On democracy in Chile
Rosenberg, Tina
Ghile's plebiscite of October 1988 was a dramatic ending to fifteen painful years. Capitan General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, President of the Republic of...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...For nonpolitical 298 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad crimes, Chilean courts are still the fairest in Latin America...
...But instead of turning their anger against the government, they retreated inward...
...The last fifteen years have taught Chileans to be passive and dependent, not just with regard to politics, but in how they treat one another...
...An elected, civilian government is just one natural outgrowth of a democratic society...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...But in supporting these men, the United States also supports brutal militaries and repressive social groups that block even the most pathetic steps at democratization...
...When a worker was killed during a strike in the late 1960s, a 296 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad million people took to the streets in protest...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...The coup may haunt Chile for centuries...
...The Chilean military will likely be in a stronger position, leaving office amidst congratulations for turning the government over to civilians...
...But it soon became apparent that this apathy was a function of fear and the seeming hopelessness of political activity...
...A big night in Chile means a bottle of wine and an argument about whether Clodomiro Almeyda's wing of the Socialist party will support a Christian Democratic presidential candidate...
...He set up institutions with the novel idea that the state was there to serve the country as a whole and left office so poor that at times he didn't have change for cigarettes...
...Chile was a good deal more egalitarian than most places in Latin America...
...When the economy crashed and protests began in 1983, they never really reflected the depth of opposition to Pinochet...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...The wise worker ignores calls for strikes, keeps his political views to himself, and attends Pinochet rallies in the soccer stadiums, waving banners if he is asked...
...To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1)Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...I went back to the same slums several times before the plebiscite...
...It was the largest demonstration in Chilean history...
...it ranks seventh in per capita income in Latin America...
...This was especially true for the centrist Christian Democratic party...
...Chile is practically an island, enclosed by the world's driest desert, the Pacific, the ridge of the Andes, and Antarctica...
...In November, a newspaper reported that a man died in the street outside a public hospital because he could not pay the 200-peso fee—about seventy cents—for medical attention...
...but it was now all "legal...
...Independence meant replacing repressive rule by foreigners with repressive rule by locals...
...Modern Chile is not a wealthy country...
...Speaking out is risky, and for those who supported the coup it is simply more comfortable not to know...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...Right-wing death squads with clear links to the armed forces were responsible for twenty-five massacres of workers or peasants in the first six months of 1988 alone...
...Chile is better prepared for this work than most countries in Latin America...
...I went to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in El Salvador where the military's SUMMER • 1989 • 295 Reports from Abroad then-Commander in Chief, General Adolfo BlandOn, presented a program to build hospitals and schools in rural areas as a way to fight the guerrillas...
...A History of Democracy Traditional measures of "democracy" used by scholars have focused on either the means or the ends: the strength of parties, freedom of the press, and independence of the judiciary or income distribution, literacy rates, and other quality-of-life indicators...
...First, no one believed that a Pinochet could happen in Chile...
...It now seems that military officers will be seriously prosecuted for the massacre of ten peasants in the village of San Sebastian—the first such prosecution...
...Allende's democratic spirit was part of the tradition of the left...
...The United States falls short...
...People do not throw garbage on the ground...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...The Chamber was dominated by coffee growers (recipients of healthy doses of U.S...
...The repression was usually backed by the United States, which sought to protect its strategic or economic interests...
...once broken, it is likely to be broken again...
...The few Indian tribes did not go docilely into slavery...
...Pinochet's peasants are not happy...
...Capitan General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, President of the Republic of Chile, notorious worldwide as a symbol of violence and repression, lost an election he himself had designed...
...They feel their opinions matter...
...The free-market economic policies Milton Friedman and "los Chicago boys" brought to Chile could be put into practice only if there were no pressure groups to protest the new low salaries (the lowest in Latin America) and thousands of bankruptcies caused by opening Chile's markets...
...Will this attitude last...
...But this is not democracy...
