Pinochet judge looks for evidence The Washington Post MINAS HUANTAJAYA, Chile - In a country where powerful interests support Augusto Pinochet, going after the military patriarch has not been easy. Since August, when Judge Juan Guzman lodged a high-profile indictment of retired Gen. Arellano Stark, one of the cruelest characters of Pinochet's rule, human rights attorneys who presented the cases before Guzman have been under police protection. Death threats have been common. Guzman, who also is under 24-hour guard, has long mingled in circles in which Pinochet is revered. He has come under a more subtle form of pressure. When Stark, for instance, first caught wind of the investigation, he appealed to Guzman's friends and family for assistance. Guzman, who under Chile's legal system acts as judge and prosecutor in 57 criminal suits filed against Pinochet, issued the indictment anyway. Like Stark, Pinochet, if indicted, would be charged with "perpetual kidnapping" - a legal creation of Guzman's. More than 1,000 dissidents are still unaccounted for, and Guzman has argued successfully that they could still be alive and that their cases should be treated as kidnappings - something not covered by Chile's broad laws granting amnesty to Pinochet-era officials. At an abandoned mine recently, a cage lowering Guzman reached an earthen shelf where diggers were still excavating. A former miner had passed along a tip that soldiers had tossed "something" into the shaft and set off explosives to cover it up in the final days of the dictatorship in the late 1980s. Diggers making their way through heaps of rotting trash had found evidence of an unusual explosion, but after eight days of labor they still have two yards to go before reaching the site where any remains might be found. "We've got to try, because recovering the bodies restores part of the damage that was done," Guzman said. "When we returned past remains to families, some of them kissed the skulls. They had found peace." The next day, Guzman led a caravan to Pisagua, an infamous military prison on the nearby Pacific coast. In 1990, one of the first mass graves of the Pinochet era was found there. Originally on page 9A in the 1-27-2000 issue of the Daily.