April in Chile

...They point to the takeover of the Banco A. Edwards (admittedly a shaky family enterprise engaged in loans exceeding its strictly legal prerogatives...

...Probably not," he answered...

...through persistent gestures of friendliness to Castro and the Marxists, irrevocably alienated the Alessandristas (who, for their part, went out of their way to antagonize the Christian Democrats...

...In May there is bound to be unemployment on a huge scale...

...Actually, neither Allende and his followers nor the Communists want a dictatorship...

...I suggested to him...

...As long as one is left, Allende can always blame American imperialism for what goes wrong, no...

...Since assuming the Presidency, however, Allende has given indications of protecting the opposition from intolerant partisans of his coalition...

...One of them, an American sociologist working for a foundation, is an almost fanatical Allendista...

...I asked...

...More than likely," I said, and recounted a run-in I had two years ago with my old friend Neruda after he received a telegram from East Germany (!) advising him that I was employed by our spy agency...

...This will be worse in May, for now they are harvesting the pre-election crop...

...Until we have the controls, production is bound to suffer.' But I think Allende is well aware that Chile has a strong middle class, so maybe he is more concerned about this production slowdown than the Communists are...

...Did you hear about the interview last week with the Communist Secretary General, Luis Corvalan, published in the Italian Communist organ L'Unital He said, 'We aim to consolidate the victory gained and keep advancing until all the state and political machinery pass into the hands of the people'--people meaning the Party, of course...

...It declared bankruptcy before the election, but is again attacking the "national treason of the Marxists" and presenting savagely effective lampoons of Allende...

...According to the law--Frei's law--you are obligated to give credit to the small farmers.' This is a good law, good for the country and bad only for the big bankers who have always used their funds primarily to develop their own industries...

...He has also given refuge to 25 Rightist military officers from Bolivia who fled their country after trying to overthrow Torres...

...Tomic entered the campaign under the misapprehension that he could gain the Communists' support and have the best of both worlds...

...On earlier trips to Chile, including a prolonged visit in 1968, I had been impressed by the political tolerance here...

...We passed a callampa ("mushroom," a squatters' settlement of jerry-built homes...

...You see what's happening already," he said...

...Are you still friends with Neruda...

...Vigilante committees enforce its decrees now, quite arbitrarily...

...The plan evidently had been to kidnap the Army commander, who was inadvertently slain when he drew his revolver...

...For example, every farm is required to have an outside latrine, its own source of drinking water, etc...

...The police, my Alessandrista informant concluded, are now as demoralized as the Armed Forces...

...As far as agrarian reform and the land seizures go, I say more power to them...

...The American sociologist was more realistic--or more naive, depending on your point of view...

...The worker says, 'Why should I arrive on time, or work hard, since it is our company now--or soon will be.' Sooner or later this is bound to leave half the working population unemployed and Chile bankrupt...

...It's significant that the leading official of the international Socialist movement interviewed Allende for hours on this point recently and came out saying, 'He's a moderate.' Another indication is that Allende hasn't granted asylum only to the guerrilleros of Brazil and Bolivia...

...Homeowners have stopped expansion and repairs...

...He almost certainly opposes the creation of a Socialist dictatorship, for then the Communist party, with its superior organization, agitprop and control of the labor movement, would become the real boss...

...To that the government replies, 'It is not available because your funds are going only to the big directors of the banks...

...Do the Chilean Communists really want the responsibility of full power...

...There's a slow-down, moreover, in the whole construction industry...

...That's what every Latin American country needs...

...By 1970 that climate had vanished, leaving barely a trace...

...Last October a clamor was raised to have a "good Marxist" appointed Director of Fine Arts, a post Frei had filled with the noted painter Nemesio Antunes, a political neutral...

...In '69 I could tell him what 1 thought about the Soviet tanks crushing Czechoslovak democracy...

...One businessman told me the other day, 'Big business in Chile is so corrupt that if the government investigated it rigorously even Communism would be justified!' " I pressed him on his own relationship to the government...

...While he tends, in Marxist style, to refer to every Communist country as "democratic," those familiar with Allende personally call him a traditionalist who really believes in free elections and respect for the law...

...Labor conflict promoted for political ends hastens the instability and the downfall of private enterprise . . . Seizure of the banks and with it the power to examine and exert economic pressure is another step toward winning the April elections...

...And these new tribunals, it is charged, are in effect "McCaithyite" forums where personal enemies on the Center or Right are first denounced as "unpatriotic citizens'' or "class enemies" and then eliminated from positions of control...

...PEC's editor, an ex-Communist, is adept at hitting his former comrades where it hurts most...

...the latter are perfectly satisfied with the relatively minor Cabinet posts of Labor, Finance and Public Works, and don't want to rock the boat...

