THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW SERGIO BITAR
Dreifus, Claudia
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Sergio Bitar 'We never imagined such brutality could happen in Chile' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS During the early 1970s, Sergio Bitar was the wunderkind of the Popular Unity...
...It was obvious...
...When you lack air, you forget everything else...
...Because of them, it became much more costly for a dictator to kill someone...
...Emotionally, not...
...Q: But it had to be traumatic to come back to a place so different...
...Bitar: In some ways, you have to restart the conversations that were interrupted...
...Whenever you destroy institutions and those monsters come out, you can see things that are absolutely awful...
...Q: So what is the job of people like you in this new democracy of Chile...
...After a nasty whisper campaign in which it was hinted that Bitar had not sufficiently renounced "Marxist-Leninism," he was passed over for a post in the Mining Ministry of the Aylwin government...
...Our generation was a generation that dreamed a lot...
...For everyone else, the apolitical, the middle class, this is just an annoying subject they wish would go away...
...She told the story of the way many people were killed at the beginning of the junta...
...Q: Within days of the coup, you and the other surviving members of the Allende government were taken to a concentration camp on Dawson Island...
...Second, to gain social recognition for the position of the victims—so that the victims realize that their neighbors know what happened and recognize their suffering...
...The words had changed...
...Under some conditions, polarization can create conditions for change...
...These people will see that all these stories about the chaos and the communists eating children is garbage...
...Bitar: Information...
...That's first...
...Fourth, you need reparations-psychological and monetary...
...What makes a democracy is the ability to keep these things latent...
...Just look how a book like Patricia Verdugo's The Claw of the Puma is selling...
...Bitar: Yes, and at Dawson Island, it was as if the air had disappeared...
...We have a reaction against those who think they have the whole truth and who present you with broad models where everything fits...
...The process of de-exiling yourself is a difficult one...
...Q: Pinochet seems to have a real base...
...It is a mixed feeling because it is and it is not your country...
...Sergio Bitar: Well, it's very different...
...But good deeds do not always go rewarded in the newly restored democracy of Chile...
...We thought we could reach heaven by making changes...
...International support was central...
...Conservatives, too...
...Bitar: I would say there are some similarities, especially in the direction of human rights—institution building, pluralism, dignity for the human being...
...Secondly, I began to value the very deep feeling about gaining majorities before you do anything—and the value of doing things more gradually...
...We feel the dictatorship reached the zenith of being dogmatic and having grand schemes...
...All of that will take time...
...It was based on winning a clear majority—so that we could sustain for a long period of time a government that could project political stability...
...To know what happened to the victims...
...And to make that known to everyone...
...If we had any idea of the costs, the attitude of the leaders of the political parties would have been different in some way...
...They created space for political action...
...We never said, "The authorities said...
...It's not like Romania...
...Bitar: No...
...We reject that...
...We used to say, "The Secretary of State said...
...My own book, Island Ten, which is about what happened in the Dawson Island concentration camp for political prisoners, is in its sixth printing...
...Q: What would you say is a viable strategy for dealing with the widespread desire to sweep the past under the rug...
...Q: Is there a real constituency for facing up to the past...
...You have to reorganize things to become normal as a country and as a person...
...To know what happened...
...It was pretty naked...
...But the kind of transition we have today is so gradual, so soft, so slow, it is like a ballet...
...Q: Traveling around Santiago, what I hear is that human-rights issues are extremely politically delicate for Aylwin...
...At thirty-two, he was Minister of Mining, negotiating the nationalization of the copper industry with the U.S...
...If we had known what we were going to experience, I think, rationally, that those who were in charge would have conducted themselves differently...
...In the late 1960s, the strategy was often to create as much polarization as possible...
...As I see it, only those parts of the citizenry who suffered from human-rights abuses are asking that the nation come to terms with its past...
...Q: Sergio Bitar, you were the youngest minister in the government of Salvador Allende...
...Today, I'd say that we have an instinctive reaction to anyone who would be politically divisive...
...But if the struggle for human rights is perceived as the struggle of a radicalized minority, well, of course, that will not be a force strong enough to change things...
...Bitar: One very important conclusion I reached on Dawson Island is to be very, very careful about what you say and the relationship between what you say and what you do...
...I think all of us came away from the experience of the Allende years and their aftermath with a strong feeling for doing things that increase participation...
...Q: This has a lot of relevance to North American political activists...
...His book, Island Ten, about his time on Dawson Island, is a Chilean best-seller...
...And who reads that...
...We had assumed that institutions were there like the mountains...
...Q: Well, I ask about Eastern Europe because some months ago, when we first saw those photos of Alexander Dubcek standing alongside Vaclav Havel, I remember thinking, "For history to be truly restored, we would need Salvador Allende here...
...Bitar: They are essential...
