NEWS ABOUT CHILE Journalist rueful at Pinochet arrest The TV journalist whose interview with Chile's Augusto Pinochet helped prosecutors charge the former dictator expressed regret at her role in the case. OSCAR CORRAL, The Miami Herald March 18th Television journalist Maria Elvira Salazar set out to score a rare interview with Gen. Augusto Pinochet, but she never imagined it would lead to his arrest. Chilean officials say Salazar's interview, broadcast in November 2003, helped give them enough evidence to place Pinochet under house arrest in December. The Harvard-educated Salazar, an aggressive interviewer who has her own show, Maria Elvira Confronta, on Miami's WDLP Channel 22, is not entirely comfortable with her unwitting role in Pinochet's imprisonment. ''I feel very bad,'' she said. ``I did not want to cause him problems. Someone who had already put legal issues behind him is now entangled in new legal problems because of me.'' Few Latin American leaders have aroused as much emotion as Pinochet. Conservative sympathizers view him as Chile's savior for wresting power from the hands of communists, but detractors say he was a tyrant -- torturing, killing and jailing to keep power. More than 3,000 Chileans were killed by security forces during his 17-year regime, which began after he overthrew the freely-elected socialist Salvador Allende. After viewing Salazar's interview with Pinochet, 89, Chilean Judge Juan Guzman Tapia on Dec. 13 indicted Pinochet on charges of kidnapping nine political dissidents and killing one of them. Guzman used the interview to establish that Pinochet is mentally competent to face a criminal trial. ''It would have been difficult to jail him without that interview,'' said Chilean Supreme Court spokesman Miguel Gonzalez. ``The judge concluded that a person who could give an interview and respond to questions in a clear form, as he did in that interview, is capable of going on trial.'' ''The interview lasted more than 30 minutes and Pinochet appeared very lucid,'' said Eduardo Contreras, a top prosecutor in the case. ``It obviously was an important marker that Pinochet was not mentally disabled.'' Pinochet's defense lawyers, Pablo Rodriguez-Grez, and Ambrosio Rodriguez, could not be reached for comment. YEARS OF PURSUIT To interview Pinochet, Salazar pressed him and his family for years, even sneaking into Pinochet's house in London with his grandson when he was under house arrest there in 1999 on human-rights charges. Back then, she was the top anchorwoman for Telemundo. She took pictures with Pinochet then, but Scotland Yard refused to let her take a video camera into the house. So she settled for just meeting him. She called members of Pinochet's family frequently until 2003, when they finally agreed to let her interview him in Santiago. It had been about a year since he was cleared of the charges against him in London, and the Supreme Court in Chile had deemed him mentally unfit to stand trial. Pinochet declared on camera to Salazar that it was ``the last interview I will give in my life.'' During the hour-long interview, he cracked a few jokes and struck a defiant attitude. ''What do I have to be sorry for?'' he asked. Pinochet also acknowledged that under his rule, ''excesses'' were committed by ``people who don't control themselves.'' In response to a question on his leadership, Pinochet said: ``That's difficult -- how one sees one's self. Always as an angel. I have no regrets at all. I have not assassinated anyone. I haven't ordered the killing of anyone. I feel that would be an aberration. I am a Christian first, then the rest.'' Salazar said she was so shocked at her unwitting role in Pinochet's indictment that she wrote a letter to his lawyers telling them that Pinochet committed many mistakes, had mental lapses and was so often incoherent during the interview that it had to be ``extensively edited.'' Contreras, the prosecutor, said Salazar set out to help Pinochet with the interview ``but ended up sinking him.'' 'She tried to defend him and say, `Poor little Pinochet was very old and tired during the interview,' '' Contreras said. ``But it was too late. The die was cast. We appreciate the interview.'' Salazar insists that Pinochet was making a ''great physical effort'' to speak during the interview and that she wrote the letter because Pinochet's lawyers called her and asked her to describe what he was like during the interview. The biggest reason Pinochet granted Salazar the interview, she said, is that she is a Cuban American from Miami and Pinochet believes that the Cuban exile community is one of the few groups across Latin America that understood his role in preventing Chile from becoming another Cuba. ''That's one of the main reasons they had agreed to give me the interview, not because I'm special,'' she said. A JOURNALIST ONLY Salazar, who also once landed a one-hour exclusive interview with Fidel Castro , sees herself as a journalist, not a prosecutor, she said. ''It seems like my role is to inform, not persecute people that I am interviewing,'' Salazar said. Trying Pinochet for crimes committed under his rule has important implications for Chile and for democracy in Latin America, said University of Miami Latin America expert Robin Rosenberg. ''Chile is quite possibly the only country in Latin America that can go through this painful process of evaluating the past crimes of a dictatorship,'' Rosenberg said. ``It's a sign of the strength of democracy in Chile.''

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