanced age (85) and health problems, almost a carbon copy of the reasons why the Tony Blair government sent Pinochet back to Chile.

Since then, and until his death in 2006, the elderly former dictator had no major legal problems. Not at least in terms of human rights: in his final months he had to grapple with the cause of money found in secret accounts at Riggs Bank. All cases against him were closed with his death.

Guzmán left the judiciary in 2005. He published his memoirs, entitled At the end of the world: Memoirs of the judge who tried Pinochet, and was dean of the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences of the Central University of Chile, as well as director of the Institute of Human Rights of this house of higher studies, founded by himself.