PINOCHET, AND ME the Lincoln Brigade.

That post-Franco Spain is demanding General Pinochet's extradition is a cause of great satisfaction to those who struggle for human rights all over the world. But it must be particularly satisfying to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who watched Francisco Franco die in his bed without ever having been held accountable. Now the ideological heir to Franco, who went to the caudillo's funeral and then had to leave hurriedly before Juan Carlos was crowned, is under arrest because a Spanish judge decided to charge him with the murder of Spanish citizens, with international terrorism, and with crimes against humanity.

What a wonderful gift to Lincoln Brigade Veterans at the end of their lives: some measure of justice in a century that has been woefully remiss in bringing dictators and mass murderers to trial. A sweet way for the pendulum of history to swing back, for a balance to be restored to the cosmos: that the Madrid which the Veterans defended in the battle of Jarama, that the Spain they had to leave against their will, be the final prison for General Pinochet, or, at least, the place where his trial might take place. And even if he were never to be extradited to Spain, even if he were to return to my country and we did not find the strength and breathing space to hold him accountable, even so, the international resolve and courage of the Lincoln Brigade Veterans will have once again received vindication because it is that spirit of going beyond national boundaries to defend freedom that is alive in the attempt by Spanish justice to deny a dictator like Pinochet the right to impunity or immunity.

My love affair with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and my debt to its Veterans, started many years ago, when I was nine years old. One day in October of 1951, the year I visited Europe for the first time, I stood on the frontier of Spain. My Argentine father--a former communist and still very much a man of the left--had sworn, like so many of his generation who had Espana en el corazon, that he would never step on Spanish soil until Franco was gone or dead. But we swear many things in life, and life makes demands of us that are not always heroic or definitive; life has a way of confronting us with what Primo Levi called the gray zones.

My father was working at the time at the United Nations in New York, and he had professional business to conduct in Madrid and Barcelona. And so we came to the frontier of the country he had never wanted to visit in his life, even though it had been at the center of that life and on his mind ever since its struggle against fascism in the thirties had inspired him and countless millions around the world.

What I remember above all was that frontier. We had been traveling from France and, because the tracks were narrow-gauge on the Spanish side, it was necessary to descend in Irun and change trains. My father took me by the hand and walked me to the very edge of Spanish territory. He crouched down to my height so he could look me in the eyes and told me that this was the place where the Republic had been betrayed.

Here, he said, right here, the weapons that the Republic had paid for had been blocked by the French, with the acquiescence of the English and the Americans. Proclaiming their neutrality, these countries, future allies against Germany, had conspired to starve the Republic, not realizing that they were, in fact, encouraging and appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Did I know who Hitler and Mussolini were?

I nodded my head solemnly.

Hitler's aircraft, my father said, and Mussolini's ground troops were engaged on the side of Franco. And I knew who Franco was because he was the hijo de puta who governed this land and whose name I shouldn't mention while we were in Spain. Even then, as a child, I was being trained, as my own children would be many years later in Chile, to hide my thoughts from the men in power, to hide what our family really thought about Franco.

Franco--my father twisted the word in his mouth as if it hurt him merely to say it. Here is where the Second World War began, my father went on. Never forget that here is where the Spanish were betrayed.

My father was crying as he said this, his hand trembling in my hand. I can't remember having seen him cry before that: He was--he still is at ninety-one--a man of steel, not one to vent his emotions. I don't recall him ever crying again, except when he told me, at another train station in Buenos Aires some years later, that his father had died.

Those first tears of his on the Spanish frontier certainly had the effect that he desired: I have never forgotten what Spain meant to him, how the loss of the Spanish Civil War was one of the great tragedies of his life and, I was later to learn, one of the great tragedies of a century that has seen its fill of tragedies.

The antidote to the tears came soon. As soon as the train began chugging south to Madrid, my father told me another story, in hushed, low tones: the story of the International Brigades, and particularly of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Or maybe he used the word "Battalion." How they had poured into this country to counteract the spread of fascism, the decisive battles they had won, el Ejercito del Ebro that had crossed the river and beaten the Falangistas.

For me, in 1951, the existence of the Lincoln Brigade did not work merely as a legendary story of heroism, of men and women willing to give their lives for the cause of democracy while their governments stood by and watched the Republic bleed to death. Though born in Buenos Aires, I was then a little Yankee boy who thought of himself as an American. I refused to speak Spanish, sang "The Star Spangled Banner" with fervor, and swore that New York was the best city in the best country in the world. Like any little patriot, I was always looking for a reason to justify my love of my adopted home. And yet, I was also the son of a father persecuted by McCarthy, a witch-hunt that would eventually lead us to abandon the United States a few years later and head for Chile.