...And when they transfer Jorge to Paris to serve under Neruda, he'll be similarly--how do you say it?--innocent by association...

...My last day in Chile I was lucky enough to run into two old acquaintances of 1968 whose views, if not as balanced as the agronomist's, complemented each other...

...The traditional oligarchy appeared to be giving way to the rising middle class quite peacefully, and the Catholic Church, as nowhere else in the Hemisphere, seemed firmly committed to achieving social justice through radical reforms...

...The other is that the effort to implicate Generals Huerta and Valanzuela in I'affaire Schneider could backfire, forcing the Army's hand if it thinks Allende will stop at nothing to control it...

...Once their own home is completed they stop building...

...He was as friendly as ever, but the old political give-and-take was gone...

...Communists, Socialists, liberals, and conservatives associated freely, apparently feeling that being Chilean transcended party loyalties...

...Even that good, gray liberal, Frei, wouldn't tolerate [Malcolm] Browne of the Times, remember...

...Banks are afraid to lend on credit...

...Well," he laughed, "that's why they'll never expropriate all of your companies...

...He knows it could backfire...

...General Viaux, already retired by Frei following an agreement to meet most of the Tacnassa demands, was jailed on vague charges along with various other suspects...

...Like expelling Browne...

...Speak...

...The press is still free," he concluded, and he is right--for the time being, at any rate--as an excerpt from that morning's lead editorial in Mercurio illustrates: "The heavy artillery of insult and calumny that stops at nothing and is capable of trumping up charges of treason, sedition, murder and robbery against the opposition fulfills a well-planned strategy...

...Because the Communist Minister of Labor controls the unions...

...A good sign," one hopeful conservative remarked to me in Vina del Mar, the plush Pacific resort where the President conducts most of his business...

...Except that its adherents go a step further to insist that freedom of the press and assembly, as well as the legal recourse still provided by an independent judiciary, will vanish simultaneously...

...More than in any other Spanish American country, flag-waving nationalism and the tendency to equate all economic ills with "gringo" penetration were considered rather uncivilized, if not downright silly...

...Like nearly everyone in the new Chile, both declined to be quoted by name...

...may testify to the liberals' reluctance to take sides in the kind of showdown Chile is facing...

...Our Embassy is pessimistic because Ambassador Edward M. Korry is a former European newspaper correspondent and takes a West European-Cold War view...

...But if the up gains total political control by May, what difference will it make...

...The Communists' greatest fear is losing the initiative to MIR and MAPU...

...Neruda is said to have saved his friend Antunes from summary dismissal...

...And he isn't speaking to his old friend Nicanor Parra across the road because his fellow poet had the bad luck to be photographed at a White House reception talking to Tricia Nixon...

...His public statements after coming into office have tended to reassure businessmen who precipitately fled the country September 4, panicked perhaps by "photographs" in the extreme Rightist weekly PEC showing Soviet tanks ringing La Moneda, the Chilean Presidential palace...

...Frei himself, the Alessandrista claimed, finally hinted that a golpe would be tolerated to save Chile, but he acted too late and did not receive a favorable response from his Army chiefs...

...With incredible political skill, he has thus far managed to draw just enough fire from the militants of his own party and the Communists to give business and the middle classes a degree of hope (wishful thinking, some say) that he is truly a stabilizing fulcrum, a statesman above the battle, who may in the final analysis prevent the revolution from outlawing private ownership entirely and imposing a "totalitarian" dictatorship over every form of political opposition and free expression...

...I also discovered that Neruda accepted the ambassadorship to Paris on the condition that his young novelist friend Jorge Edwards be made his assistant, though Edwards is widely believed to be almost as conservative as his renowned family...

...There's still a law...

...I went to see him at Isla Negra last September on election day, and I called on him yesterday," I replied...

...the government will assume control of all the banks...

...I still don't know whether Pablo was wholly reassured," I said, "when I pointed out that an East German tome, purporting to expose the CIA, lists as 'active agents' the thousands of World War II soldiers who served in OSS, including me...

...Two thousand were supposed to be finished by now," the agronomist said, "by cooperation...

...The American Ambassador, widely respected for his "correct" hands-off attitude toward the revolutionary regime, though said to be pessimistic about the future, characterizes Allende as a "populist" and a "humanist...

...Allende himself is the great enigma...

...Under the leadership of Jacques Chonchol (currently Allende's Minister of Agriculture) the whole Christian Democratic left wing, embracing most of the youth, seceded to join Allende's Leftist coalition...

...The courts, the Right observes, are being superseded by tribunales vecinales, a subtle transformation of the grass-roots community councils established by the Frei Administration to hear cases the courts were dragging their feet over...

