Gloria Miqueles, Stella Franceskides and Jose Lavín gather around a table stacked with hundreds of photographs at the archive in the University of East London. They point out familiar faces as they try to put them in order in preparation for activities marking Gen Augusto Pinochet’s London arrest, 25 years on.
“When I heard the news, I jumped up and shouted as if I were celebrating a football goal,” says Lavín, who was a member of Chile’s Communist party when he was detained and tortured during Pinochet’s 17-year brutal regime, which lasted from 1973 to 1990.
Lavín, one of more than 3,000 Chilean exiles who fled to the UK, has lived in London since 1977. He’d watched helplessly as Pinochet took frequent trips to the UK, where he was welcomed with VIP treatment by the Foreign Office and would enjoy tea parties with his close friend Margaret Thatcher.
But Britain’s congenial mood towards Pinochet changed overnight on the evening of 16 October 1998. While convalescing after minor back surgery, the 82-year-old general was arrested at the London Clinic on a warrant from Spain for human rights violations.
El Piquete de Londres (the London Picket) was formed by the hundreds of Chilean exiles who campaigned for Pinochet’s swift extradition to Spain. Miqueles, Franceskides and Lavín were there throughout the remarkable 503-day-long movement that followed Pinochet’s British detention.
Earlier that year, the general had retired as head of the army and assumed the position as the country’s first life senator, a role he created for himself while in power. But Britain’s highest courts rejected Pinochet’s argument that he was entitled to immunity as a former head of state – a watershed moment in international law.
“It had reverberations well beyond Chile,” said Dr Francesca Lessa, the author of The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America, who said Pinochet was the most notorious face of a string of dictatorships throughout South America in the 1970s and 1980s. “Activists thought: if this can happen to Pinochet, we can get things started in [other] contexts.”
After his discharge from hospital, Pinochet camped out in a residential mansion in Surrey while the courts debated his fate. “We followed him everywhere, until the end,” said Franceskides, who ran a Chilean restaurant, El Vergel, with her exiled husband.
The El Vergel team would make sure there was enough soup for protesters braving the cold winter days. At times the weather was so cold that their protest flags would be frozen stiff, but the London Picket continued on regardless, coordinating a robust programme outside Pinochet’s quarters that included barbecues, concerts and theatre.
Yet not all occasions were jubilant. When Pinochet appeared at Belmarsh, the London Picket were confronted by pro-Pinochet groups. Sylvia Velasquez, an exile, recalls them heckling an activist friend who was campaigning for her disappeared husband: “They threw a sack of bones in her face and said that they’d found him,” said Velasquez. “She was a strong woman, but that was the first time I saw her break.”
Pinochet’s defence resorted to using his health and age to argue for his return to Chile. The former dictator began to use a wheelchair, and would appear confused and frail for medical surveys. In March 2000, after 17 months under house arrest, doctors declared he was not fit to stand trial, leading to the home secretary, Jack Straw, granting his release on humanitarian grounds.
Pinochet’s health was miraculously restored on the plane ride back to Chile. Immediately upon arrival, he no longer required a wheelchair and was seen confidently strolling across the airport to greet his supporters.
It was a heartbreaking moment for those who formed the London Picket – but they now can appreciate the impact of the time. “Pinochet was a finished man, a renowned criminal,” said Miqueles.
In the aftermath of Pinochet’s detention, Chilean courts successfully filed to strip Pinochet’s immunity, and he was later pressed to resign from his life senator post. Lessa credits the sheer creativity and resilience of the London Picket for incentivising action: “Without the efforts of the activists, the policy of impunity would have had an easier time of prevailing,” she said.
Pinochet died in 2006 with more than 300 charges pending against him. Today the supreme court continues to reckon with the crimes of the past: it is busy processing more than 2,000 cases of human rights violations allegedly committed by state agents during Pinochet’s rule.
This year, Britain’s Chilean exile community launched 50 Years UK, which commemorates 50 years since Pinochet’s coup. It includes dozens of events this week to mark the London Picket, with panels and events at Goldsmiths and LSE, as well as film screenings and concerts across the UK.
“We’ve kept going all this time because there’s still families searching for the disappeared,” said Velasquez. “We’re old people now. We need people to continue so it’s not forgotten.”
