Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed - The Law Is Never a Given
Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed considers “38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia,” the newest book from Philippe Sands.
Sands tells the story of how SS commander Walther Rauff and Chile’s past dictator Augusto Pinochet were able to dodge justice for decades. Despite charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, they died with impunity. For his part, Sands acted as a barrister for Human Rights Watch on the cases that followed Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London. In 38 Londres Street, the author uncovers how the Nazi leader and dictator must have collaborated in Chile to torture, murder, and disappear dissidents.
Rauff, an unabashed antisemite, found friendship in Pinochet and refuge in Chile, where he ran a crab cannery. In Nazi Germany, he had designed and overseen gas vans that killed 97,000 people, likely including two of Sands’s relatives.
Pinochet, “a virulent anti-communist and Germanophile,” usurped Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in a 1973 coup d’état and presided over a secret police force, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), that targeted leftists. As Chile’s president until 1990, Pinochet authorized the torture of at least 31,000 people and the execution or disappearance of more than 3,200 people.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-law-is-never-a-given/