Short answers, pulled from the story.
Erich Honecker was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. He held the posts of General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, Chairman of the National Defence Council, and from 1976 Chairman of the State Council, making him the official head of state.
As the SED's Party Security Secretary, Honecker was the prime organiser of the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. He also bore administrative responsibility for the "order to fire" along the Inner German border, under which around 125 East German citizens were killed while trying to reach the West during his years in power.
Honecker was removed by the SED Politburo on the 17th of October 1989 amid mass protests, a refugee exodus, and growing Soviet pressure for reform. Egon Krenz led the effort to replace him; Honecker was allowed to resign publicly citing ill health, following the same pattern used when he had forced out his predecessor Walter Ulbricht eighteen years earlier.
Honecker was charged in a 783-page indictment with involvement in the collective manslaughter of 68 people who tried to flee East Germany. On the 12th of January 1993, the Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin upheld his complaint that continuing the proceedings violated his right to human dignity, and the case was abandoned. He was released after 169 days in custody.
Honecker fled to Chile because under his rule East Germany had granted exile to many Chileans following Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup, and his daughter Sonja was married to a Chilean. He first sought refuge in the Chilean Embassy in Moscow on the 11th of December 1991, and after being expelled from the embassy and tried in Germany, he rejoined his family in Santiago, where he died on the 29th of May 1994.
In a 70-minute statement to the court on the 3rd of December 1992, Honecker accepted political responsibility for the construction of the Berlin Wall and the deaths at the border, but claimed he was "without juridical, legal or moral guilt". He attributed the Wall to a collective Warsaw Pact decision made in 1961 to prevent what he described as a "Third World War with millions dead".