Abstract
From 19 May 2008 onwards, the assizes of Paris were supposed to try in absentia fifteen leaders of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, for illegal detention and torture of four French or Franco-Chilean nationals between 1973 and 1975. However, on 6 May the next year, the trial was postponed for several reasons, that left the victims' families greatly frustrated. This judicial initiative, beyond its symbolic aspect, appeared to be the result of years of struggle to bring justice to the victims of the regime's repression. The trial would have thus crowned nine years of investigation on the disappearance of Alfonso Chanfreau, Jean-Yves Claudet, George Klein and Etienne Pesle, and permitted the judgment of great criminals such as Manuel Contreras and Paul Schaefer. Obviously, Pinochet's death wrested the hope of absolute justice from the victim's families but the thrust of this historical trial goes far beyond the symbolic and will eventually sanction the crimes of Chile's darkest years, and hopefully put an end to the mourning of the departed. The families of the four victims had filed a lawsuit as soon as the news of Pinochet's arrest in London spread. With the dictator's passing, their hopes have been disappointed to some extent but it appears that the four cases will be allowed to cover all the repressive facts of the dictatorship.
