From
sfweekly.com
Originally published by SF Weekly Mar 03, 2004
©2004 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Obsessive
Pursuit
Years after her brother was murdered in
BY LISA
LAMBERT
Zita Cabello-Barrueto
sat in a chilly convent near the bottom of the world, yearning for justice. The
only other person in the almost bare room was a nun who wouldn't look her in
the eye.
From her home in
Cabello-Barrueto, a shy, middle-aged former UC Santa Cruz
professor, had taken the unusual step of suing over the slaying of her beloved
older sibling Winston Cabello during
The soldier, Armando
Fernandez Larios, was thought to have been a member of a mobile execution squad
that traveled around
Shortly after the coup,
Cabello-Barrueto and her husband fled to the Bay
Area. Haunted by her brother's death, however, Cabello-Barrueto
had returned to
In 2001, Cabello-Barrueto's investigation took her to the convent in
Fulvia Fuentealva
was an austere and imposing figure: 6 feet tall and wearing a long gray tunic
and a cross at her throat. Though only in her late teens in
1973, she had been arrested for her political sympathies. According to
another witness, Fernandez Larios interrogated her, at first exhibiting
remarkable politeness. But when Fuentealva sat down
without his permission, he exploded, beating her until she lay bleeding on the
floor. Fernandez Larios then loaded four of her friends into a jeep, leaving no
room for her. He and some other soldiers drove the friends to a field and
allegedly shot them to death.
For some reason, the
soldiers didn't return for Fuentealva.
But the nun didn't want
to talk about it. A trial, she complained, might upset her sick mother. Her
superiors wouldn't let her testify. Besides, it all happened long ago, and she
was too busy now working with children and poor people.
Cabello-Barrueto was direct with her. "Your best friend died
and you are probably the only witness," she said. "You are becoming
an accomplice."
Fuentealva didn't want to hear that.
Cabello-Barrueto quickly switched tactics, appealing
to the nun's sense of justice.
"I don't care about
justice," Fuentealva retorted. She'd already
made her peace with God.
Her attitude stunned
Cabello-Barrueto. Justice was the most important
thing in her life. She had given up her UC job over her obsessive pursuit of
Fernandez Larios. Friends were distancing themselves from her, some even
abandoning her altogether.
In the end, the
diminutive academic ran Fernandez Larios to ground. With the help of a
But that day was still
far in the future. Here in this frigid convent, another door had been slammed
in her face. The tight-lipped nun called Cabello-Barrueto
a cab.
On Sept. 11, 1973, the
Chilean capital of
Where Zita
Cabello-Barrueto lived, 400 miles to the north in Copiapo, the day was peaceful. "Everything was
happening in
There were no palaces in Copiapo, a dusty copper-mining town in the
Then 26, Cabello-Barrueto was a teacher at the Copiapo
branch of the
A white van resembling an
ambulance zoomed past her. She recognized her older brother, the tall and
angular Winston, and her husband, baby-faced Pautrizio
Barrueto, inside their official government vehicle.
Winston was the economic planning director for the regional government and Pautrizio, nicknamed Pato, was
his assistant.
"Winston had been
with his hand on every major decision in the province," Pato explains.
The men told Zita they'd been at the airport, which makes her laugh now.
"They went over there thinking they would have a flying lesson," she
says. But the military had grounded all planes.
Zita got in the van, and they all rode
to Zita and Pato's
one-bedroom house for lunch. Winston talked about a miner who'd offered to show
him a back road leading out of the country. But Winston said he didn't think
escaping was necessary, and Zita didn't contradict
him.
The three had developed a
special friendship while studying at the
At a folkloric
performance, Zita met Pato,
Winston's friend. Pato noticed that she danced
"with an air of elegance and propriety." Their first official date
was to Winston's wedding, when he married a woman named Veronica.
Winston, Zita, and Pato dreamed of
building a new
But society was
transforming in a way they'd never foreseen.
