Chile:

...some find solidarity mechanisms...

...Chile's alternative subculture encompasses over fifty high-level research institutions and a plethora of scholars, artists, writers, opposition politicians...

...He fails to capture, for example, that repression in Chile is now a fine-tuned instrument-a highly sensitive seismograph programmed to register and respond to the fluctuating moods of the country...

...Despite the prominent credentials earned by his brilliant bestseller, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, Argentine writer Jacobo Timer-man's latest book, Chile: Death in the South, reads like the journal of an Argentine correspondent who has taken on mission impossible...

...These women have translated their pain and fear into silence-the dictatorship's preferred coping mechanism...

...Equipped with dozens of phone numbers for his arrival in Santiago, he hopped on a plane...

...so loses its guiding role in subjective processes...

...Reality...

...Timerman relates, "As one of the objectives of inducing fear is to deprive an individual of his ability to act, the ordinary sense of reality is deliberately disrupted and rendered useless...

...others maintain silence...

...According to Timerman, these form "the steam the military allows to escape so that the boiler will not explode...

...In the end, Timerman's comments on the various strategies available to the Chileans provide one more debatable alternative...

...Through descriptive vignettes and moving testimonies, Timerman sets out to tackle the burning enigmas which have stumped Chilean experts for the last fifteen years: What must be done to restore Chile's 150-year tradition of democracy...

...Drawing on the conclusions of a conference of psychologists, "The Culture of Fear in Totalitarian Regimes,'' he analyzes the behavior of the "Women of Calama," whose husbands were executed in the early days of the regime...

...During the Holocaust," he warns, "the Jews managed to create a life with theaters, schools, choirs, lectures, chess tournaments, even beauty contests...

...What are the intellectual exercises that substitute for real resistance to the dictatorship...

...But the lines are not so clear...

...Sprinkled with sometimes humorous, often original, and always tragic anecdotes of how General Pinochet's repressive dictatorship reaches into the smallest corners of everyday life, Chile provides a melange of characters, true-life situations, and, ironically, bountiful data, statistics, and ideas generated by the phar-aonic "alternative subculture" Timerman clearly disdains...

...As the plane entered Bolivian territory on its way south, the journalist called out to the pilot,' 'Would you mind dipping to a lower altitude...

...Timerman paints his strokes broadly: some Chileans participate in an alternative subculture...

...Activism is merely a form of consolation...

...Timerman somewhat pretentiously prescribes that Chileans accept and decipher the present, instead of fighting to recover the past...

...With powerful imagery, Timerman compares the alternative lives in Chile with those of the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Poland...

...Such insights and other gems give plenty of food for thought, if the reader can overlook Timerman's often simplified and sometimes hasty interpretations of Chilean reality Chilean reality...

...Here Timerman has unwittingly stumbled upon a hidden and illuminating piece of the puzzle of Chile's political bottleneck...

...These insidious devices and the absolute lack of government accountability to the populace create an impenetrably pervasive layer of fear and frustration...

...The culture of fear also creates a collective inability to act and warps perceptions of both what is and what is not possible...

...Nowadays, those more lurid techniques punctuate only intermittently the regime's more pernicious, quotidian use of legal niceties, the fac,ade of due process, the combination of selective detentions with unacknowledged kidnappings and threats by unidentified individuals, and the never-ending enticement that a transition to democracy will come to those who wait...

...As Timerman writes, "Every day brings a new proposal or another original initiative...

...Timerman gets caught in his own contradictions-vacillating between a thinly veiled disdain for those who choose the alternative subculture and an admiration for those documenting the reality of the human rights' abuses taking place in Chile...

...But Chile is not under Nazi occupation and its "alternative subculture "is not by any means a marginalized part of Chilean society...

...I have to write about Bolivia next...

...And each day the never ending debate becomes more exhausting...

...The truth is the only way to prophesy what the future holds...

...Everything is debated in Chilean politics and everything is debatable...

...Each time, after the Nazis had transported thousands to the gas chambers and the ovens of the crematoria, the alternative life continued-for those who remained...

...Virginia M. Bouvier An American journal-ist was once assigned to write a story on Chile...

...Where, for example, would the host of journalists and editors of Chile's opposition magazines fall...

...Timerman's division of the population into separate groups that adopt different coping mechanisms again masks the complexity of Chilean reality...

...It comes to seem practically impossible to verify what is objective fact as against subjective experience and the boundary between what is real and possible on the one hand and what is fantasy and imagination on the other tends to dissolve...

...others denounce their reality and are expelled...

...Why can't the Chilean political leadership oust General Pinochet's military dictatorship...

...Visitors to Santiago more often than not will find a stunningly attractive, modern cosmopolitan bustle that shows little hint of the vise of military rule...

...What is the appropriate response to the regime...

...Given to hyperbole, Timerman's generalizations and abundant use of poetic license are at times misleading...

...If the intellectuals would realize that the Chile they believed in was defeated and was vanquished, then they could clarify their ideas and develop a vision of the future...

...The more sensational techniques of repression dramatized in Chile-beheadings, immolations, and the disappearance of political opponents more common immediately following the September 11, 1973 coup, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende-are no longer the daily bread and butter of the regime...

...Denunciation is merely a lament in the global field of culture...

...but it is impossible to get to the truth if only a part of reality is accepted.'' As though Timerman has a corner on the truth and the past can somehow be divorced from the present...