“A COUNTRY STEEPED IN ITS PAST”

MARTIN BOYD

Last night, I attended a screening of A Promise to the Dead, a documentary on the life of

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, who had been forced into exile after the coup d’état that brought

down Salvador Allende’s government on September 11, 1973. The film documented the author’s

return to his native land in 2006 – a visit that coincided with the death of Augusto Pinochet, the

brutal dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1988. Following the screening, the consul from the

Chilean consulate in Toronto held a question-and-answer session to discuss the issues addressed

by the film. A Chilean exile in the audience was the first to raise his hand; he demanded to know

the Chilean government’s position regarding the fact that Pinochet had never faced justice for his

crimes against the Chilean people. As he asked his question, the man’s voice wavered with an

emotion that appeared to have the effect of making the consul instantly uncomfortable. The

consul began to answer Pinochet had in fact been brought to trial for his crimes but evaded a

prison sentence on the grounds of his senility, while the exile interrupted him repeatedly with

angry comments and condemnations. The interchange turned heated, until finally the gentleman

in the audience stormed from the auditorium in a rage.

This interchange, and the content of the documentary itself, reveals that Chile is a country

still very much divided by an event that occurred thirty-four years ago. Since September 11,

1973, Chile has been a nation polarized between those who have dared to hope for a more

socially just nation, and those who believed that Pinochet had saved the nation from falling

victim to Soviet-style communism. The transition to democracy after Pinochet finally stepped

down in 1990 has not succeeded in reconciling these two poles. In spite of the election of a

civilian government, the military forces maintained considerable political power throughout the

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90s, and while the so-called “Truth and Reconciliation Report” released in 1991 made

allegations of atrocities committed under the military regime, it failed to name those responsible.

Pinochet and many of the other senior military officers continued to hold unelected seats in

Chile’s senate thanks to Pinochet’s 1980 constitution, which subsequent democratic governments

did not have the courage to abolish. It was not until 1998 that Pinochet faced his first risk of

judgement for his crimes, when British authorities detained him at the request of the Spanish

government, which lobbied for the dictator’s extradition to Spain to face charges of murder and

torture of Spanish citizens during his rule. After a drawn-out legal battle, the Spanish appeal

failed, and Pinochet returned triumphantly to Chile. In 2000, the Chilean Supreme Court acceded

to stripping Pinochet of the legal immunity granted to him by his status as “ex-president”; but the

charges brought against him were ultimately dismissed on the grounds that he was allegedly too

senile to be expected to answer them. Several years later the senility ruling was overturned, but

the many charges brought against Pinochet were still pending in December of last year when he

died of a heart attack at the age of 91.

It is easy to criticize Chile’s post-dictatorship governments of being slow or inactive to

address the crimes of the military regime; but such criticisms fail to acknowledge the shocking

reality that Pinochet had, and continues to have, significant popular support in Chile. Those

reformers wishing to abolish Pinochet’s constitution and with it the immunity that it gave the

military had to be conscious of the fact that two thirds of Chileans had voted for the constitution

in 1980. Those wishing to see Pinochet brought to justice the moment he stepped down from the

presidency needed to recall that over 40% of the population had voted for the dictator to continue

in power for another eight years in 1988. More recently, the concession by Chile’s current

President, Michelle Bachelet (herself the daughter of one of Pinochet’s torture victims), to grant

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the dead dictator a military funeral, and the presence of her defence minister at that funeral, was

a tacit acknowledgement of Pinochet’s continued popularity – as was made evident by the

hundreds of thousands of mourners who turned out to view his body. Critics of Bachelet’s

supposed ‘cowardice’ in granting him military honours should remember that she refused him a

full state funeral, a fact which outraged many of his supporters.

In fact, Chile has made substantial progress in recent years towards dismantling the

legacy of the military regime. The immunity of the military as established by the 1980

constitution is being gradually whittled away, and in 2005 the Chilean armed forces even

accepted institutional responsibility for the atrocities committed in the 1970s. But the fact that

Pinochet is still such a sensitive topic with many Chileans indicates that that fateful September

day in 1973, and the horrors that followed it, are still very much an open wound. The failure to

address what really happened all those years ago has rendered Chile a nation very much steeped

in its own past, and tied to one moment in its history in particular.