Zita told herself the military
government would last six months before new elections were held (in fact,
Pinochet remained
"There was shooting
and killing in
The violence that
saturated
That night, Pato and Zita took Winston a
sleeping bag and then returned home. Zita made
herself a cup of tea, and they stood in the kitchen talking. The possibility of
a coup had loomed for a while. In an attempt to socialize the country, Allende had launched a series of economic reforms that had
triggered long bread lines and incapacitating strikes. The
Zita once asked her older brother
during those months of turmoil what might happen under a coup. "In this
country," she remembers him saying, "they're
going to detain people. And they're going to kill them all, because it's too
expensive to have them in jail." Now, Zita
worried deeply about Winston.
"Do you think they
are going to kill him?" she asked Pato.
Her husband didn't
answer. Zita dropped her cup of tea, which shattered
on the floor.
Life slowly twisted into
a new shape over the next few weeks. Zita missed the
announcement that all Allende supporters were fired
from the
Pato put on his best suit and went to
the office of Incandente Haag to plead for
Winston's release. Even though the secretary wouldn't let him past the lobby,
he went to the mayor's office again and again. On his fifth attempt, the
secretary had Pato arrested.
"I looked around and
saw so many people I knew," Pato recalls. He
liked to kid around to make points and get people talking. But a jail full of
newly detained political prisoners was no place to be a comedian. "I asked
what time the meeting was going to start. One of my friends said, 'Shut up,
motherfucker.'"
By then Winston had been
transferred to the local military garrison. "Winston had more physical
access to the military prosecutor [who oversaw political detainees]," Pato says. "He obtained permission to have a birthday
party, to get a television installed. He realized the military didn't know how
to have prisoners."
Zita was now supporting a household of
nine people, since Pato had offered their home as
refuge to other prisoners' wives. Three or four people slept in each bed. She
made lunches and walked the food every day to the prison and the garrison for
the two men who'd been taken from her. She was exhausted.
On Oct. 14, Zita left the prison in tears after visiting Pato. The guards were rough on her and wouldn't let her
kiss her husband goodbye. When she arrived at the garrison, Winston hugged her
and tried to give her a sense of hope. "Even if someone cuts all the
flowers," she remembers him saying, "they
can't keep spring from returning."
He also had good news: He
was being released to a small town where he'd check in with an officer each day
under a type of house arrest called "town detention." Pato would also be given town detention after the military
prosecutor interrogated him.
And just as Winston said,
on the morning of Oct. 16 Pato was brought to the
garrison to meet the prosecutor. He was made to stand in front of a wall and
wait all day. At 5:30 that afternoon, the prosecutor emerged from an office,
stressed and hurried.
"You're not going to
be questioned today because there's a delegation coming from
Though Pato didn't know it at the time, the "delegation"
was the Caravan of Death. He was returned to a long dormitory at the prison.
Winston was being held there now, too. Pato went to
sleep on the bottom of a bunk bed. Across the room, Winston slept on the bottom
of another.
Around midnight, the door
opened and Pato awoke to see a soldier "in full
combat uniform and a machine gun hanging from his side." The trooper read
a list of 13 names. Winston's was on it.
The image of that soldier
burned into Pato's mind. "I remember his smile:
so cruel, so arrogant," he says. "His demeanor was so aggressive;
testosterone all over."
Pato watched as his best friend
dressed, putting on his suit over his pajamas. The soldier grew impatient and
yelled at him to hurry up. Winston, who was very particular about his clothes,
didn't have time to tie his shoes. Pato saw him
shuffle off into the night. Then he fell back asleep.
He never saw Winston
again.
In
The night Winston was
taken away, a drunken jail guard, Adolfo Gonzalez, showed up at his house and
told his wife, Veronica, that he was dead. Veronica sent Gonzalez home; why
should she believe this boozy fool? But the guard insisted he was telling the
truth. Her gave her the name of a garrison employee
who'd confirm everything.
The next morning, Zita heard rumors that Winston had died. She tried to visit
the garrison, but military people she hadn't seen before told her they didn't
have prisoners there. She wasn't sure what was happening. Veronica then talked
to the man who worked at the garrison. Winston, he said, was gone.
