SANTIAGO – The former Chilean judge who indicted late dictator Augusto Pinochet filed Monday to run for the Senate on the ticket of dark-horse independent presidential candidate Marco Enriquez Ominami.

Juan Guzman, who stepped down from the bench in 2005, will be contending with one-time rightist presidential hopeful Joaquin Lavin and with Ricardo Lagos Weber, son of former Socialist President Ricardo Lagos.

Since leaving the judiciary, Guzman has headed the Center for Human Rights Studies at the University of Chile and worked as a defense counsel for Mapuche Indians on trial for invading and occupying land in the Araucania region.

Guzman is the leading figure in the documentary “El Juez y el General” (The Judge and the General), directed by Chile’s Patricio Lanfranco and the American Elizabeth Farnsworth, that has won several international honors and was nominated for the Emmy Awards.

Pinochet, whose lawyers kept him out of the dock by filing endless procedural motions and alleging that he was unfit to stand trial, died of a heart attack in December 2006 at the age of 91.

At the time of his death he was facing charges for both human rights abuses and graft during his 1973-1990 rule, which is blamed for more than 3,000 deaths. EFE