...Over the past fifteen years Pinochet has done his best to erase Chile's democratic culture...
...A second serious problem is the threat of a new coup...
...L Colombia, which has a civilian president chosen in a two-party election, the Permanent Human Rights Commission publishes a thick folder every month with such sections as Genocides, Assassinations, Death Threats, and Tortures...
...they are resentful of the inequality in their society...
...When I asked people if they planned to register, most shrugged...
...Chile's second point of departure came in 1829, when Diego Portales, a businessman, came to power...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...It requires years of a civilian government committed to democracy to nurture the changes—building grassroots organizations that encourage participation in government, constructing a justice system that works fairly, educating young people to challenge authority —which can allow a country to reinvent its political culture...
...The Spaniards governed, if it can be called that, with violence and corruption...
...In 1985, with Jose Duarte in the presidency, the killings dropped to 2,000...
...The conquest and colonization of most of Latin America was characterized by frantic greed...
...The challenge is to make these groups strong without provoking a reaction from the right that will once again break the political system...
...This isn't, of course, a justification for dictatorship...
...Another is that the basis of rule is law, not mere power—the justice system works and works fairly...
...300 • DISSENT...
...Chile does not show signs of the breakdown that one sees in other places...
...There is every reason to think that given the time for these institutions to take root, real democracy is possible in Latin America...
...Most important, Pinochet has not been able to extinguish Chile's love of politics...
...Social culture is not immutable...
...Pinochet has achieved a subtle balance—just enough repression to quiet political activity but not enough to wake up Chileans, who prefer to sleep through the dictatorship...
...Officials talk about the miracle of modern Chile, as if the new computers and skyscrapers mean that the country has beaten underdevelopment...
...Chile's prospects for the future depend, in large measure, on whether its people can overcome self-censorship in their daily lives...
...On a Sunday visit to Santiago's La Pincoya slum, I found that one person among the forty I interviewed had registered to vote...
...The pact of democracy is precarious...
...The plebiscite was a good deal more impressive than the presidential elections a month later in the United States...
...Their government excepted, Chileans during the plebiscite were model democrats...
...A policeman who quit the force shortly after the coup told me that until 1973 the police were forbidden to raise their nightsticks above shoulder level...
...One reason, of course, was fear...
...The reverse of my hope for Chile is a sense of despair regarding its neighbors, whose legacy from the past is less fortunate...
...There are many words for this kind of theater, but "democracy" does not come to mind...
...Pinochet will probably have to abide by the rules...
...The countries with the worst human rights records in Latin America at the moment are all democracies—Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala...
...A military that had never before mixed in politics now has tasted power...
...Many Chileans preferred to wait for the "legal" way out...
...Although in Lima, Peru, people drive on whichever side of the street they feel like, drivers in Chile stop at red lights even on deserted streets at 2 A.M...
...Replacing a dictatorship with an elected, civilian government is a first, crucial step to building democracy...
...After the coup, the government dissolved the "subversive-infested" sociology and political science departments...
...we are in some measure blessed or damned from the start...
...The Communist party is still illegal, and anyone convicted of harboring ideas that "conspire against the family" can be banned, South Africa style...
...The other poor cousin during the conquest was Costa Rica, which had little gold and few Indians to be enslaved...
...He tried to declare himself the winner anyway, and his own military junta prevented him...
...they turn to politics and not to violence...
...General Pinochet in Chile is a right-wing military dictator whose social philosophy is summed up by his recent statement, "We must take good care of the rich because they're the ones with the money...
...Now it has two...
...It is simply that more killings would be unproductive...
...Citizens of a democracy feel powerful...
...In December 1971, Allende's most trusted general tried to sue Tribuna, a right-wing magazine, for suggesting that the armed forces should break their loyalty to President Allende...
...dissidents were jailed and exiled...
...He fired half the army and subordinated the other half to civilian rule...
...The voices of the very poorest, urban and rural, were not really heard until the Allende years, and Pinochet has silenced them completely...