Zita refused to believe it. She'd
spoken to a lawyer who visited the garrison frequently and he'd said no one had
died. He invited her and Veronica to his office, promising to explain
everything. He asked them to bring a newspaper, which would detail the
sentences the prisoners received.
The women forgot the
newspaper, so while Zita waited for the lawyer,
Veronica ran off to get a copy. The man arrived before she returned. The next
few minutes changed Zita's life forever.
"He said, 'You
haven't brought a newspaper,'" Zita recalls.
"Then we saw Veronica, and we saw her face."
At that moment, Zita knew her brother had been killed. The newspaper
reported that 13 Copiapo prisoners were shot while
escaping. Their families were forbidden from burying or even seeing the bodies.
"Why did you lie to
me?" Zita asked the lawyer. Furious, she grabbed
him and started to shake him. But all he could say to her was, "I'm
sorry." The attorney, she later learned, was a military intelligence
agent.
Zita's world went dark. "Even my
trust in good people -- I lost it," she says. "There was nothing left
for you to do, because your life doesn't belong to you anymore. What's the
meaning of hope? They can kill you at any time."
With her older brother
and close friend dead, Zita understood anything could
happen in
Zita didn't know if Pato was alive or dead. Adolfo Gonzalez, the jailer who'd
told Veronica about Winston's death, now informed Zita
that Pato was OK but would soon be transferred to a
concentration camp. Zita went to the incandente's office, begging and pleading her way into a
five-minute meeting with Oscar Haag.
Once inside his office
she turned into a lioness.
"I made him
sit," she says. "I told him he was a liar. I was not there for an
explanation. I said, 'Send me to an island, but I want to go with my husband.'"
Haag acceded. He allowed
her to select a village, and sent Pato there for town
detention. Zita went with him. Then they finally got
a major break. Another older brother of Zita, Manuel,
was studying at UC Berkeley and could send his sister and brother-in-law
Before they left, though,
one of Zita's former co-workers at the technical
college who was now in the government's tourism office, Ximena
de la Barra, invited them to lunch. Zita was perplexed. What did this woman want to talk about?
In the middle of the meal
Pato got up to go to the restroom. The woman turned
to Zita.
"Do you know how
Winston died?" she asked. "Fernandez Larios killed him."
It was the first time Zita had heard that name, the first time she knew more than
the official account. De la Barra was a friend of
Fernandez Larios' psychiatrist, to whom Fernandez Larios had supposedly
confessed everything.
"It was a game for
them," Zita remembers de la Barra
saying.
De la Barra
said Winston was driven in a truck to a field and ordered to get out so he
could be shot while running away.
But, she said, Winston
defied Fernandez Larios, refusing to get out of the truck. The soldier then
stabbed him repeatedly with a corvo, a long,
double-edged knife with a talonlike blade, de la Barra said. A corvo
doesn't slice into someone so much as tear through his body tissue and internal
organs with its hook. Zita vowed her family would
never know these devastating details.
In 1974, less than a year
after the coup, Zita and Pato
sneaked away from the town where Pato was in
detention. They took 2-year-old Felipe, their visas, and one suitcase. If there
had been computer databases or a Homeland Security Department in place at the
time, anyone would have been able to see that Pato
wasn't supposed to leave
"I remember seeing
Felipe waving us goodbye," Karin says. "Then it was like,
'Phew.'"
Zita and Pato
had escaped the murderous purges of Pinochet's
The two young economists
who set out to change the world wound up as janitors in an Oakland bank
building. They moved on to paint houses, learned English, and had another baby,
Roberto.
In 1978, Zita's parents and two other siblings, Karin and Aldo,
followed them to the Bay Area. "They were working cleaning houses,
painting," Karin recalls. "You name it. We used to laugh about it. We
knew somehow it would get better."
Still, Zita thought about the one brother who would never join
them. She had a recurring dream about climbing stairs at the
"Get out of
this," he told her.
