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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHO GETS AWAY WITH CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY?  
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Andre Pagliarini
October 10, 2025
The New Republic
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_ How dictators and Nazis have eluded the international justice
system—with help from their friends. _

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38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in
PatagoniaPhilippe SandsKnopfISBN: 9780593319758

From Nuremberg to The Hague, the postwar order promised a universal
standard of justice. In practice, it has delivered something else: a
system that shields the powerful and their allies, and reserves
prosecution for poorer, weaker countries. The same states that helped
draft the rules have worked just as hard to ensure
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that those rules almost never apply to their own leaders. This
selective enforcement is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.
The case brought last year by South Africa at the International Court
of Justice accusing Israel of genocide, a charge co-signed by several
other countries, big and small, is only one of the most recent tests
of whether the promise of impartial justice can survive geopolitical
reality. 

The rise of reactionary “anti-globalist” political movements has
rendered the possibility of international justice ever more shaky in
recent years. During his first term as president, Donald Trump
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hostility to the very notion of universal rights. Seeing a ruler’s
power as essentially absolute, he extolled Saddam Hussein’s brutal
record on counterterrorism in Iraq and celebrated the authoritarian
“leadership” of Vladimir Putin. Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch have warned that the second Trump administration will
likely further erode the rights of vulnerable people at home and
abroad. The recently constructed Alligator Alcatraz in Florida—a
slapdash detention center surrounded by swamps and predatory
wildlife—is a brutally surreal symbol of state cruelty.

 
American politicians have long floated above the reach of global human
rights law no matter how egregious their conduct. While U.S. leaders
have escaped the scrutiny reserved for the likes of Slobodan
Milošević, Charles Taylor, and Laurent Gbagbo, they have also
frequently intervened on behalf of friends accused of horrific acts.
When the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest
of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year, Senator Tom
Cotton dismissed
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“kangaroo court” with no standing to bring charges. “If you help
the ICC, we’re going to crush your economy,” Senator Lindsey
Graham intoned. Earlier this year, the Trump White House sanctioned
the ICC, an act U.N. experts said “strikes at the very heart of the
international criminal justice system.” 

In a postwar global order defined overwhelmingly by U.S. actors
serving U.S. interests, the miracle might be that any world leader
friendly with Washington has ever been held liable for their gruesome
deeds in an international court of justice. Augusto Pinochet was
likely comfortably assured of his impunity when he was awakened
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London hospital by Scotland Yard officials on the evening of October
16, 1998. Two detectives and an interpreter were there to place the
82-year-old retired army general under arrest for crimes committed
during the ruthless dictatorship he ran in Chile for almost two
decades. “I know the fucker who’s behind this,” Pinochet said.
“It’s that communist Garcés, Juan Garcés.”

He was right. As a young man, Garcés had become a friend and adviser
to President Salvador Allende, the democratic socialist overthrown on
September 11, 1973, in a violent coup led by Pinochet with the Nixon
administration’s support. “Someone has to recount what happened
here, and only you can do it,” Allende told Garcés on the day he
died. Garcés went on to study law in Paris and returned to his native
Spain in 1975 after the death of strongman
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Francisco Franco. Garcés then spent years organizing the legal case
against Pinochet under universal jurisdiction, a legal principle
allowing prosecution for torture and crimes against humanity
regardless of where they occurred or the nationality of the
perpetrators and victims. In coordination with human rights groups, he
worked closely with a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, who ultimately
issued the warrant that led British authorities to detain Pinochet.

 

Philippe Sands was an attorney for Human Rights Watch, one of the
groups pressing for the prosecution of Pinochet at the time. In _38
Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in
Patagonia_
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_he offers more than personal recollections of the case, which he
calls “one of the most important international criminal cases since
Nuremberg.” As he uncovers the surprising links between Pinochet’s
Chile, Franco’s Spain, and the shadowy remnants of the Third Reich
on the run, Sands weaves a chilling transnational history of
twentieth-century atrocity. What emerges is a profoundly humane
examination of the legal, political, and ideological networks that
make impunity possible, and a study of the moral clarity needed to
confront power when it shields itself behind a uniform, a border, or a
flag.

