Chile

SANTIAGO, Chile – A Chilean court on Wednesday ordered poet Pablo Neruda's remains be returned to his tomb, three years after they were exhumed to determine whether the Nobel laureate was assassinated.

Just before midnight on Friday, October 16, 1998, police from Britain’s Scotland Yard entered a room in a small, private hospital in London and arrested former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. General Pinochet was recovering from back surgery, but the ramifications of his arrest would shake not only his world, but the way the entire world would come to view human rights prosecutions. Today, in this special section of The Tico Times, we commemorate the anniversary of that world-changing arrest with a series of articles.

After the coup in Egypt in July, a Wall Street Journal editorial argued that "Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet."

Recent criticism leveled at Chile by the U.N. for the country’s treatment of its indigenous minority prompts a human rights historian to question Britain’s current support for Chile’s military establishment.

Six former military officers are accused of embezzlement and helping to hide millions of dollars in Pinochet accounts.

Exhumation begins to determine the cause of the poet’s death in 1973.

President Oscar Arias this week expressed his condolences to the family of recently deceased former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet, and said the former dictator’s...