Zita thought Winston was telling her
to make something of herself, just as he had when they were university
students. Zita awoke from one of the dreams and told Pato she was going back to school. He could do whatever he
wanted, she said, but she was going to improve their lives.
She decided to
simultaneously pursue a master's degree in public health and a Ph.D. in
developmental economics at UC Berkeley. The ambitious educational program
presented challenges in every area of her life: money, language, schedules, feelings. Just getting accepted was a battle. She had no
letters of recommendation; after all, she'd been working as a cleaning woman.
By 1989, though, Zita had received her Ph.D. and become a professor at UC
Santa Cruz, teaching developmental economics and Latin American studies. In the
meantime Pato had opened a day-care center in
Their sons grew up with
stories about their missing uncle. Still, none of Zita's
siblings ever said his name, and only Zita knew how
Winston had died.
In 1990,
That year, families
searched the
Back in
"The more I read
about the genocide, I said there's nothing happening in
Ever the academic, she
researched her quandary by making a low-budget documentary, Never Again
Shall We Say Never Again. Her assistants were her son Felipe and two recent
college graduates who knew how to work a video camera. Dedicated to Winston,
the 1995 film explored Chileans' opinions about how those who commit genocide
should be punished. It was intended primarily to help Zita
find answers, not entertain theatergoers.
A friend from
"He could be a
neighbor," she recalls herself thinking. "It was scary that he could
be in this country."
Fernandez Larios had
become an even more notorious figure. In 1976 he'd entered the
Fernandez Larios later
fell out of favor with his military. He cut a deal with the U.S. Justice
Department, much of which remains secret. In exchange for providing information
on the assassin and Chilean intelligence operations, he'd go to a federal
prison for seven years and would never be deported to
A federal judge in
Zita made her documentary without
interviewing him, but she was uneasy knowing he lived in her new country. She
wrestled with what to do with the information about him and Winston, and
decided to let it lie for the time being.
Her frustration stayed
with her. Her documentary had told some truths, but it had not brought about
justice. Then another political earthquake hit
In 1998, on the 25th
anniversary of Winston's death, Pinochet was arrested in
The ripple effects of Pinochet's arrest spread to
Pinochet was found
mentally unfit to stand trial, but the CJA had a new case to work on. The
Cabello family had decided to sue Fernandez Larios.
The law center connected Zita and her relatives with two attorneys, Leo Cunningham
of
Cunningham is a polished,
genteel litigator whose firm normally defends corporations and their
executives, but also takes on some pro bono cases each year. Though he could
barely distinguish between
The Cabellos'
lawsuit relied on an obscure 1789 law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows noncitizens to be sued for wrongdoings, or torts. Its
original intent was to prosecute pirates on the high seas, but in the 1970s a
federal judge declared that it also applied to human rights cases.
One major problem for the
Cabellos' lawyers was how to directly connect
Fernandez Larios with Winston's murder. Most of the eyewitnesses to the killing
-- i.e., the other 12 Copiapo prisoners -- were also
executed.
The legal team thus
decided to sue Fernandez Larios for crimes against humanity, originally defined
at the
Zita, meantime, obtained a copy of the
Tomos, or Tomes, a voluminous 1998
investigation of Pinochet and the Caravan of Death conducted by a Chilean
jurist. Judge Juan Guzman had found Fernandez Larios guilty in absentia of 19
counts of kidnapping. But because of Fernandez Larios' plea agreement with the
Justice Department, the
"They didn't want to
be found," Zita says. "They knew someone
would read this. They were right."
Zita spread the pages out on her
dining room table and in her guest bedroom. She marked each appearance of
Fernandez Larios' name with a Post-it and wrote down the name and address of
anyone who might have been involved with the Caravan or the killings of the Copiapo men. She painstakingly transferred the information
to her computer and typed a long memo for her lawyers summarizing her findings.
Cunningham had brought on
a Chilean lawyer to help build the case, but most witnesses -- especially
ex-military people -- didn't want to talk.