...Then came the murder of General Rene Schneider on October 22, the eve of the Inauguration...

...This gives the government legal grounds for demanding that the banks extend these farms credit--or else...

...Selden Rodman is a veteran Latin American observer whose latest book is South America of the Poets...

...Far from being implicated or hopelessly embarrassed by the incident, as the Rightist plotters hoped, Allende turned the affair wholly to his advantage...

...General Robert Viaux's "Tacnassa Mutiny" a year ago had been motivated entirely by grievances over pay and pensions, he explained, and the military's attitude was, "What has democracy ever done for us...

...It gives you a kind of immunity from suspicion to be in a place like that...

...Its philosophy is to seize power first, so what can I say...

...I tell the government people that their philosophy can only increase production by way of dictatorship, and that they don't like to hear...

...I drove with him on his rounds one morning...

...The closest I came was an encounter with a government agronomist, now reduced to aiding a handful of small farmers on the outskirts of Santiago...

...Most disastrous of all was the choice of Radomiro Tomic to succeed Frei as the Christian Democratic standard bearer...

...Chile," my Christian Democratic friend offered...

...A front-page feature the day I arrived took aim at Pablo Neruda, Chile's great poet and Communist Presidential nominee until his party decided to back Allende, who had just been appointed Ambassador to Paris...

...Just two things worry me, he said...

...The fragmented and thoroughly frightened Right agrees...

...But to effectively detach foreign exchange from the internal economy and thereby permit the economy to be manipulated without brakes, Allende needs a sweeping mandate in April...

...In November when a student affiliated with the Castroite MIR was killed by a member of the Communists' Brigada Ramona Parra, the Brigade made a secret pact with the MIR and Chonchol's MAPU to hush up the incident and cooperate in illegal seizures of farms and housing units...

...General Vicente Huerta, former commander of the carabinieri, admitted having attended some of the conspirators' meetings, casting into disrepute his former boss, Patricio Rojas, Frei's Interior Minister, and delivering another damaging blow to the Christian Democrats...

...But if the grumbling should later become symphonic...

...They say he is drinking much more...

...But they're moving against the others under existing statutes...

...Conversely, it will be the moment of triumph, for the Left--total triumph, some say--if President Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular (up) wins again, and with a bigger margin than the 36 per cent of the vote by which it squeaked into power last September...

...That's what Chile needs...

...And if these policies prove harmful to the majority rather than helpful, what will happen then...

...They note an alleged withdrawal of government advertising--on which all Chilean communications media seem to depend for a large share of their operating revenue--from those few papers and radio stations not already controlled by the up faithful...

...Not that I mean to suggest that Jorge is guilty of anything, except maybe his thoughts, but these days if you haven't shouted your Marxist beliefs from the roof tops, some mean person you owe money to may report you to the tribunales vecinales...

...Naturally he went out of business...

...Nail manufacturers complain that nails aren't being bought, and the cement industry, threatened with expropriation, has stopped turning out cement...

...Nor could it provide a viable succession...

...They might conceivably intervene to thwart the imposition of an outright Leftist dictatorship, if the law appeared to be openly violated, but Socialism by gradual, legal steps they would most likely go along with...

...Meanwhile, Frei and his Foreign Minister, Gabriel Valdez...

...A Coca-Cola vendor I know who was openly Alessandrista in September had a $500 fine slapped on him recently for raising the price of a bottle by two cents...

...In the middle stood a cluster of 150 new houses built of reinforced concrete...

...housing developments, completed and uncompleted, will be turned over to the "rightful" tenants (those most in need of homes, regardless of ability to pay rents...

...The trouble is that those with houses already built aren't cooperating...

...But the situation is forcing them to take a more militant position...

...Yet, no matter how much Neru-da's enemies delight in calling attention to his opulent way of life and expensive tastes, they give him credit for sticking to his old friends...

...The President's personality and lifestyle are analyzed microscopically, down to such minutiae as his art collection, his penchant for mod clothes, his free-wheeling love life, and his drinking habits...

...Its role is to soften up resistance and open the way for misrepresentation or silencing of events that block the progress of the revolution...

...Not only had Frei parted company with Father Vekemans, the brilliant Catholic intellectual who was expected to modernize the Church and secure its allegiance, but the Christian Democratic regime had failed to fulfill its promises of agrarian reform...

...I asked...

...one of them said to me with a sigh of relief, his thankfulness hardly affected by the news that the editors were out on bail and back at their desks the following day...

...The government still asks me to advise it," he said with a sigh, "but I'm a production expert...

...To make Chile a full-fledged member of the Marxist-Leninist club just two things are necessary: control of the banks and control of foreign exchange...

