The charges concerned "one of the most chilling crimes of his nearly 17-year rule", reckoned the New York Times. "Pinochet is now a very old man, but normal feelings of sympathy would be misplaced." But while more delays were still possible, the paper felt there was a good chance he would at last face justice.
The demand for justice was completely legitimate and backed by the Chilean public, said ABC, and although the "suffering of the victims of the regime must not be silenced", the Spanish daily worried that the trial would "reopen old wounds".
The decision by Juan Guzman, the Chilean judge who has been investigating abuses committed between 1973 and 1990, to charge him had provoked "reactions of both jubilation and grief", said Chile's Diario El Sur. The charges added to a series of problems already faced by Pinochet. Yet it was Operation Condor that "was the most emblematic ... and the one making headline news in the rest of the world's press".
In Chile's Las Ultimas Noticias, Rafael Gumicio reflected on the official report on torture during Pinochet's regime, released last week. "After 15 years of uncomfortable, incomplete democracy, at last Chile has found the courage to examine and judge the past without lies and revisions." The report acted as "a way of telling us - those of us who played dead in 1973 and who died slow deaths in the years that followed - that we are still alive, and that we have a right to continue living".
The prosecution should help Chile "close the book on the Pinochet era", agreed the Chicago Times. "It has also exploded the notion that Latin dictators and others who abuse human rights are untouchable."