"The subject matter
was difficult," he says. "It's gut-wrenching to revisit these roles.
You don't have an upside. These army people didn't want to describe on the
record what they'd witnessed."
Zita reviewed her memo at a meeting
with the lawyers. At the end they concluded there was only one person familiar
enough with the case to find witnesses and persuade them to testify: Zita.
In the beginning, Zita thought it'd take her six weeks to line up witnesses.
It took her nearly five years, with a total of 10 trips to
She had to find those who
could prove Fernandez Larios was a member of the Caravan of Death and had gone
to Copiapo, linking him to Winston. She also had to
prove he'd tortured and killed other people in
In 1999, she flew to
"My mom likes to laugh
at herself a lot," says Felipe, now a 31-year-old professional dancer.
"She likes to laugh at the fact that when she began this process she
didn't know what she was doing."
That's an understatement.
Zita had no strategy for finding witnesses or persuading
them to talk. She had addresses that were out of date, names that didn't exist.
She'd tried to set up her
interviews from
"You cannot plan
these things in advance," Zita says.
"Nobody said no. No one really went out of their way. That's who we are as
Chileans. We say we're going to do it, but we don't mean it."
It was easier just to
show up and play things by ear. Zita presented her
case simply to those she met: She was looking for the truth, and she knew they
had a piece of it. She often introduced herself in a brief, almost abrupt way,
announcing, "I'm Zita" -- no last name, no
title, no job description.
Most of the time, doors
were closed in her face. People wanted to leave the past in the past. They
didn't want to dredge up old memories; ex-military types still felt loyalty for
the old regime. The Pinochet repression was over, but Zita
found that people were still afraid to talk.
For example, she located
a priest who'd witnessed 14 killings. He'd embraced the victims, heard their
final confessions, and accepted messages for their families that he'd never
delivered. Zita argued that he needed to speak up
about what he saw, but he didn't have the courage to help her, she says.
"He said, 'Not even
Jesus says the truth all the time,'" Zita
remembers. She answered back with, "Maybe Jesus didn't have the
opportunity to tell the truth like I'm giving to you."
She couldn't sway him.
Finally the priest said, "I'll pray for you to be a success." Zita said she'd pray for him to change his mind. But he
never did.
At night, alone in hotel
rooms, Zita typed e-mails to her family, called
friends in
"Sometimes she'd
just feel awful. Sometimes she'd be excited. The swing was huge from one e-mail
to the next," recalls her son Roberto, a program representative at the
Lawrence Hall of Science in
Most of the e-mails
Roberto received described getting interviews. "It was, 'He didn't want to
talk, he was tentative, then he talked until 1 a.m.,'" he says. "It
was all these small battles."
It was a lonely,
emotionally devastating time. But Zita kept moving
forward, propelled by an iron will and fierce intelligence.
"She has the best of
both worlds: the passion and her love for knowledge and truth," her sister
Karin says.
Zita, who's prone to think hard about
questions, doesn't fully understand what kept her going. She's found only one
concrete answer: The day her brother died, her life was damaged forever.
"I've been trying to
transform that," Zita says, "to give
meaning to what happened."
In a way, she couldn't
win. If she didn't persuade someone to talk, she lost that information. If she
did persuade him to talk, she had to listen.
One day she knocked on
the door of retired Incandente Oscar Haag, who
was hosting a tea party at the time. Haag trembled with nervousness when Zita explained who she was. She told him he'd once granted
her a favor and now she needed another. They sat in his den, and he poured her
a Coke.
She was struck by how
different he was, stripped of his almost God-like authority in the
post-Pinochet era. "In 1973, he looked like a huge, powerful man who could
do anything," she says. Now he was just an old man shaking with fear.
It was almost unbearable, sitting in this comfortable home, talking
quietly with a man she believed had helped orchestrate her brother's death.
"The more he talked,
the more I wanted to stop listening," she says. "It was so horribly
painful. I had to remind myself, 'Zita, this is not
you asking the questions.'"
