ON THE occasion of General Augusto Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, his former Minister of Home Affairs, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, appalled by the demonstrations against the general in the British capital, expressed his desire to "make a movie" to educate international public opinion about what really happened in Chile under military rule.

Ten years later, one could say that with The Judge and the General, the film by Elizabeth Farnsworth and Patricio Lanfranco, his wish has come true, though not necessarily along the lines Jarpa would have liked to. The documentary, recently nominated for an Emmy in the category of 'Outstanding Historical Programming', was released in 2008, and shown on Public Broadcasting Service television. The Emmys will be announced on September 21 in New York City.

Codirectors

Many would say that the codirectors - Ms Farnsworth, an American journalist, and Lanfranco, a Chilean reporter - fully deserve the award for the film.

The story is told from the perspective of Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, the Justice of the Santiago Court of Appeals who, in January 1998, was assigned, by the luck of the draw, to handle the criminal cases filed against General Pinochet. In March of that year, the latter would leave his position as Army Chief to join the Senate as a senator-for-life.

As the narrative unfolds, one senses the changes from Guzmán's initial scepticism to his subsequent horror at the findings he uncovers.

Coming from an upper-middle class background, the son of a noted writer and diplomat, Judge Guzmán's life embodied in many ways what the Chilean Judiciary during the dictatorship was all about.

Politically conservative, he supported the candidacy of right-wing Jorge Alessandri in the 1970 elections won by Salvador Allende. He also welcomed the 9/11 1973 military coup.

During the military regime, Judge Guzmán pursued his judicial career, including postings to faraway provincial towns. He kept his distance from the attempts of human rights defenders to obtain protection from the Chilean Judiciary. Some 10,000 habeas corpus petitions were submitted in those years to the courts. They were rejected.

As he gets deeper into the cases, he realises how many victims, including quite a few of the detenidos-desaparecidos (that is, the 'disappeared'), were not even political leaders as such, but rather, young, emblematic figures - artists like singer V'ctor Jara or academics like 23-year-old sociologist Manuel Donoso. They were surgically targeted in operations like the infamous 'Caravan of Death' that traversed Chile from north to south in late 1973, shooting some 97 detainees.

Curiously, the film does not dwell on what would turn out to be one of the key challenges facing Judge Guzmán. In 1978, the military junta approved an Amnesty Law, whose net effect was to extinguish all responsibility for human rights violations committed from the day of the coup onwards.

What to do?

Judge Guzmán came up with a solution. In the case of the 'disappeared', it was not a crime that could be characterised as having been completed (say, like a homicide), but one that was still unfolding (like a kidnapping). As no bodies were available, the presumption was that the crime was still taking course, and thus not covered by the 1978 Amnesty Law.

In this, a deep irony was at work. To make his opponents disappear, a technique some say was invented by Pinochet, had as its main purpose to spread terror. The sudden disappearance of a loved one is something that has a lasting effect on family, friends and associates, sowing eternal doubts about an eventual return.

The fact that one of the main instruments of state terrorism would end up generating the key legal tool to bring those perpetrators to justice has a poetic ring to it. Judge Guzmán, the son of a noted poet, and himself fully trilingual, must have appreciated this.

Upon returning from London in March 2000, Pinochet was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and spent the next six years fighting off hundreds of criminal proceedings against him. Though never convicted, he died in 2006 with his reputation in tatters. Today, some 50 of his former military and civilian collaborators - including, without precedent in any dictatorship, the head of the secret police, are behind bars. Another 200 await trial.