LONDON -- The freedom to murder your fellow citizens with impunity used to be what made up for the long hours and all the paperwork. Some people simply wouldn't have taken the job of president without it, and Augusto Pinochet was one of them. If somebody had told the former Chilean dictator that he would one day be facing charges of kidnapping, torture, murder and illegal burial, he might never have left his barracks.

But he is facing charges, and in his own country, too. On Dec. 1, two years after Pinochet was arrested in Britain in response to a Spanish extradition request, and only eight months after the British government let him fly home on the grounds that he was too weak to stand trial, Chilean Judge Juan Guzman Tapia indicted him for the kidnapping of 19 Chileans who disappeared during his rule, and the murder of 55 others whose bodies have been recovered.

The general claims that he had to save his country from a (freely elected) Marxist government, denies any murders, and feels quite sorry for himself. In an address to 1,400 supporters on his 85th birthday last month, he spoke of his great hardships during 16 months of detention in Britain (he was under house arrest in a luxurious rented country estate), but "dedicated (his) suffering to the Chilean people."