When preliminary research for this book started in 1998, General Augusto Pinochet was still head of the armed forces in Chile and enjoyed senatorial immunity as senator-for-life. Peru’s president Alberto Fujimori was undermining the authority of the judiciary to secure reelection while using secret death squads to finish his battle against the left-wing guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Although the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had handed down its landmark Velasquez Rodriguez decision in 1988, defining forced disappearance as a crime that violates nonderogable rights, judges in domestic courts across the continent had largely ignored this ruling. A general international criminal court to handle the most serious human rights violations—torture, extrajudicial killings, genocide, and other international crimes—had yet not been established.