She employed the same
trick in almost all of her interviews: She mentally erased herself. She became
an objective outsider, calmly asking questions as if they didn't pertain to the
most emotional events of her life. She buried her reactions to the answers she
got. And it worked. People told her things they'd never said to anyone else.
"They were
unburdening themselves," says Felipe, who sat in on some of the
interviews. "They also wanted to understand what happened."
When Zita
left Haag's house, she noticed roses in his garden, her favorites. The old man
graciously cut her one. It was as if they were longtime friends, she and this
man who'd had such a horrendous impact on her family. He died before the trial,
but some of what he told her that day wound up in her lawsuit.
Felipe had a performance
schedule that allowed him to see his mother in action in
He remembers, for
example, how she pursued Juan Morales, a former prison guard who declined to
give her any information, even though he told Judge Guzman he'd seen Fernandez
Larios with files on the Copiapo prisoners. But Zita wouldn't let go of Morales.
With Felipe in tow, she
went into a Copiapo store to ask about Morales' new
address. His wife happened to be shopping there at the time. Zita approached the woman, but she shied away. So Zita followed her home and came back later and got Morales
to talk. He told her he'd seen Fernandez Larios repeatedly kick a defenseless
prisoner in the head, and later testified in her suit.
Another time, Zita wanted to get inside the Copiapo
jail. But instead of waiting outside with everyone else, she sauntered in
behind a truck as it pulled through the prison gate.
"She plays the naive
ingénue very well," Felipe says.
On the other hand, she
wasn't much good at organizational details, says Felipe, who lovingly calls his
mother "the absent-minded professor." For each trip to
As the years wore on, Zita lost the emotional support of friends, including one
of her best friends, a Chilean woman named Gloria who said her endless
questions on sensitive matters was suicidal.
"I realized she
abandoned me," Zita says. "She reflected
what many Chileans think: It's not worth it, staying in the past. I said,
'We're doing this for the future.'"
Some friends simply
thought she was torturing herself. They stopped returning her calls and getting
together with her when she was in
"People wanted to
help me, and they'd say, 'Why don't you stop doing that?'" Zita says. "I wanted to hear, 'We'll make it less
painful.' I've lost everybody now, except my family."
Even her family couldn't
always be there. She spent many nights in
Zita was undeterred. She gave up her
job at UC Santa Cruz so she could concentrate even more on her case.
"When I say I'm
going to do something, I will do the best, anything that it takes," she
says. "It took so much from me, but I already said I'm going to do
this." Leo Cunningham says: "There should be a word for how much Zita cares about this."
She says she split the
cost of her trips with her other attorney, Bob Kerrigan, and racked up enough
miles on American Airlines to give Pato a ticket for
a Chilean vacation.
In ways both big and
small, her detective work paid off.
One breakthrough involved
Enrique Vidal, a Copiapo garrison guard. Zita often left letters for potential witnesses, explaining
her case, and she tried leaving one for Vidal at his
At midnight, her hotel
telephone rang. She scrambled to answer. It was Vidal.
"I didn't know what
to say, because he was such an important guy," Zita
says.
The ex-guard remembered
Winston, and it turned out he'd attended the national military academy with
Fernandez Larios. He said he'd seen the soldier the night the Caravan of Death
arrived in Copiapo, when he and Haag went to the
soccer field where the helicopters landed.
"He knew so much,"
Zita says. Better yet, he was willing to give sworn
testimony in her suit.
Kerrigan had rented a
large hotel suite in
The trial was to be held
in
Cunningham worried that
"The political
philosophy is so shaped by the Cuban situation that that affects everything in
Zita's story also showed up on CNN, in a
number of major
The Center for Justice
and Accountability provided a cluster of condos in
After the pretrial
phases, the jury had three weeks to understand the complex case and make a
decision.
On the trial's first day,
news reporters swarmed the courthouse. Because Zita
had been misquoted in an article already, her lawyers asked her not to speak to
them. Her sons assigned themselves "Zita
duty" during the trial; one of Roberto's main chores was running physical
interference for Zita with people she didn't want to
meet, including reporters.