 

For Garcés, bringing Pinochet to justice was a means of reckoning
with the legacies of the Spanish Civil War, fought from 1936 to 1939
between an elected republican government and a fascist military
uprising led by Franco. The conflict claimed well over a hundred
thousand lives and displaced millions more. As the then–U.S.
ambassador to Madrid later recalled, “it was evident to any
intelligent observer that the war in Spain was not a civil war.”
Something larger and more ominous was afoot: “Here would be staged
the dress rehearsal for the totalitarian war on liberty and democracy
in Europe.” After Franco’s victory, some 15,000 Spanish
Republicans were sent
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to Nazi concentration camps. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish
dictator outlived World War II, serving for decades as a beacon of
reaction for authoritarian traditionalists the world over.

As historian Kirsten Weld has shown
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crucial figures in the Chilean dictatorship understood themselves to
be following in Franco’s footsteps. The Pinochet regime, like
Franco’s, sought to impose a conservative, nationalist order that
rejected liberal democracy and leftist movements of any kind,
justifying brutal measures—including disappearances, torture, and
extrajudicial killings—as necessary to preserve order and
civilization. Three years after the coup, Pinochet himself told U.S.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that events in his country
represented “a further stage of the same conflict which erupted into
the Spanish Civil War.” (Kissinger, for his part, considered
Pinochet “a victim of all left‑wing groups around the world.”)

 

It was in Spain, too, however, that legal activists began the battle
to prosecute the Chilean dictator for his crimes. Central to this
effort was the case of Antonio Llido, a Spanish priest arrested in
Santiago in 1974. Witnesses asserted Llido was badly tortured before
he disappeared forever, one of thousands murdered by the state. With
the return of democracy in Chile in the 1990s, Chilean and Spanish
human rights groups filed complaints on behalf of Llido and other
victims, triggering investigations in Spain that culminated in
Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998. The ex-dictator claimed
immunity from arrest as a former head of state. But in a highly
publicized ruling, the House of Lords—at the time, the United
Kingdom’s highest court of appeals—found that former heads of
state could not claim immunity for torture charges after 1988, the
year that conspiracy to torture outside the United Kingdom became a
crime in English law. On other points, however, the decision was
mixed, allowing the pro- and anti-immunity sides to claim partial
victory. The lords left Pinochet’s fate up to Home Secretary Jack
Straw. For a moment, it seemed entirely plausible that Pinochet would
be extradited to Spain, where Chilean survivors were preparing to
testify against him.

Yet Pinochet never stood trial. Behind the scenes, the ex-dictator’s
powerful allies weighed in on his behalf. In 1982, Margaret Thatcher
had reportedly
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given him her word that he could seek medical care in Britain as
needed in exchange for support against Argentina during the Falklands
War. “During his annual trips to London, Pinochet says, he always
sends Thatcher flowers and a box of chocolates, and whenever possible
they meet for tea,” journalist Jon Lee Anderson wrote
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1998, just days before Pinochet’s arrest. In the aftermath, Thatcher
wrote Prime Minister Tony Blair to lobby for her friend’s release.
The Vatican also quietly yet forcefully pleaded for a “humanitarian
gesture” from British authorities. For its part, the Chilean
government under President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle—hardly a Pinochet
defender—demanded the former strongman’s release in the name of
national sovereignty and political reconciliation at home. They all
got their way. After 16 months under house arrest in Britain, Pinochet
was sent home in March 2000 by Straw. The Spanish case met a dead end.

What makes Sands’s account of this legal drama so compelling is the
way he weaves it into both the story of democratic reconstruction in
post-dictatorial South America and the broader trajectory of his
long-running investigations into atrocity and impunity. Indeed, one
way of understanding _38 Londres Street_ is as the final piece of a
Sands trilogy on atrocity and impunity that includes _East West
Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against
Humanity”_ (2016) and _The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious
Death of a Nazi Fugitive _(2020). Research for both of those works led
him to the other major character in this latest book: former SS
commander Walther Rauff.

