General Pinochet's arrest in London on 16 October 1998 was the only one of its kind to date. The ex-dictator of Chile was apprehended at the London Clinic (where he had just undergone a back operation) by order of the British government at the request of the Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garc—n, for 'crimes against humanity including torture, genocide and ordering disappearances'. The months that followed witnessed a political and legal wrangle over his fate that was often shrill, sometimes shabby and occasionally farcical, but always riveting for students of Anglo-Chilean history. Eventually, as the Guardian journalist Andy Beckett puts it, 'a Third Way' was discovered, one which steered between the twin poles of 'outraged hostility' and 'admiring cooperation' that characterised both Chilean and British attitudes to the General. The 'new, classically Blairite compromise' was to use the 82-year-old's apparently frail state of physical and mental health as a means of allowing him to return to his native land, but only after he had undergone the ritual humiliation of being confined in a villa on the Wentworth estate, near Virginia Water in Surrey, for some months.
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