Roberto also had to
protect her from the one person she didn't want to confront: Fernandez Larios.
In a photo taken at the
trial, Fernandez Larios, 54, looks hefty in a double-breasted gray suit. He
wears glasses and has a few strands of hair combed over his bald spot. To
Cunningham, he came across as a typical
Fernandez Larios only
looked around the courtroom once, about midway through the trial, says Felipe.
He surveyed the audience, appearing imperious and commanding. The rest of the
time, he sat at the defense table, not looking at or otherwise acknowledging
the Cabello family.
The Cabellos,
however, watched him like hawks.
Felipe can say at what
point in the trial he took notes, how urgently he wrote, and when he put his
pen down to play with a paper clip. Pato studied
Fernandez Larios, wondering if this was the same cruel-looking soldier he'd
seen in the jail doorway in Copiapo. When Karin left
the courtroom one day, she accidentally bumped into the former soldier. She
looked into his eyes, wanting to say, "You killed my brother. Here I
am." But she held her tongue.
"He was very
cold," Karin says about the moment. "You could see his bad
energy."
The defense case was
simple: Fernandez Larios was the least powerful member of the Caravan. When he
accompanied Gen. Stark on the helicopter, the argument ran,
his role was similar to that of a secretary; he didn't order or participate in
interrogations or killings. He'd been there, but he hadn't done anything.
The Cabellos'
lawyers faced problems both legal and political.
First, they had to prove
Fernandez Larios had committed crimes against humanity, not an easy task and
something an American jury had never been asked to consider before, according
to the CJA. Second, they wanted to keep the focus on Winston rather than Zita.
"We didn't want the
case to be Zita versus Fernandez Larios,"
Cunningham explains. "Zita never pitched herself
as a victim. We preferred the jury view Winston as the victim."
And there were those
"We were concerned
if the jury registered us or Zita as politically
motivated, they wouldn't be able to do the right thing," Cunningham says.
"We were afraid the defense would make something out of the fact Zita has deeply held beliefs that are political."
As the trial progressed, Zita, despite giving so much to the case, backed away. The
legal truth, she decided, was different from the historical one, less complete
and smaller in scope. She had done her best to compile the historical truth,
and was content to let the lawyers unfold the legal one. For much of the
proceeding, she simply sat quietly, holding Roberto's hand.
Despite her son's
protectiveness, the day came when Zita had to take
the witness stand herself, sitting only a few feet from the man she believed
killed her brother. As Zita spoke, she could feel
Fernandez Larios gazing at her intently, but she refused to look at him.
Her lawyers were afraid
that the defense attorney, Steven Davis, would try to portray Zita as a crusader looking for a scapegoat.
Instead,
She hadn't, for example,
gotten the general who led the Caravan of Death, Arellano Stark, to talk to
her. In his cross-examination,
But Zita
insisted on explaining that she contacted many more people than had actually
talked to her. Instead of appearing as if she had pursued witnesses
selectively, she came out looking thorough.
"She tried to talk
to everyone," says Felipe.
The taped depositions of the witnesses rounded up by Zita,
says Cunningham, were particularly effective with the jury. Cunningham
and Kerrigan used excerpts from them to paint a chillingly vivid picture of the
last days of Winston and the other Copiapo prisoners.
The excerpts started with
Enrique Vidal, the former garrison guard, saying he'd greeted the Caravan men
when their Pumas landed. According to Vidal, Fernandez Larios was carrying a macelike weapon with nails protruding from it. Vidal asked
him about the device, and the soldier said it was for "tickling the little
pigeons," which Vidal understood to mean torturing the prisoners. Other
depositions recalled Fernandez Larios torturing people throughout the country.
Especially emotional
testimony came from the local coroner, Victor Bravo Monroy,
who issued death certificates for the Copiapo
prisoners, many of whom he'd met. Bravo Monroy
described wounds on the men's corpses, drawing his hand across his throat to
indicate that Winston had been slashed to death. Some of the victims, he
testified, had tried to shield their faces from gunshots, and ended up with
bullet wounds in their hands.