...Counting from 1980, when Peru "returned to democracy," to 1987, its security forces have killed or "disappeared" 13,000 people...
...It is easy to replace a culture of cooperation and participation with one of fear...
...Another is that the armed forces do not go around killing people with whom they are not at war...
...The second factor was that Chileans were so accustomed to think of the military as a benign force that many supported the coup who would not otherwise have done so...
...They never work, but they keep filing them anyway...
...The national sport was politics...
...In 1980, his popularity high because of an economic boom, Pinochet submitted a new constitution to popular vote...
...Central Intelligence Agency and the Chilean right, in part because of bad management—but this alone could not have provoked the coup...
...The Si campaign's message was that the No would bring chaos and terror, but the No campaign spoke responsibly about serious issues—poor salaries, lack of health care and education, torture, censorship...
...habeas corpus was ignored...
...When Allende became president in 1970, a socialist was elected to power in Latin America for the first time in history...
...His loss in the recent plebiscite drained much of his support...
...These are all measurable building blocks of democracy...
...the Araucano tribe was so fierce that it surrendered formally only in the twentieth century...
...Their government is strong, not in the sense of being big and controlling much of society, but in the sense of having popular legitimacy...
...The murder of 2,000 civilians instead of 13,000 is a great improvement...
...Hugo Rodriguez, a Peruvian human rights lawyer, told me that in the past few years Peruvians have filed exactly eight habeas corpus petitions...
...In the same period in Chile, the security forces of Pinochet's dictatorship killed or "disappeared" 400...
...In the opposition's focus groups, people said they felt shut out of society...
...A few months before the plebiscite, it seemed as though he had...
...All this was made easier because there was no precedent for the hell they were living...
...Military coups are not seen in Chile," said the general, whose name was Augusto Pinochet...
...Chile is also remarkably free of corruption, important because nothing causes people to lose faith in government faster...
...Others leave the question open but endorse an investigation...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...Congress was in permanent recess...
...Duarte in Salvador, Vinicio Cerezo in Guatemala, and Virgilio Barco in Colombia are not dictators...
...The plebiscite, however, is certainly a reason for optimism about Chile's future...
...A human rights lawyer told me of a case he represented during those years that became such a scandal that Salvador Allende, then president of the Senate, came to investigate personally: A prisoner's ears had been boxed...
...But even if he follows the rules, the game is still rigged...
...In the last few years, Pinochet's security forces have killed about fifty-five people a year, and the "disappeared" total five people...
...The first problem is that Pinochet is still Chile's dictator—a lame-duck dictator, but a dictator...
...Chileans joke that theirs is the only country where the tanks stop at traffic lights during a military coup...
...By now people all over the country were joining parties and going to demonstrations, and this offered a new sense of momentum...
...These new democracies may still have economic problems, the thinking goes, but at least they no longer suffer massacres, torture, and disappearances...
...The program had its origin in U.S...
...Allende never bothered to create armed organizations to defend the government...
...Their violence, which plays into Pinochet's hands, has killed innocent people and has increased since the recent plebiscite...
...Neither is likely to please the armed forces, who believe an ungrateful Chile should recognize their historic fight against the communist threat...
...In Chile, they've filed thousands...
...The Latin oligarchy learned arrogance and the Latin poor silence, habits that remain to this day...
...Pinochet broke the common accord Chileans had formed to work for change through politics and not violence...
...I wish to propose a more basic focus: the values that underlie the society and produce (or do not produce) both the means and the ends of democracy...
...aid to "strengthen the private sector," although it's hard to see how they could get any stronger), who criticized the plan as "a step towards socialism" and invited the army to stage yet another coup...
...In the early 1980s, when a military junta ruled El Salvador, the armed forces killed roughly 13,000 people a year...
...Despite Pinochet's frantic efforts, Chile retains some important qualities of democratic societies...
