structural:scholar_edition, structural:expansion
Charges against Pinochet and family members

This tax fraud filing, related to Pinochet's and his family's secret bank accounts in the United States and in Caribbean islands, for an amount of US$27 million, shocked the pro-Pinochet wing of Chilean public opinion more than the accusations of human rights abuses. Ninety percent of these funds would have been raised between 1990 and 1998, when Pinochet was Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and would essentially have come from weapons traffic (when purchasing Belgian Mirage fighter aircraft in 1994, Dutch Léopard tanks, Swiss Mowag tanks or by illegal sales of weapons to Croatia, in the middle of the Balkan war; the later case has been linked by Chilean justice with the assassination of Colonel Gerardo Huber in 1992). General Pinochet was reported to have owed the Chilean tax administration a total of $16.5 million.