Licence to kill

Letters

Vol. 16 No. 7 · 7 April 1994

From Malcolm Coad

In his piece on the Scott Inquiry (LRB, 10 February), Paul Foot does an injustice to Carlos Cardoen, ‘the Chilean Cluster Bomb King’ and arms supplier to Iraq, when he describes him as having ‘only two heroes, Pinochet and Saddam Hussein’. In fact, Latin America’s most notorious private arms manufacturer has proved himself far cannier than this. Certainly, his success story began under Pinochet, when Army contacts in the late Seventies allowed him to branch out from his existing small mining explosives business. But in the mid-Eighties, at the height of his cluster bomb bonanza, he fell out with the General and became a leading backer of the Christian Democrat and centre-left opposition; he was probably the most outspoken business dissident at the time. When elections came finally in 1989, he was a major funder of opposition leader Patricio Aylwin’s victorious Presidential campaign. Since then – having, he says, given up arms production for fruit exports and other activities – he has funded a leading leftwing magazine, done business in Cuba (food products, apparently) and continued to sponsor cultural projects, such as an arts centre on Easter Island.

The full story of Cardoen’s conflict with Pinochet has never emerged. His undoubted sensitivity to the direction of the political wind probably had much to do with it. He is also known to have criticised the quality of the Chilean Army’s ordnance products. But one incident, triggered by the Iran-Iraq War and the arms supply networks Paul Foot discusses, was certainly important. Presumably lured by the millions being pulled in by Cardoen’s sale of his cheap, efficient and very nasty cluster bombs to Iraq, a company linked to the Chilean Army attempted to get in on the act by selling another such bomb to Iran, in a triangular deal through Nigeria. The attempt ended in farce, as a sample bomb blew up in the air in tests carried out in Iran, reportedly destroying an Iranian Air Force plane and risking bloody reprisals against the Chileans involved in the project. The middleman between Chile and Iran, Bernard Stroiazzo, claimed to have been held captive by the Iranian Government for 18 months and later sued Pinochet’s Government, alleging it had reneged on a deal to compensate him by allowing his British-based company, Were International Ltd, to process toxic waste in the Atacama Desert. Cardoen, meanwhile, sued the Army-linked company, Ferrimar, for industrial espionage, alleging that one of his executives had decamped to it with his cluster bomb plans. The officer involved in developing the rival cluster bomb, Colonel Carlos Carreño, was later kidnapped by the Chilean left-wing armed group, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, in one of its more spectacular hits against the Pinochet regime, and smuggled to Brazil, where he was released.

All of which is only a footnote to the vast and repulsive story told in Paul Foot’s article, but corrects the widespread and over-neat impression of Cardoen merely as a Pinochet acolyte. The unpalatable fact is that part of Chile’s campaign to return to democracy (albeit a democracy where Pinochet continues as Army commander-in-chief) was bankrolled by the profits from some of the more hideous deaths in the Middle East.

The next instalment to the Cardoen saga is likely to be an extradition request by the Miami courts to have him face charges brought by US Customs of illegal arms trading with Iraq. The request will almost certainly be turned down by the Chilean Supreme Court, a decision which will be generally applauded in Chile, despite the Court’s deep unpopularity due to its craven record when called on to defend human rights under Pinochet and the general feeling of embarrassment at Cardoen’s activities. In this case, however, Cardoen is seen as a relatively small Third World player being scapegoated by the US Government to distract attention from its own far vaster role in the game of supplying Saddam – an interpretation, as Paul Foot’s piece serves to emphasise, with which it is hard not to sympathise.

Malcolm Coad
Santiago, Chile