...The problem is that governments committed to building democracy rarely last long enough to find out...
...A No campaign rally a week before the plebiscite attracted more than a million and a quarter people, a tenth of the population of Chile...
...But by a different, perverse logic, the Chilean democratic tradition also helped to keep Pinochet in power for fifteen years...
...It can be done in one long night...
...And why must these countries keep "returning to democracy" again and again...
...But it was always the most middle-class country, the most educated, and the country with the strongest state...
...Students had to read books, criticize them, and write essays...
...Willful blindness is a common defense mechanism...
...Garcia's security forces have killed or "disappeared" one hundred people a year...
...The vast majority of Chileans have lived all their adult lives under Pinochet...
...Chile was not accustomed to violence...
...When the government killed thousands of people in the first few years after the coup, Chileans preferred not to notice...
...Today, Costa Rica is the only real, stable democracy in Latin America and the only country in the world to have abolished its armed forces...
...Although Santiago's Mapocho River was red with blood and bodies were left in the street, many Chileans to this day believe that the deaths and tortures exist only in the imagination of the left...
...Chileans have learned a new and dangerous skill, that of figuring out what the boss wants them to say, think, and do...
...Fear has changed Chile...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...But more than that, a plebiscite was on the horizon...
...The government just does not do those kinds of things," I heard over and over...
...A dictator's life is easier, of course, in countries with long histories of dictatorship...
...When registration closed, more than 90 percent of all adults had gone through an expensive— the new ID card required cost nearly a day's salary at minimum wage—and time-consuming process of registering to vote...
...The Constitution provides for a National Security Council of the armed forces that would have virtual veto power over executive decisions...
...Chilean democracy permeated all aspects of society...
...What Will Democracy Require...
...In a continent that rarely sees good news, this was a story with a happy ending: Chile returns to democracy...
...This was Chilean democracy's weakest point...
...That more soldiers in El Salvador are building hospitals and fewer are machine-gunning citizens is undeniably a change for the better...
...A country's social culture, which strongly affects the development of political institutions and distribution of wealth, is greatly influenced by history...
...The Indians they did not kill they enslaved to work in the mines and as laborers on sugar and fruit plantations...
...The Constitution calls for elections by December 1989...
...The worst pirates and criminals of Spain came to the New World in search of gold...
...Most Latin American countries have "returned to democracy" in the last ten years...
...Silence is the guarantor of everything from Christmas toys distributed by the city government to a job, to physical liberty, to survival itself...
...There was no censorship during Allende's government, there were no political prisoners...
...A college education, which under Allende was free to all, is now within reach of only the middle and upper classes...
...Undoubtedly some government officials and military officers are enriching themselves, but corruption is certainly not one of the constants of doing business, as in Peru, Mexico, or Paraguay...
...Such talk is the technocratic equivalent of a king's smug assurance that his peasants are happy because his castle is large...
...They have learned that silence is health...
...In voting a dictator out of office, Chile accomplished a true miracle...
...The Communist party had worked within the system and never supported armed struggle—until Pinochet...
...later, interest falls...
...Chile had the good fortune to be extremely isolated and extremely poor...
...Caudillos did not sell here...
...Where Did Pinochet's Support Come From...
...The task of returning to democracy is enormous...
...They felt that no one was listening...
...Never president, Portales as minister dominated three presidents...
...The first thing you did if you formed a soccer team was elect officers and write up pages of by-laws and rules," a Santiago businessman said...
...They feel their government is reasonably fair to them...
...The Constitution contained another stroke of genius: a call for a plebiscite before March 1989...
...Months after the plebiscite Chileans are still euphoric, still talking about the "lesson in democracy" they taught the world...
...Meetings of any kind were considered subversive—in the first years after the coup, even Miss Chile was appointed...
...He won 67 percent approval in a blatantly fraudulent election (something else that had been unknown in Chile), but Chileans were so distracted by their new television sets and refrigerators that he might have won anyway...