When I visited Santiago de Chile a few years ago, I was struck by how far removed it

seemed from the images of oppression and hardship that I had grown up seeing on television

news about Chile. The city centre is clean and modern: sweeping boulevards and neat little

pedestrian malls; crowds of smartly dressed people drifting past the display windows of boutique

clothing stores; stylish cafés packed with men in suits who stand at high tables and sip at piping

hot coffee served to them by glamorous young waitresses; a clean and efficient subway system,

with trains that glide silently from station to station on soft rubber wheels; the neatly trimmed

gardens at the foot of the Cerro San Cristobal, that lush green hill that is the largest of the city’s

many well-kept parks. Images of ostentatious modernity and glib consumerism assaulted my

eyes on every corner, and the expressions on the faces I saw around me were lively and self-

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assured; the faces of people caught up in the busy hustle-and-bustle of a prosperous twenty-first

century city.

It was on my second day in Santiago that I caught a glimpse of what lay beneath the

shiny surface. I walked out of my hotel and onto the Alameda to be confronted by a military

parade; a regiment of perhaps a hundred armed soldiers, marching together down the wide

boulevard. I stood back and watched them as they passed; as I did, I looked around to observe

the expressions of the civilians who had also stopped to watch them. In the expressions around

me, I saw no sign of the misty-eyed patriotism that such a sight might have inspired in some

countries, and much less the condescending amusement that would probably be the most

common response in my homeland. Their faces were as hard as stone, hinting at a cold, silent

contempt, or a mournful weariness which their owners seemed afraid to express openly. But after

so many years and so much progress, why would they still be afraid?

I think I got my answer to this question later that same day, when I met a gentleman in

my hotel with whom I struck up a conversation about the poetry of Neruda. We were ambling

down the quiet cobblestone lane of Calle Paris, chatting amiably, when the sound of an airplane

passing overhead made him stop and catch his breath. He clutched at my arm and gasped, unable

to speak until the sound of the aircraft had submerged beneath the rumble of traffic on the main

streets nearby. ‘What happened?’ I asked him, when he had regained sufficient strength to reply.

‘Forgive me, my friend,’ he answered. ‘How could I explain it to you? The sound of an

airplane passing over the streets of Santiago always paralyzes me. I was walking these very

streets in 1973, when I heard just such a sound. The next sound I heard was the explosion of a

bomb dropped on the Presidential Palace.’ He took a deep breath to calm his beating heart, and

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released his grip on my arm. ‘It is a sound that will haunt my generation for the rest of our lives,’

he added sadly.

‘But you must understand,’ I said, hoping to reassure him, ‘that such a thing could never

happen again. Chile has left those days far behind. It has a stable democracy now.’

He smiled at me softly with one of those smiles that an adult gives a child who has just

uttered a remark that is charmingly naive. ‘Allow me to show you something,’ he said. He dug

his hand into one of the pockets of his slacks, and took out a fifty peso coin. ‘Please,’ he said,

‘read the inscription on this coin.’

I took the coin and read the inscription aloud. ‘Por la razon o la fuerza.’

‘By reason or by force,’ he echoed. ‘That is the motto of my nation. Whenever reason

fails, force will be used. In 1973, they decided that people who wanted social justice in Chile

were not listening to reason. How long will it be before they decide the same again?’

It was then that I understood. Chileans were steeped in their past because they saw it in

their present. It is inscribed on their national coat of arms, in the coins of daily currency, in a

motto that implicitly endorses violence as a solution. And it is inscribed in the hearts of the

hundreds of thousands of Pinochet supporters who believe that the victims of his state terrorism

got what they deserved for ‘not listening to reason’.

It would seem that there is still much to be done before Chile can be truly free of the

events of September 1973, and the past that continues to haunt it.