Rauff was born in 1906 in Köthen, a town roughly a hundred miles from
Berlin. In 1924, the year Adolf Hitler was imprisoned for leading
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the Beer Hall Putsch, Rauff joined the German navy. He soon visited
South America for the first time, landing in the Chilean port of
Valparaíso in late 1925. “Making his way to the Naval Academy,”
Sands writes, “Rauff passed the San Rafael Seminary, where one of
the pupils was ten-year-old Augusto Pinochet.” This was not the last
time the two would be so close.

A dutiful Rauff excelled in the armed forces until he began an
extramarital affair that culminated in a nasty divorce and military
court proceedings against him in 1937. That same year, he joined the
Nazi Party. In 1938, the year of the Munich Agreement and
Kristallnacht, Rauff joined the SS, the elite Nazi paramilitary
organization led by Heinrich Himmler. Decades later, Rauff’s Chilean
grandson would tell Sands he liked to imagine him as a reluctant
collaborator. Sands’s careful research shows, however, that Rauff
was a true believer. He stood out for his technical prowess and would
prove to be an innovator in atrocity. He closely oversaw the design
and implementation of mobile gas vans used to murder Jews, Roma, and
Soviet civilians in the occupied Eastern territories. “The main
issue for me was that the shootings were a considerable burden for the
men who were in charge thereof, and this burden was removed through
the use of the gas vans,” Rauff later remarked.

In late 1942, Rauff led a special unit in Tunis that persecuted and
killed Jews. By September 1943, he was transferred to Italy, where he
would meet Mussolini—but not before participating with Karl Wolff,
Germany’s military governor of northern Italy, in secret talks with
Allied forces, who had landed in Sicily that summer. “In return for
peace, he and Wolff hoped to avoid prosecution.” In Switzerland in
early 1945, Rauff met Allen Dulles—the powerful
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representative of the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence
body that would become the CIA (both the State Department and the CIA
have made available troves of documents pertaining to Rauff).

 

Held in a POW camp after the end of the war, Rauff escaped in December
1946 and spent over a year hiding in an Italian monastery. Like many
Nazi fugitives, he fled across the Atlantic. In a letter uncovered by
Sands, Rauff advised a former high-ranking SS officer and Nazi
official: “Accept the current situation and you can achieve a lot
and climb back up the ladder … The main thing is to get out of
Europe … and focus on the ‘reassembling of good forces for a later
operation.’” Rauff suggested South America.

In early 1950, Rauff and his family arrived in Ecuador, where they set
about creating a new life. Rauff engaged in various business dealings
and, as was revealed decades later, did some spying for West Germany.
His sons took military paths, with support and letters of
recommendation from friendly Chilean officials stationed in
Quito—including Pinochet, then in his early forties. The future
strongman had joined the army in the 1930s, a time when Chile’s
military was considered one of the most modern and professional in
South America. Pinochet rose steadily through the ranks, holding
command positions in various army units. In 1956, he was invited for a
teaching stint at Ecuador’s War Academy. “Pinochet and Rauff, and
their wives, became socially close, bonded by a virulent
anti-communist sentiment, respect of matters German and a mutual
interest in Nazidom,” Sands explains, undercutting Pinochet’s
later claim of never having met the escaped SS officer with a direct
hand in the murder of thousands. The two men saw each other as allies
in a shared epic struggle bigger than themselves.

In the late 1950s, Rauff settled in Chile. He joined a large German
expatriate community and made an ostensible living as manager of a
crab cannery near the country’s southern tip while continuing to
write reports for West German intelligence. Accountability eventually
came for certain high-profile Nazis in hiding. Adolf Eichmann, who
managed
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many of the logistics of the Holocaust, also fled to South America
after the war. He was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960;
taken to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against humanity, war
crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people; and executed by hanging
in June 1962. Rauff himself was apprehended in 1962 in what Sands sees
as a parallel with Pinochet: “two men arrested at 11 p.m., on
charges of mass murder, with a request for extradition from one
country to another.” Rauff assured his family that he was safe, that
the high-profile connections he had established in Chile would shield
him from Eichmann’s fate. He was right.

