SANTIAGO, Chile -- The arrest of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in London a year ago has opened a quiet and long-postponed reckoning in Chile over its years of dictatorship that is finally bringing former military officers to task for the deaths or disappearances of thousands of political opponents.
Since the arrest of General Pinochet, the former dictator, 25 officers have been arrested on charges of murder, torture and kidnapping, including a member of one of the juntas that helped rule the country for 17 years after 1973. And Government officials privately predict that a long list of generals and other officers once thought untouchable will be arrested over the next year.
The wave of arrests is unprecedented in this country, where amnesty and avoidance have been used to grease a sometimes tenuous transition to democracy since 1990. It results from a sea change in the attitudes of Chilean judges and senior military officers that came with the arrest of General Pinochet on charges of crimes against humanity last Oct. 16
The absence of the general, a once-towering figure who dominated Chile for two decades, and the embarrassing attention cast anew on past tortures and disappearances have put conservative military officers on the defensive and left them politically unable to block the prosecutions.
At the same time, General Pinochet's repeated legal setbacks in trying to avoid extradition to face trial in Spain, where the charges against him were brought under international statutes, have encouraged more moderate military officers to acknowledge publicly for the first time that human rights abuses did indeed occur.
"The day of Pinochet's arrest last October marks a key point in Chile's transition to democracy," said Pamela Pereira, a prominent human rights lawyer. "The army now understands it has a human rights problem and that they have to do something about the disappeared."
About 3,000 people were executed or disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship, and tens of thousands more were tortured or forced into exile. Most were leaders and members of the Communist and Socialist parties as well as other political and labor groups that supported or took part in the Government of the Socialist President, Salvador Allende Gossens, which was overthrown in a military coup supported by the Nixon Administration.
But now a new generation of military leaders led by Gen. Ricardo Izurieta, the army commander, have opened negotiations with human rights lawyers that senior Government officials say are likely to establish, finally, the fates of many people who disappeared and identify dozens of officers suspected of ordering their torture and execution.
While human rights activists are expressing almost giddy pleasure, the shift has inspired surprisingly little excitement among most Chileans. They appear to want to jettison their painful political memories and to move forward to a more prosperous future.
The leading presidential candidates make few comments on human rights or General Pinochet's fate, preferring to concentrate on economic issues. But even military officials concede that a shift toward accountability for past abuses is already under way.
Defense Minister Edmundo Pérez Yoma said in an interview this week that a new attitude toward past abuses was emerging among the military high command: "You deal with it or it will never go away. You have to confront it -- that's the changed attitude."
José Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean lawyer who is executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, said "the recent developments in the courts signify very important progress in human rights in Chile that we never dreamed of before Pinochet's arrest."
Last week, for instance, the Supreme Court upheld the indictment of retired Gen. Humberto Gordon and Brig. Gen. Roberto Schmiedt for the killing of a labor leader in 1982. General Gordon was a member of the four-man junta and chief of General Pinochet's secret police, and his arrest on Sept. 14 made him the highest-ranking military official ever to be detained and prosecuted in Chile.
The case had been bottled up in court for years by a judge close to the military, which contended that the labor leader, Tucapel Jiménez, had been stabbed to death by a carpenter. The carpenter was later found with both wrists slashed in what was called a suicide, although investigators said the gashes were too deep to have been self-inflicted.
An appeals court reopened the case in March and replaced the judge, who was found to be sitting on incriminating evidence. To escape arrest earlier this month, General Schmiedt tried to hide in an army base but officers ordered him to surrender.
Senior Government officials say that in the next few days another former director of the secret police, retired Gen. Hugo Salas Wenzel, along with his chief subordinate, Gen. Humberto Leiva Gutiérrez, will be arrested for ordering the killing of 12 Marxist guerrillas in 1987.
Lawyers and Government officials point to a Supreme Court decision in July as the most important jolt to the military's traditional impunity -- one that has put pressure on the military high command to go to the negotiating table with human rights lawyers and religious leaders traditionally critical of the armed forces to decide how best to account for the disappeared.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a decision by a lower court that an amnesty declared by the former Pinochet regime to protect military officers involved in political crimes committed between the 1973 coup against Allende and March 1978 -- the period in which the worst political violence took place -- was no longer applicable to cases in which people disappeared.
The court ruled that until the bodies of the victims were accounted for, the crime committed was not murder but kidnapping -- meaning that the original crime was a continuting event that went beyond the 1978 deadline. That creative departure from previous decisions made by judges since General Pinochet stepped down in 1990 has opened the way for the prosecution of retired Gen. Sergio Arellano Stark and four other army officers on kidnapping charges.
The five officers are accused of forming a helicopter-borne commando unit called the Caravan of Death that removed 75 political prisoners from military jails in the month after the 1973 coup, killed them and buried them in secret graves. The bodies of 56 of the victims have been recovered, but 19 are still missing.
The new Supreme Court interpretation could, at least theoretically, leave General Pinochet open to prosecution for ordering disappearances. The general is currently awaiting the decision of a London magistrate's court, due on Oct. 8, on whether he can be extradited to Spain to stand trial.
President Eduardo Frei has argued that the recent arrests prove that the attempts of a Spanish judge to extradite and prosecute General Pinochet are unnecessary because he could now just as easily stand trial in Chile. A senior Chilean judge has even sent him questions about his involvement in various crimes and is awaiting a response that could be used in a future trial.
Human rights activists remain skeptical, however, in part because no judge here has challenged the parliamentary immunity against prosecution General Pinochet has as a senator-for-life.
Chilean Government officials privately say that whether the former dictator faces charges here or abroad could be an academic question anyway since legal proceedings leading up to any trial would take at least three years. With General Pinochet nearing 84 and ailing, they say, he would probably not live long enough to be convicted anyway.
Court proceedings involving the recently arrested officers could take many months or even years, and the lengths of any sentences remain uncertain. It took heavy pressure from the United States before former Gen. Manuel Contreras was convicted and imprisoned in 1995 on charges he was involved in the planning of the 1976 car-bomb murder of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American assistant in Washington.
General Contreras was sentenced to a seven-year term in a prison compound specially outfitted with unusual comforts like a well-stocked bar, cellular telephone and personal computer with Internet access.
But Government officials say the military is finally losing its impunity because of the emergence of a more liberal judiciary after nine years of civilian presidential rule and the natural change of military command that has yielded a younger, more modern senior officer corps.
Government officials and other analysts credit General Izurieta, who took over from General Pinochet as army commander in 1998, with quietly beginning to nudge the military in a new direction even before the former dictator was arrested.
Senior Government officials said General Izurieta apparently did not consult with General Pinochet when in July 1998 he had the military hand over to a judge a list of hundreds of former secret police agents with their code names to aid an investigation into the killings of 12 guerrillas in 1987. The case had been stalled in the courts for more than a decade.
Now, they say, General Izurieta's policy of cautiously moving the military to acknowledge past abuses as a way to clean up its image is progressing with the military's talks with human rights lawyers that began in August. Senior Government officials say privately that the talks would have been impossible before General Pinochet's arrest.
A senior military official said the military hoped a compromise could be reached in which "an amnesty would be applied to all cases before 1978 in exchange for all information we can acquire for locating where the disappeared are buried."
Government officials say they are hopeful that even if the guilty officers escape prosecution, at least the truth about hundreds if not thousands of killings will finally be told.