...The Chilean diplomat began musing, "I wish I were at our new Embassy in Havana with our friend Jorge Edwards right now...

...will never be the same again...

...Explained the other, a Christian Democrat who is a permanent member of Chile's diplomatic corps, "They think in terms of gigantic conspiracies with interlocking directorates...

...and the nationalization of the giant American copper companies, carried to 51 per cent under former President Eduardo Frei, will be completed on terms of compensation that are acceptable to Chile...

...My God, man," he said, "I've got to give you one or two reservations--Allende's not perfect, you know--and if I do, I may find myself on the next plane home...

...Only Frei's ethics prevented him from being a tyrant, for the President of Chile has almost unlimited powers if he chooses to use them...

...Our Armed Forces," he replied, "are not upper-class, as in so many Latin American countries, but middle-class...

...As it turned out, of course, the Left would have nothing to do with him, and by courting them, Tomic frightened his own party's moderates into backing Alessandri...

...The comerciantes were especially reassured by the prompt jailing of the top editors of Chile's No...

...Every Chilean will think, 'I'm the only miserable one,' because the only news he'll see in the papers or hear on the radio will be allegro...

...When you used the word 'backfire,' referring to what Allende fears," I inquired, "did you mean the possibility of Army intervention...

...Like Dirinco, the price and wage control authority...

...If I'm even seen talking to you they'll suspect I'm in the pay of your CIA...

...A disgruntled Alessandrista had informed me earlier that the Army's "failure" to stage a golpe after the election or the inauguration stemmed from the officers' feeling that democratic governments never treated them very well...

...They've seized only one so far, the Banco Edwards, and with good reason: It was engaged in dishonest deals...

...The former are about as revolutionary as Robert Kennedy's movement...

...The farmers are simply not producing or investing in new seed or fertilizer, lest their farms b; seized and the money lost...

...The first is almost achieved...

...Urged to cable Generalissimo Franco to protest the Spanish government's recent demand that the Basque separatists be given death sentences, he readily complied and at the same time cabled a protest to Moscow against its harsh treatment of the Leningrad Jewish hijackers, thereby predictably infuriating the Chilean Communists...

...The problem in February 1971 was to find anyone in Chile capable of viewing the political situation objectively...

...Back in business, too, is PEC, the weekly scandal sheet of ex-President Jorge Alessandri's followers...

...One is that Allende's wage boosts seem a little irrational in terms of what Chile can afford...

...Far to his left in the American colony, the Peace Corps tends to regard the President as a democrat at heart, firmly committed to carrying out vital social changes with a maximum of freedom...

...All but the very small landholdings, I was told, will be turned into cooperatives or state farms...

...The parliamentary system under which Chile (uniquely in Latin America) has been governed since Colonial times was regarded as inviolable...

...But a blown-up quotation from Sophocles in Peace Corps headquarters--"Who is the slayer...

...Who the victim...

...During his final rally at Valparaiso last September, for example, when asked how he planned to pay for the quart of milk he promised every Chilean child, he replied, "If we run out of four-legged beasts, we can always start milking the two-legged ones...

...2 Communist newspaper, Puro Chile, for openly advocating defiance of the law in the matter of property seizures...

...Pessimists of the Right and Center point to Allende's firebreathing campaign utterances as a true measure of his intentions...

...There are no more of the inflationary wildcat strikes that undermined Frei...

...In April, say members of almost every faction of the unwieldy coalition--Radicals, Socialists, Social Democrats, Communists, and dissident Christian Democrats of the Left (MAPU) --the "real" revolution will begin...

...They view with even greater alarm the harassment of the nation's largest newspaper, El Mercurio, and its biggest publishing company, Zig-Zag (both Edwards family enterprises) by Leftist tax inspectors and government decrees enforcing wage increases...

...No...

...Added to this are the "spontaneous" seizures of farms in the south and of apartments in Santiago developments--seizures provoked, the Right claims, by Communist and Socialist militants, "protected" by hands-off orders issued to the once "impartial" carabinieri (police), and finally "confirmed" by government takeovers of the seized properties pending a promised judicial review...

...The leaders are old men, comfortable in their jobs...

...The banks . . ." "Are under Allende's thumb, as Mercurio complains this morning...

...Every time they intervene to stop the illegal seizure of a property," he said, "the officer responsible is demoted or transferred--on orders from the Communist party...

...In September, when I asked him when he was going to visit my home in New Jersey again, he said, 'When Nixon's dead, and you are out of Vietnam.' Yesterday he wouldn't talk about politics at all...

...Credit is not available, say the banks, because small depositors are withdrawing their tnoney...

...They say to me, in effect, 'First things first...

...Yet productivity has gone steadily down...

...If he gets it, he can really ride over the opposition...