 
Pinochet’s rise to power no doubt set Rauff’s mind at ease. The
dictatorship repeatedly rebuffed fresh extradition requests from West
Germany and Israel, even as Nazi hunters like Beate Klarsfeld and
Simon Wiesenthal located war criminals. For Pinochet, harboring Rauff
was neither accident nor oversight. As Sands makes clear, Pinochet’s
regime was ideologically aligned with the arch-traditionalism of
Francoist Spain and the repressive anti-communist order that Nazi
veterans represented. Rauff, an unrepentant party man who celebrated
the Führer’s birthday every year, embodied both the continuity of
far-right authoritarianism from the 1930s to the Cold War and the
conviction that leftist politics were an existential threat to be
eradicated.

Sands examines these overlapping life histories and political
narratives with sensitivity and clear eyes. He is not inflammatory or
accusatory. Rather, through meticulous archival research, interviews,
and vivid reporting in several countries, he allows readers to trace
surprising—and damning—connections across time and place. Sands
himself is often the vessel for these discoveries. He recounts walks
in recent years through unassuming Santiago neighborhoods, retracing
with torture survivors the footsteps of political detainees and
observing the architecture of state violence, unchanged in a Chile
that is otherwise vastly different. He visits the site of the former
Socialist Party headquarters, turned after the coup into a notorious
center of interrogation and torture, at the titular
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38 Londres Street. The book includes photos that reflect Sands’s
personal, memoiristic style: snapshots of rooms, buildings, and
people, evidently taken by the author himself. The effect is to
heighten the reader’s sense of accompanying Sands on a chilling
journey into a human rights heart of darkness.

When Rauff died peacefully in Santiago in 1984, surrounded by his sons
and grandchildren, the Pinochet government had shielded him for more
than a decade. His funeral drew open displays of Nazi salutes, a final
reminder that the ideological underpinnings of his crimes were far
from extinct. In this light, Pinochet’s own confidence in his
untouchability seems less like personal hubris and more like the
logical conclusion of a system in which those who serve the right
cause, in the eyes of powerful patrons, are protected no matter the
enormity of their crimes. Just as Rauff eluded the hands of justice,
so, too, did Pinochet hope to evade the authority of any court. That
he was wrong, even briefly, is why his arrest in London still
resonates: It was proof, however fleeting, that the walls built to
shelter the powerful can be breached. Pinochet was eventually sent
home to Chile rather than Spain, where he would have stood trial.
Claiming concerns for his health, he left London in a wheelchair that
he abandoned on the tarmac in Santiago. He died in 2006 at the age of
91.

Sands insists that the spectacle of the dictator’s arrest was not
for naught. It helped lay the legal groundwork for the successful
domestic prosecution of other members of the regime. Unlike Brazil,
for example, which never held any agents of its Cold War–era
dictatorship criminally liable for human rights violations, Chile made
significant legal strides. Over the past two decades, hundreds of
military officers have been indicted and dozens convicted for their
involvement in forced disappearances and assassinations of dissidents
in Chile and beyond.

Chile’s protection of Rauff was of a piece with the regime’s use
of former Nazis and fascists as advisers, trainers, and symbols of a
militant anti-communist international. It was also a vivid
demonstration of the formal and informal mechanisms that sustain
impunity—convenient legal loopholes and mutually beneficial
alliances binding together fundamentally anti-democratic actors across
continents and decades. Our attention to these networks should serve
more than historical understanding. Sands, who last year argued
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against the legality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine at the
International Court of Justice, understands this implicitly. In a
moment defined by a lack of accountability, the Pinochet precedent
reminds us that impunity is not inevitable. It is a political choice
that can be—and has sometimes been—reversed.

 

Andre Pagliarini is an assistant professor of history and
international studies at Louisiana State University, a fellow at the
Washington Brazil Office, and nonresident expert at the Quincy
Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

* dictators
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* crimes against humanity
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* impunity
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* Fascism
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