McCain’s Rendezvous with Pinochet

McCain Also Has a Skeleton–Pinochet

THE RECENT disclosure by award-winning journalist John Dinges on Huffington Post that Senator John McCain met privately with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1985 is more significant than it may seem. While the meeting may have taken place over twenty years ago, it raises fundamental questions about McCain’s political judgment. Certainly McCain’s warm, friendly meeting with a brutal dictator defies the candidate’s well-honed image.

The meeting reveals, above all, the disingenuousness of McCain’s key contentions. The McCain camp has relied heavily on two accusations to discredit Senator Barack Obama: Obama’s purported ties to a domestic terrorist (Bill Ayers) and his naive willingness to negotiate with dictators. At the same time, the McCain campaign has been unrelenting in highlighting its candidate’s foreign policy experience and long record as a bipartisan, independent leader. News of the meeting with Pinochet undermines both sets of claims.

Timing is everything, and the McCain-Pinochet meeting needs to be put in its proper context. The meeting took place a dozen years after the bloody coup led by Pinochet and, at the time, the dictator’s responsibility for the deaths and torture of thousands of people was well documented and widely known. In addition, Pinochet’s ongoing refusal to extradite former members of his secret police accused of committing a terrorist act on U.S. soil—the 1976 car-bombing assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronni Moffitt in Washington D.C.—was also known.

At the time of McCain’s meeting, international pressure against Pinochet was mounting as pro-democracy forces in Chile took to the streets and serious rights abuses persisted. With the United States moving to promote democracy, numerous congressmen traveled to Chile to bolster the forces of reform. But unlike McCain, many of them met with progressive elements and representatives of civil society, rather than with the sitting dictator.

Why should this brief episode—a 30-minute encounter between McCain and Pinochet—matter today? The answer is that the meeting, buried until now in declassified documents, turns a series of “guilt by association” charges that the McCain campaign has launched against Obama on their head. Nowhere in this encounter is McCain, the self-described maverick, visible. He has been supplanted by McCain the opportunist.

Sonia Cardenas is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Human Rights Program at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the author of Conflict and Compliance: State Responses to International Human Rights Pressure (2007). Homepage photo: Emilio Kopaitic (Wikimedia Commons / public domain).