Jack Straw has promised to give the "most careful consideration" to yesterday's submissions on the Pinochet case. The general's final departure from these shores, then, is delayed, but perhaps not for long: the likelihood of his return to Chile remains high enough for Chile to have dispatched a plane, due in Britain today, to collect him. It is a disappointment, obviously, for Judge Baltasar Garzon and for the families of Pinochet's victims. Whatever the merits of Jack Straw's decision, it would certainly have been courteous - and, prudent - had he offered the Spanish courts access to the contested medical evidence to judge for themselves whether Pinochet was fit to stand trial.
But as the old dictator sits on his suitcase, it would be wrong to see this result as a defeat for those who wished to see the crimes of the dictatorship accounted for - or those who wish Chilean democracy well. Fifteen months ago, in the wake of Pinochet's arrest, the main chant of Norman Lamont's bizarre chorus was that Chilean democracy was so fragile that an act of justice of this kind would bring it crashing to the ground. The subtext of Lord Lamont's remarks appeared to be that Chilean democracy was just a pretence that the Chilean right and the Chilean armed forces were ready to end at a moment's notice.
Fifteen months on, those opinions seem even more contemptible than they did at the time. As it turned out, a year and a half without Pinochet was just the tonic Chilean democracy needed. Chileans of the left and the right have been able to go about the political business of remembering that democracy used to flourish in their country before Pinochet tried to destroy it.
Pinochet's era, despite the rump of appointed senators, is over. The bulk of his support on the right has melted away or transferred its allegiance to the next generation. Joaquin Lavin, the leader of that new generation, is treading a path similar to that taken by the Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, when he steered his rightwing party away from its associations with the past dictatorship and towards democratic terra firma. Lavin has made it clear that if Pinochet comes home, he will be expected to stay decently indoors.
There is no mileage any more in being a Pinochet groupie. The pragmatic component has decamped, leaving only the retired military die-hards of the Pinochet Foundation and those elements of the security services who fear ending up in the dock themselves. Pinochet will return to a country that has just elected Ricardo Lagos as president, a man he once imprisoned and exiled, a man who had been nominated ambassador to Moscow, of all places, by Salvador Allende.
The Pinochet issue was refreshingly absent for much of the election and, when it did become important just before the final vote at the weekend, it seems to have tipped the vote in favour of the left. If Lord Lamont wanted any clearer view of what the people of Chile (in whose name he claims to have been speaking all these months) really think about their retired dictator, he has only to ask himself why the prospect of the general's return should so have galvanised the vote for his arch opponent.
It is not just Chilean politics, though, that have benefited. Chilean judges, who have ignored the pleas for justice, the requests for habeas corpus and the dossiers of evidence for the best part of a quarter of a century, have found a little courage after Pinochet's arrest. Even if only from a sense of wounded national pride, Chilean judges have begun to recover their sense of shame and with it, a capacity for action. Judge Jaime Guzman, for instance, has now accepted more than 50 cases against General Pinochet, many of which he has been pursuing with a certain diligence. He may never get anywhere and even if he did, he is likely to be led a dance as he tries to prosecute the general in person. But it is no longer considered outlandish or suicidal in Chile to try for justice, just as it is no longer thought eccentric or mad to insist on the right to truth. Fifteen months ago, the widows and orphans of Pinochet's victims were outcasts. All had lost loved ones. Some had also lost their homes and their livelihoods. For them Pinochet's arrest and detention has been a liberating event.
Even if there will be no court verdict, Chilean society has lost enough of its fear to have recovered a measure of its conscience; the least the victims are owed is a frank account of their fate.
Pinochet and his admirers will never again be able to impose their view of history on their country and never again be able to force the lie that the general is a hero to his people down the throats of his victims. The general has found his true place in history. For that, we should all thank Baltasar Garzon.