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affected the United States. Having won the Cold War and elicited the peaceful capitulation of its Soviet rival, the United States conferred on itself a kind of de facto amnesty even more encompassing than that enjoyed by itsLatin American allies: no truth commission or any other kind of official investigation was established to look into the human collateral damage of the many proxy wars we supported in Latin America and elsewhere.
    Despite the edifice of legal obstacles, however the pursuit of justice never ceased. For more than two decades the investigators, journalists, political activists, human rights workers, and a few indomitable judges worked relentlessly to piece together the facts as they became available and to seize opportunities for judicial advances as they arose.
    The successes in the pursuit of justice were few. Then, in October 1998, everything changed. Circumstances, hard work, and luck conspired to put a dictator under arrest in London.
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    * The names of heads of delegations to the Condor meeting are known only through this document. They are, as listed: “Jorge Casas, Navy Captain, chief of delegation, Argentina; Carlos Mena, Army Major, chief of delegation, Bolivia; Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Army Colonel, Director of National Intelligence, Chile; José A. Fons, Army Colonel, chief of delegation, Uruguay; Benito Guanes Serrano, Army Colonel, chief of 2nd Department, Armed Forces Staff, Paraguay.”

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TILTING AT WINDMILLS
    The charter of this tribunal gives warning for the future, I say, and repeat again, gives warning for the future, to dictators and tyrants masquerading as a state, that if . . . they debase the sanctity of man in their own countries, they act at their peril, for they affront the international law of mankind.
    –S IR H ARTLEY S HAWCROSS , B RITAIN’S CHIEF PROSECUTOR AT N UREMBERG , 1945
    Pinochet’s impunity has never been far from Joan * Garcés’s mind. It has been that quiet man’s burning passion since September 11, 1973, when as a young aide with Socialist ideals he had been forced to evacuate Chile’s presidential palace, La Moneda, before the air attacks that enveloped it in flames. That day, for Garcés, saw the death of the dream of building a just, Socialist society using democracy rather than violent revolution.
    Garcés, a Spaniard, had come to Chile a few years earlier to write a thesis on Chilean politics, for his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he stayed to become—still only twenty-six years old—one of Salvador Allende’s closest political confidants. That last day Allende ordered him to abandon the besieged presidential palace because “Someone has to recount what happened here and only you can do it.”
    “I was a witness to the great national and collective hope [of the Allende experiment], expressed in a democratically impeccable way. And I was also a witness to the human and social tragedy into which Chile was submerged three years later. My best friends left their lives there, defending their commitmentto the freedom and dignity of their people. This is something you don’t ever forget,” he said, looking back.
    After the coup, Garcés returned to Spain to a career in law, writing and teaching. He wrote a book on the failed but noble experiment of the “Chilean road to Socialism,” one of the first insider accounts of the chaotic political maneuvering of Allende’s three years in office. He made the case that Allende was committed to inviolate respect for the law and Chile’s constitution.
    Impeccable democracy. The rule of law. Applied to the service of the poor, as in no other country of the world before or since. Those were the values that Garcés took away from Chile. Instead, the region began a long journey through a swamp of dictatorship, arbitrary military rule, and violations of individual rights. And the military leaders like Pinochet seemed to be getting off scot-free. Even as the years unfolded and the military