At nine years of age, I was living an irreconcilable contradiction: The country I considered my own was trying to exile my father. The fact that the very United States that was hounding my family and so many of my family's leftwing gringo friends had also produced the Lincoln Brigade was a source of comfort to me and also one of the first profoundly political lessons I received in my life. It confirmed in me something I knew but could barely articulate at the time: There were two Americas, one personified by the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy, the other made up of citizens who were willing to risk their lives for freedom wherever it was threatened, an America that came to be represented more and more in my imagination by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

That was the America I could belong to: If they could defy their government in the name of the permanent values that America should really stand for, so could I. If they defined their loyalty to humanity above their loyalty to the short-term interests of the United States, so could I.

The men and women of the Lincoln Brigade could not know that, many years after they had left Madrid, they would rescue a small nine-year-old boy from confusion and push him toward political maturity. They could not have anticipated that their mere existence would help him to realize that there was another deeper and more decent America to which he could pledge allegiance. It is proof how, beyond their wartime exploits and their service to the Republic, the example of the Veterans, their mere presence, can influence history in many strange and secret ways. Never underestimate how an exemplary life can persist in the imagination of others, how it can inspire beyond death.

Pinochet is the man who has pronounced Franco to be his hero (though Napoleon is a close second), who sees himself as continuing the caudillo's special mixture of repressively conservative Catholicism with a modernizing capitalist mentality, who in his vanity has declared that, like Franco, he saved the world itself from communism. And just as Franco rose against the freely elected authorities of Spain, Pinochet overthrew the democratic government of Salvador Allende, betraying the president who had named him commander-in-chief of the Chilean army.

Allende's creed was forged in the wake of Spain's struggle. Indeed, he came to prominence in 1938 as the youngest minister of the Popular Front government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, modeled on the coalition that was fighting for its life in Spain at that very moment. As Minister of Health, Doctor Allende helped to institute a free National Health Service and Social Security, both of which Pinochet would do his best to dismantle during his seventeen-year dictatorship--dismantle and then export that dismantlement as a model to other countries in the world.

Later, when Allende became a perennial candidate for president, his marches were punctuated by the songs of the Spanish Civil War. We thought of ourselves often, in Chile, as repeating the Spanish experience, only this time with a happy ending. But our adversaries used Spain as a warning, reminding us that what had happened there could happen in Chile. And, in 1973, it did. The coup came, the massacres came, the persecution came. And then, si Espana estuvo en el corazon para la generacion de mi padre, if Spain lived on in the hearts of my father's generation, Chile found its way into the heart of my generation across the planet during the seventies and eighties. Allende's democratic road to socialism created the hope that there was an alternative not only to a capitalist development--should I say misdevelopment--but also to Stalinist models of society. This was Allende's project that was crushed in part by U.S. intervention just as the search for socialism with a human face had been destroyed in Prague by Soviet tanks five years before. Our defeat in Chile, like the Republic's defeat in Spain, ushered in long years of repression around the world, concentration camps and torture, censorship and exile, disappearances and executions.

Now Chile's dictator has been judged by world opinion; he has become a synonym of infamy for tomorrow's dictionaries; his detention alerts dictators everywhere that they will never again be safe to wander the globe and sip tea with the likes of Margaret Thatcher. When English police arrested General Pinochet on October 16, they were establishing that when a crime against humanity has been committed, particularly the crime of torture, it is humanity itself that must find a way of demanding accountability and, one would hope, settling accounts.

Those who have attacked the English government and Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who is carrying out the investigation against Pinochet, have done so under the pretext that such judicial actions trample the national sovereignty of Chile, that such actions intervene illegitimately in the internal affairs of my country.

There are many answers to that objection. One is that it is Pinochet who trampled on the national sovereignty of other countries by engaging in international terrorism and murdering opponents in foreign lands. Another is that Chile itself has subscribed to the International Covenant on Torture and that this covenant demands that any perpetrator of that sort of human rights violation be apprehended wherever he may find himself.