...The importance of money was minimal—the government lost to an opposition that had almost no money at all...
...His neighbor in Peru, democratically elected Alan Garcia, is an energetic social reformer, an eloquent spokesman for the oppressed...
...That's what passed for torture in Chile...
...Its land was terrible for plantation agriculture and its minerals were boring...
...Millions waited peacefully for hours in the broiling sun to vote...
...Portales's dream was to end the rule of strongmen, or caudillos, and establish the rule of law...
...A new government must also encourage the reconstruction of the country's political and social organizations...
...In politically repressed societies, first opportunities to vote usually attract massive participation...
...Chile never had left-wing guerrilla groups before...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...That the regime kills "only" fifty-five people a year is not an indication of benign character...
...Another is that people can get what they want by working within the system...
...How could a Pinochet have come to power in such a climate...
...Argentina has seen three recent coup attempts because the government has refused to grant the military amnesty...
...political parties were outlawed...
...Democracy is how people relate to the government and to each other...
...Then why is it that disappearances, massacres, and torture continue to occur in democratic Latin America...
...While in most Latin countries education means copying what the teacher writes on a blackboard—in all but a handful of private schools in Peru, students graduating from high school will never have read a book—Chilean education was different...
...Although these organizations had proliferated to the point of parody, they never reached as far as they should have...
...But they have their foundation in an elusive quality that cannot be seen, merely felt: Chile must rebuild the culture of argument...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...But foreign curiosity usually vanishes with the dictator...
...One-third of the Senate would be appointed, not elected, and the election procedures for the rest favor Pinochet's supporters...
...Since the late 1970s, military dictatorships have fallen (at least temporarily) in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay...
...who cared about nitrates and copper when Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina were bursting with gold and silver...
...One is public faith in law...
...They dropped further but recently have been rising again, though not to the levels of 1981...
...Voting itself is a catharsis...
...Labor unions, SUMMER • 1989 • 297 Reports from Abroad political parties, trade associations, and neighborhood groups were shut down...
...Women were arrested for organizing soccer clubs...
...But it is just one step...
...Some opposition politicians have backed full trials for military officers involved in "disappearances" and torture...
...The coup required two other factors and they were supplied, ironically, by Chile's tradition of gentlemen's politics...
...The last years of the Allende government were chaotic—in part because of sabotage by the U.S...
...While the private hospitals proudly demonstrate their new CAT scan machines, at the public hospitals mothers are told that the next available appointment is two months away, and they couldn't afford the medicine anyway...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...Since 1973, consumption by Santiago's poorest fifth dropped 30 percent, while that by the top fifth has risen 15 percent...
...an attempt at a coup would not draw many supporters...
...Education itself has changed...
...In the offices of UniOn PatriOtica, a new left-wing political party, one of the party's officers showed me a computer printout of names of the more than six hundred party members killed since 1985...
...Students were required to think and question...
...In La Pincoya new party headquarters had sprung up, people openly made political jokes and almost everyone ended up registering to vote...
...All it can do is denounce the violence—there is too much of it to investigate, the justice system is too weak to offer recourse, and anyone trying to investigate would be immediately killed...
...3)Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...policy in Vietnam, and it was obvious that BlandOn saw it as a small price for his half-billion dollars a year from the United States...
...THE EDITORS q SUMMER • 1989 • 299 Reports from Abroad Moving in the other direction is more difficult...
...That Pinochet's Chile is one of the last outposts of dictatorship in Latin America is a bizarre accident of history...
...They are back but rigidly controlled—sociology, political science, and economics courses today are more like religious instruction in the revealed truth of free markets and the red peril...
...but this is also not a description of most countries in Latin America, no matter how their presidents dress...
...Television time was free...
...Until 1973, Chile enjoyed 150 years of elected civilian government, with one period of dictatorship, from 1927 to 1931...
...The vision of a political end to Pinochet's term—although nine years away—bought him years in office...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
