Story: SANTIAGO - Around 1,000 people gathered here Saturday in front of the Palace of Justice to protest the court ruling that enabled Augusto Pinochet to avoid trial for allegedly ordering the murder of 75 political opponents in October 1973.
"We reject the court decision to shelve the only case in which the former dictator was indicted," said Viviana Diaz, president of the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees, one of the organizers of the demonstration.

Pinochet has suffered at least two strokes and the Supreme Court this week declared him mentally unfit, due to dementia, to stand trial for the systematic abuse of human rights, including widespread torture and summary execution, carried out under his rule.

Most Chilean observers agree the ruling sets a precedent that will allow the former general to escape indictment for the more than 250 criminal complaints filed against him for offenses committed during his 1973-1990 regime.

"It seems like a joke that the court declared Pinochet insane and then he had the wits to draft a letter of resignation to the Senate," Diaz said.

Three days after the high court ruling, the former general resigned his post of senator-for-life.

In a letter addressed to Senate President Andres Zaldivar, the 86-year-old former army commander retired from "civic activity" and expressed the hope that future generations will remember him as the embodiment of "a soldier's sacrifice" rather than as a repressive dictator.

Communist Party leader Gladys Marin said the people who gathered Saturday in front of the courts to repudiate the ruling had shown the world that there is no reconciliation in Chile.

Shouting slogans against the judiciary, the demonstrators, who included leftists, human rights activists and relatives of the victims of the dictatorship, threw red paint against the court building.

"This paint represents the blood of the victims of repression," Marin said.

At the protest, lawyer Julia Urqueta said she was considering filing charges against the Chilean government before the Inter-American Human Rights Court for "denial of justice."

Once his resignation becomes effective, Pinochet is expected to invoke the former presidents' Statute of Guaranties, which will provide him with a monthly stipend of at least 2,600 dollars, and preserve his legislative immunity from prosecution.

The 1991 Rettig Report documented 3,197 victims of the Pinochet regime, including 1,192 who disappeared in custody.