Yet another rejoinder, more tongue in cheek, is that the followers of General Pinochet did not object to the intervention of a foreign power, specifically the United States, when the CIA destabilized, with Henry Kissinger's benediction, the democratically elected government of Chile. "National sovereignty" is a phrase rightwingers use when their interests are being threatened, but they automatically cease to employ it as soon as they see the chance of selling their country's assets to the highest multinational corporate bidder.

But perhaps we should let the best response be given by the Lincoln Brigade, who insisted more than sixty years ago on the right of good men to intervene in the fight against injustice wherever it may exist. When they volunteered to go to Spain and die for a cause in a land where they had not been born, to die next to Germans and French and Russians and Yugoslavs and, yes, some Latin Americans, when the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade announced to the world that the death of freedom in Catalonia was the death of freedom everywhere, when they defined themselves as human beings first and as members of a nationality second, when they ignored the frontiers set up by government and states and broke down the frontiers between the members of our species, when they proclaimed that they could not stand by and watch the triumph of fascism--they were anticipating this moment in the history of humanity when their grandchildren would also state unequivocally that General Pinochet is the problem not merely of Chileans and that his punishment concerns not merely his compatriots.

The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade remind us today that one humanity does and should exist. And it exists not only inasmuch as multinational corporations invest in many lands and manufacture, sell, and promote their wares in a global marketplace or because CNN can be watched in more than 100 countries simultaneously. Humanity is one, much more importantly, for moral reasons. The death by torture of a militant in Chile is an outrage to us all, as the internment of a dissident in a psychiatric ward in the Soviet Union should have outraged every one of us when it occurred.

The arrest of General Pinochet is completing, for the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, the circle that they opened when they crossed the seas and fought for the Republic. It inaugurates a new era in human rights legislation where humanity affirms today what the Veterans bore witness to yesterday: We are responsible to one another, responsible for one another.

But there is yet another circle that needs to be closed--or maybe it is a wound. It was the country from whence the Lincoln Brigade originated that intervened in Chile and, in some respects, could be said to have made Pinochet, created him Frankenstein-like, and supported him despite his appalling human rights record. Our failure to achieve liberation in Chile was partly due to the ways in which Nixon's government undermined, with help from ITT, the democratic government of Salvador Allende. I say partly because I want to recognize that we ourselves were in a considerable measure responsible for that catastrophe: The left in Chile was unable to find enough unity and clarity, enough tolerance and originality, to withstand the onslaught of our enemies. And that is another parallel with Spain, where the savagery of Franco's troops and the German and Italian fascist invasion of Spain could never have succeeded if there had not been, within the forces fighting for the Republic, tremendous and heartbreaking internal struggles and sectarianism that weakened the cause.

This does not attenuate the need of the people of the United States to address the crimes committed in foreign lands in their name. There are two Americas: the America that helped to overthrow democracy in Chile and the America that fought that intervention. The America of Nixon and the America of the Lincoln Brigade. And the America of the Lincoln Brigade still has unfinished business at home, right here in the United States.

It is not enough for Pinochet to be tried for his crimes against humanity. The humanity of the U.S. public must also demand that the America that put Pinochet in power--and sustained him there for many years--open its files, and let the world know what those files hide about the dictator's human rights violations. And, even more important, the U.S. government must be pressured to ask for the extradition of General Pinochet to the United States to face trial for the murder of Allende's Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt.

If the United States is really interested in fighting international terrorism, it does not need to bomb pharmaceutical plants in Sudan or murder children in Iraq with missiles or sanctions. President Clinton has an international terrorist nearer at hand and the judicial means to bring him to justice. All he has to do is instruct his Attorney General to demand General Pinochet's extradition.

Then the circle would be truly complete. Think of the day when the Lincoln Brigade Veterans who are left, the Veterans who crossed the Atlantic to die and live for Spain, the Veterans who fought their own government over Vietnam and Nicaragua, the Veterans who gave me hope as a child on that frontier in Spain and inspired me as an adolescent and later as a revolutionary in Chile and even later as a wandering bilingual exile for years and years, think of those Veterans filing into a courtroom in Washington, D.C., and seeing the self-proclaimed heir to Franco stand accused of crimes against humanity.

Then the circle that began in the States and wove through Spain would be truly complete, truly sweet. In a sense, the Brigadistas would, after so many years, finally have come home.

Ariel Dorfman is the author of "Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey" (Penguin). His latest novel, "The Nanny and the Iceberg" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), will be published in May. This article was adapted from a February 28, 1999, speech delivered to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Bay Area.