Financial bloodhounds in Europe are on the trail of the most closely guarded secret in Chile, the exact size of the hitherto secret fortune of the Pinochet family.
The Swiss Socialist Party, a member of the Swiss government, has been successful in its call for an official investigation into the family's arms-dealing and financial activities. The Swiss government, like its Spanish counterpart, is seeking Gen Augusto Pinochet's extradition from Britain. Bern is expected to give further details of investigations into the Pinochet assets in Switzerland when Parliament reassembles on March 1st.
Prof Jean Ziegler, a leading Socialist deputy from Geneva and a long-standing critic of Swiss banking secrecy, has called for the seizure of "large private bank accounts in Switzerland belonging to some Chilean generals, notably Augusto Pinochet, at the time the commander-in-chief of the army".
The work is having to be done in Europe as nobody dares carry it out in Chile where potential investigators are afraid of reprisals. The armed forces have already threatened violence against those seeking information about the Pinochet family.
As the Law Lords in London prepare to deliver their verdict concerning the extradition of Gen Pinochet to Madrid, his allies in Chile are doing their best to keep the lid on the last big secret about the Pinochet family. Gen Pinochet's wife, Lucia, has claimed, unconvincingly, that her only wealth and that of her husband is his army pension.
Others disagree. "He is the head of one of the richest families in Latin America," says Dr Robinson Rojas, a Chilean expert on the Pinochet era, who is on the staff of the University of the South Bank in London. But the exact extent of the Pinochet resources is still a carefully guarded secret. The Pinochets' world-wide assets are widely believed to embrace Soquimich, the Chilean Mining and Chemical Company. It was originally a state company, part of the CORFO state holding company. A Chilean businessman, Mr Julio Ponce, the husband of Gen Pinochet's daughter, Veronica, was on the board of CORFO, resigned in 1983 under mysterious circumstances and later became the president of Soquimich.
The successive husbands of Gen Pinochet's elder daughter, Ines Lucia, have attracted controversy. The first, a vet, rose to a top job in the state-controlled television in the years immediately after Gen Pinochet's 1973 coup. The second, Mr Jorge Aravena, was a director of an insurance agency, Metropolis, which was disbarred from taking commissions from state companies in 1983.
The Swiss inquiries will revolve around the relations of Gen Pinochet and his son, also Augusto, with two Swiss companies which supply equipment to the Chilean forces. MOWAG builds military vehicles and SIG manufactures light automatic weapons at its headquarters near Schaffhausen.
Augusto junior has had brushes with Chilean law. He started his career in the army, but then was given a job with the Central Bank of Chile in New York. In April 1993, the Council for the Defence of the State, called for an investigation of possible fraud against the state in the sale of a rifle factory, SIG Valmoval, a Chilean affiliate of the Swiss SIG, to the Chilean army in the late 1980s.
The Council pointed to evidence that Pinochet junior had received three cheques to the value of nearly $2 million, in an affair known at the "Pinocheques".
According to two courageous Chilean investigative journalists, Victor Osorio and Ivan Cabezas, Augusto junior apparently acted as an agent, heading a company called PSP which bought SIG Valmoval and sold it to the army his father was commanding.
Later, Gen Pinochet, no longer President but still commander-in-chief of the army, threatened to put the troops onto the streets if the investigation continued. In June 1993 the judge hearing the case declared it was beyond his jurisdiction.
Nevertheless, in 1994, the general was ordered to testify in Santiago in connection with the sale of SIG Valmoval but he refused. The investigation was finally halted in 1995 on the instructions of President Eduardo Frei.