• The Judge and the General, 11 p.m.-12:30 a.m. Tuesday, WPBT-PBS 2

A few weeks ago, on a visit back home to New Mexico, I ran into my high-school friend David. The owner of a construction company, he enthusiastically told me of a booming new market where he hopes to do business soon: Cuba.

''The only thing holding us back is those crazy people you live with in Miami,'' he told me earnestly. ''What's their problem? Cuba is a fantastic place.'' Well, you might see it differently if Fidel Castro had arrested your parents and seized your home, I replied mildly. David shook his head. ''That was all 50 years ago,'' he said. ``They need to get over it.''

I thought of David while watching The Judge and the General, a sobering account of the legal pursuit of Gen. Augusto Pinochet by victims of his military dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. (It airs tonight as an episode of the PBS documentary series P.O.V.)

More than a third of a century later, Chilean courts are still rounding up Pinochet's henchmen, most of them now old and infirm, and sentencing them to prison terms from which they will not return. The Chileans have been aided by governments around the world -- Pinochet was originally arrested by British authorities acting on a warrant issued by a Spanish judge -- and have had virtually unanimous support from international human-rights groups and journalists (including Elizabeth Farnsworth and Patricio Lanfranco, who produced and directed The Judge and the General). Nobody has told them that they need to get over it.

And good God, how could they? Listen to the accounts in The Judge and the General from the tortured and the torturers, from parents forced to betray their own children to agonizing deaths, from helicopter crews who bound prisoners to lead weights and tossed them into the Pacific Ocean, then try to imagine how long it takes to forgive and forget.

The coup that deposed the democratically elected Marxist Salvador Allende and brought Pinochet to power occurred during the Cold War, at a time when communist advances in the Third World were alarmingly constant.

But even the most profound anti-communist, even the most deeply suspicious of the ultimate intentions of Allende's Moscow-friendly government, will be unable to suppress a shudder during interviews like the one with a Pinochet dungeonmaster who matter-of-factly explains that the country's secret police ''acted with toughness and firmness when necessary.'' His clarification of what that meant for women prisoners: Clamping electrodes to their nipples and vaginas, then flipping the switch.

The killing, kidnapping and torturing was not some burst of ''excess'' at the time of the coup, as Pinochet always claimed, but continued for years afterward and extended well outside Chile's borders. International pressure finally forced Pinochet to disband his secret police, free most of his surviving political prisoners and leave power in 1990 -- though only after he amended the country's constitution to make him a senator for life, with legal immunity.

In 1998, families of his victims nonetheless filed criminal charges against him. The investigation was assigned to Judge Juan Guzmán, a political conservative who admitted toasting Pinochet's coup with champagne in 1973. But Guzmán, staggered by the testimony of survivors, began exhuming bodies and following the evidence wherever it led -- even into his own chambers. One of the most chilling moments was when he read old court orders in his own handwriting, denying writs of habeas corpus for prisoners who had ''disappeared.'' ''It opened the eyes of my soul,'' he admitted.

Guzmán eventually indicted Pinochet for kidnapping and murder; though the general died before he could be tried, Guzmán still believes his work was important: ``A wounded country needs to know.''

Just so. But the question raised, however inadvertently, by The Judge and the General, is why the world keeps two sets of human-rights books. Pinochet's dictatorship is believed to have killed about 3,200 Chileans. The communist governments that once ruled nearly half the world killed more than 90 million people.

But not one former Soviet official has ever stood trial for the crimes of the Gulag or sending the tanks rolling into Hungary. None of Pol Pot's lieutenants has been called to account for stabbing, clubbing, strangling and suffocating two million Cambodians. When the Castro regime finally falls, count on it, the journalists and human-rights organizations that hounded Pinochet will fall strangely mute. Instead, we'll hear that that Cubans need to concentrate on reconciliation and the future, not dwell on the past. Anybody who insists on talking about justice will be told to get over it. How nice it would be, instead, to see a documentary called The Judge and the Castro Brothers.

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