Philippe Sands, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025. 480 pages.
In 2018 I wrote for Inroads about the power transfer in Chile from the socialist Michelle Bachelet to the conservative Sebastián Piñera. I included some background about the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and the years of violent repression that followed under Augusto Pinochet, and Inroads editors advised that I highlight that period more prominently. I demurred, arguing that the political shift had more to do with contemporary economics than past abuses of human rights. Far be it from me to diminish the significance of that horrible era, but North American and European audiences tended to dwell on it and showed little curiosity about more recent positive developments in Chile’s affairs.
That said, events of 1973 through 1990 do have a morbid attraction. The publication of Philippe Sands’s 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia again opens that eerily creaking door. Sands is a renowned international lawyer and author. He worked on the case to extradite Pinochet from the U.K. where the retired dictator was temporarily resident in the late 1990s. The address 38 Londres Street is a building in the heart of the Chilean capital, Santiago, that served as a reception and torture chamber for many political detainees.
Sands gives a detailed account of the legal process against Pinochet that started with a Spanish judge’s ruling. The judge asserted that his court had the authority under evolving international jurisdiction to extradite Pinochet to Spain to face trial for the murder of Spanish citizens in Chile. The subsequent legal pursuit in the U.K. resulted in the House of Lords first endorsing the Spanish judgement, then overturning it after the revelation that one of the peer judges had a conflict of interest. Pinochet was eventually returned to Chile under a political agreement between the U.K. and Chilean governments.
The cut and thrust of the legal chess game that arrived at this result is fascinating, but Sands’s account is made much more intriguing by the parallel story of the activities of the Nazi Walther Rauff, who took refuge in Chile after the Second World War. Rauff was no minor figure. He was responsible for the design and deployment under Adolf Eichmann of death trucks that piped their emissions’ carbon monoxide into the freight compartments packed with imprisoned Jewish families.
Sands describes how Rauff managed to evade the reach of the Nuremberg trials and bring himself and his family to Peru where – and here history starts to rhyme – he met Augusto Pinochet, then a military attaché in the Chilean embassy in Lima. With Pinochet’s quiet sponsorship, Rauff made it to Chile, and in a darkly ironic twist the murderer who had fled prosecution at Nuremberg became an informant for the West German government trying to monitor international Communist activity.
Rauff’s presence in Chile was hardly a secret. In a case of West German authorities acting at cross purposes, an extradition request was filed against Rauff but failed, essentially on the technical grounds that the charges against him were said to exceed Chile’s statute of limitations. The Chilean press continued to report on Rauff’s presence in the country even as he moved to its southernmost city, Punta Arenas, to manage a crab cannery. The Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, known for his darkly sinister fictions, made several allusions to Rauff (under the name of Raef) in his novel By Night in Chile.
Sands darkens the landscape through careful reporting on Rauff’s late-life career as director of torture for Pinochet’s intelligence agency, the DINA. From 38 Londres where the torture sessions were held, vans of the company Pesquera Arauco would travel regularly to a fishmeal factory in the coastal city of San Antonio. Many Chilean dissidents were known to have been taken from there by helicopter and dropped tied to train rails into the cold waters of the Pacific.
There is also evidence that some bodies were baked and ground into fishmeal, some of which found its way to local poultry farms. “Can you imagine, when we were eating eggs, we were eating humans?” says one of Sands’s sources, a waiter on the staff of Manuel Contreras, head of the DINA, who also supervised the factory (Contreras died in prison in 2015). Among gruesome crimes of the Pinochet regime, this may be the most sordid. Rauff is known to have been in the vicinity, where he was able to employ his expertise in the movement of vans and fish plant operations.
Pinochet stepped down as dictator 36 years ago following a democratic plebiscite that refused his offer to remain. The successful No vote was an unexpected triumph of a peaceful transition of power. Rauff died in 1984, Pinochet in 2006. Neither was ever tried and both were unrepentant. Rauff told friends that “coming to terms with the past was nonsense” and he wrote in letters to family in Germany, “I regret nothing that I have done in my life and would change nothing.” Pinochet declared in a statement issued when he died that the coup and repression were necessary.
For three years between 2014 and 2017, I worked in the Canadian embassy in Santiago as head of the trade program. It was inevitable that during our work we would encounter stories about the horrors of the Pinochet years and even some denialism. In a lunch with several businesspeople shortly after my arrival, a Chilean representative of a Canadian company said, “I grew up in those years. They said bodies would turn up in the Maipu River. I never saw any.” A local lawyer, although of conservative bent, couldn’t abide such blindness. “There were; there were,” he chided.
An eerie magnetism drew me to the door of 38 Londres, located in a neighbourhood designed by an early-20th-century developer to mimic a quaint European style. It was just around the corner from the San Francisco Church, a historic building dating from the days of Pedro de Valdivia, Santiago’s colonial founder. The charming exterior and surroundings seemed incongruous with what had gone on inside.
On a business trip to Punta Arenas to meet a Canadian investor, I saw a resilient maritime city well situated as a commercial hub and jumping-off point for Antarctic scientific expeditions. Across the deep waters on an arm of the Strait of Magellan were Dawson Island, once the site of a Pinochet concentration camp that faithfully mimicked Nazi antecedents in Europe, and the Pesquera Camelio cannery formerly managed by Rauff. My job as a trade commissioner was to advise Canadian business about market opportunities, which were plentiful. I was eager to be forward-looking and optimistic within reason and regard the political troubles of the past as largely irrelevant to Canadian business interests, which they essentially were despite the memories haunting so many.
On March 11 this year, José Antonio Kast became the new President of Chile. Kast is the son of a Second World War German army officer and Nazi Party member who emigrated to Chile in 1950. This was Kast’s third run at the presidency. In his first two attempts, he did not hide his view that the Pinochet dictatorship was a necessary corrective to Salvador Allende’s efforts to deliver a radical socialist program. There are many Chileans who believe today that Allende and his most left-leaning supporters were playing with fire and recklessly provoking confrontation, but remain appalled by the measures the military employed to crush them.
Kast was more circumspect in his successful third run, but has since mused about releasing some of the officers convicted of Pinochet-era crimes. He cites humanitarian grounds, pointing to their failing health. Justice should prevail over vengeance, he has said. He has also made the point that soldiers and officials who may have taken part in functional roles as jailers or van drivers should not be pursued. Interestingly, just such individuals are sources for Sands’s evidence for the macabre logistics surrounding the fishmeal plant.
Kast replaces as president Gabriel Boric, a once-radical student and community organizer, who was elected in the wake of social unrest about the inadequacy of Chilean social services and pension programs. Those concerns seemed to dissipate before a rise in crime in Chile, publicly associated with immigration. Venezuelan refugees from the Chavista regime have been singled out. Kast rode those worries to the presidency, winning 58 per cent of the popular vote. Boric’s efforts to reenergize investigations of the murders and disappearances under Pinochet will undoubtedly be shelved.
Sands book has reillumined – or perhaps sharpened the shadows of – the past. Yes, it does serve to heighten the persistent obsession with those events. But perhaps the more valuable impact of the book will be to restore some faith in the effectiveness of international law. Although Pinochet ran out the clock on his own prosecution, the law did box him in. That is perhaps the best endorsement – despite constant scepticism – for not relenting in efforts to bring to justice world leaders who perpetrate kidnapping and murders for reasons of state.