Then, apparently overcome
by the brutality of the executions, he suddenly stopped.
"Why didn't they
just kill them?" he said softly, as if to himself. "So
bloody."
Bravo Monroy
clearly was shocked, and his testimony moved the jurors, Cunningham says.
Eventually, the Cabellos' lawyers called Fernandez Larios to testify. At
first, Cunningham says, he seemed agitated and flustered. But
when the ex-soldier calmed down, "he seemed more calculating."
Fernandez Larios said all the right things, but they "didn't ring
true," the attorney says. In the end, he says, Larios "was not
likable" and failed to win over the jury.
After three weeks,
Cunningham presented his closing argument. He recapitulated what the Caravan of
Death had done, and pointed out that the people who would have been in the best
position to testify against Fernandez Larios weren't alive to do so. He spoke
with power and eloquence.
On Oct. 15, 2003, the
jury found Fernandez Larios liable for kidnapping, extrajudicial murders, and
crimes against humanity. Though the plaintiffs had never said how much they
thought Fernandez Larios should pay, the jurors awarded them $4 million: $3
million for Veronica and her daughters, $1 million for Zita
and her siblings.
Whether the family will
ever collect that kind of money from an auto-body repairman is an open
question. Defense attorney Davis, who declined an interview for this article,
has said his client doesn't have any money. Kerrigan says that's probably true,
although he says the CJA hopes to make sure by researching Fernandez Larios'
assets and income. In any event,
Despite the courtroom
victory, Zita wasn't finished with her research.
"The trial for many
people was a grieving period, it was closure," Zita
says. "But for me it was not closure."
Right after the trial
ended, she called Adolfo Gonzalez, the jail guard who'd informed her and
Veronica about their husbands. He'd been afraid to testify, but said if she won
the suit, he'd give her enough information that she could write a book.
When she called Gonzalez
to remind him of his promise, he recalled seeing Fernandez Larios with the 13
prisoners as they left the garrison, and watching the soldier beat two of them.
His testimony would have undercut the defense's argument that Fernandez Larios
wasn't involved, and linked him to Winston. But Gonzalez didn't know what
happened once the truck left that night.
No one, it seems, can
prove beyond a doubt Ximena de la Barra's
story about Fernandez Larios stabbing Winston with a corvo.
Since that interview, Zita's life has gone somewhat blurry. Roberto says his
mother spent so much time preparing for the trial that she didn't prepare for after
the trial.
She wants to contact the
families of other dirty-war victims she's uncovered information about, but
dreads the possibility of bringing even more pain into their lives. She also
has begun outlining a book about Winston's murder, her pursuit of his killer,
and the trial of Fernandez Larios.
"There are a lot of
regrets right now," she says. "I don't see the story like other
people see it. I can't abandon my journey."
But at long last, she and
the rest of the Cabello family have started openly discussing Winston with each
other and other Chileans.
"In
There has been another
bonus, too: Friends who stopped supporting Zita have
returned to her life. Her friend Gloria wrote her, saying she thanked God Zita worked so hard and showed that men like Fernandez
Larios aren't immune from justice. Zita also met
Orlando Letelier's widow, another woman forced by
Fernandez Larios to bear an irrevocable loss.
"She just hugged
me," Zita says about their meeting. "She
said, 'I'm so happy you could do it, because I couldn't.'"
Zita hasn't returned to teaching. Most
days, she uses her old house-painting skills to brighten her own home. File
boxes containing the Tomos are tucked under
the bed in her guest room. Copies of her documentary are stacked in the hall
closet. When roses blossom in her garden, Zita cuts
them and displays them in the living room. They stand regal and tall in their
vases.
"My life has been
shaped by this event," Zita says of Winston's
murder 31 years ago. "Never underestimate the power of hope. There's
nothing you can't do. I showed everybody: Yes, it's possible."
-- End --