Chilean military dictator from 1973 to 1990 who murdered thousands of people. He signed a sweeping amnesty law in 1978 shielding officials from prosecution for human-rights abuses.
In Quito, Ecuador, in the 1950s, Pinochet befriended Walter Rauff, a former SS officer who had developed the mobile gas chambers that killed some 100,000 people in the second world war. Rauff had fled an Italian prison camp at the end of the war and ended up in South America. Pinochet encouraged Rauff to move to Chile, where he settled in Punta Arenas and managed a king-crab cannery. The address 38 Londres Street in Santiago became a detention centre used by Pinochet's secret police.
In 1998 Pinochet was arrested in London while seeking medical treatment—the first time a former head of state had been apprehended abroad under the doctrine of "universal jurisdiction" for large-scale human-rights abuses. Spain had indicted him. After a 17-month legal battle over whether he had immunity as a former head of state, he was spared extradition on medical grounds. He returned to Chile in a wheelchair, then abandoned it on the tarmac once he reached home soil. He faced prosecution in Chile in his final years but died in 2006 without standing trial.
Pinochet's London arrest helped persuade Chile's Supreme Court to exclude human-rights abuses from his 1978 amnesty law, allowing hundreds of cases to be brought against former army and secret-police officials.
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head.