...That will be an enormous change in this country...
...Czechoslovakia and Chile were the two lost revolutions of that period...
...If this government moves ahead in terms of democratizing without disorder, you will see a decline of those forces that have supported Pinochet...
...State Department and mega-multinationals...
...Q: I must say that I've seen a strong public mood for silence...
...We thought that with good ideas, good ideals, you could change societies...
...Q: How do you view the restoration of Chilean democracy in relationship to recent events in Eastern Europe...
...With that as background, what does it feel like to live in the Chile of the 1990s...
...We need long-term political stability to heal the divisions that cracked the system in the first place...
...Q: What about his running in four years...
...And there were other things, too...
...It gave us more space for action and less fear...
...She visited Chile earlier this year...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Sergio Bitar 'We never imagined such brutality could happen in Chile' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS During the early 1970s, Sergio Bitar was the wunderkind of the Popular Unity government of Chile's President Salvador Allende...
...The wish to avoid some of the traumas of the past is what gives him 40 per cent of the vote...
...No, I don't see the possibility of Pinochet interrupting the process in the next four years...
...Qi Was the September 1973 coup a shock...
...Many people don't dare to tell their friends that they were tortured...
...After the September 1973 coup of General Augusto Pinochet, Bitar, like all the surviving members of the Allende cabinet, was incarcerated in a slave-labor camp on Dawson Island in the South Atlantic...
...Besides, you do have some indications that people are becoming more interested in these kinds of things...
...Unlike Eastern Europe, here the army has been attempting to control the process of change...
...You definitely need medical treatment for those who have suffered...
...Bitar: It was, indeed...
...But when polarization divides a country to the point where it is impossible to find a way out through compromise and you are really heading for confrontation, then the normal institutions don't resist confrontation beyond a certain limit...
...But probably in the Chilean case, our moment lacks the epic dimension that you see in Eastern Europe...
...The physical support when people visited us made a big difference...
...Bitar: This is not a glamorous moment here...
...But on our side were all those ideals...
...With these kinds of figures and inflation, the system cannot work...
...He spent a year in prison and then began a decade-long exile, circling the globe as a spokesman for democratic Chile...
...There are some things that are the same and others not...
...Bitar: That would mean that all we have built was too fragile...
...Q: Was it that free speech was like air—and you had made the mistake of taking it for granted...
...The commonalities are more on the liberty side rather than on the kind of economic model being pursued...
...And we saw those things in Chile...
...There, during your months in the frozen wilderness, how did you reflect on your government's political mistakes...
...Nor could he win in four years...
...Even if you don't know who did it, to know what happened...
...Bitar: Rationally, we were expecting it...
...Q: Since my arrival in Chile, I've been struck by how many former Allende officials tell tales similar to yours...
...We are so conscious that we have to build this process through negotiation and consensus, that probably all our efforts have gone toward moving slowly...
...Most of us who were there came out with much less inclination for ideology and a bigger will toward finding solutions to specific problems...
...He returned to Santiago with his family in 1984 and quickly signed on as a key organizer of the opposition forces...
...Q: And what did you conclude...
...As a leader of the moderate-left Party for Democracy (PPD), which is essentially the old Allende Socialist Party, he was one of the architects of Opposition Concertation, which elected Christian Democratic President Patricio Aylwin to office last December...
...That you could really impose on them such pressures and nothing would happen...
...Many people here reject what they did before 1973, or what happened to them in 1975 or 1976...
...So after that, the brutality of everything was so shocking, we never imagined such brutality could happen in Chile...
...It will be a major problem in all transitions in the region, and it will also be in Chile...
...Bitar: Well, you know, the 1960s are so different from the 1990s...
...I am an economist and an engineer, and I remember looking at calendars and charts at the time and saying, "This does not fit...
...people in this country, even those who favored the coup, couldn't foresee what it would mean...
...But there was reality, too...
...What is happening today is that new opportunities exist for political discourse...
...Ninety-five per cent of the Claudia Dreifus's last interview for The Progressive was with Barbara Garson in the January issue...
...Essential...
...Because it was there...
...For us then, "free speech" was so obvious that we never considered it something that counted...
...Over time, fear will vanish...
...But we can educate these people...
...Bitar: It depends on how you face that problem...
...There was no way to avoid the power of the forces opposing us...
...This explains the strategic Center-Left alliance that elected Aylwin...
...And for the political campaigns, we got much economic support internationally...
...Bitar: Well, I do not think human rights is an issue that can be avoided...
...Q: When you came back to Chile in 1984, after a decade of exile, did you feel as if you had landed on the moon...
...Q: So that the work of groups like Amnesty International and Americas Watch is underestimated...
...And all those people who think Pinochet will protect them will realize that the political parties are responsible, and are doing their business in a decent way...
...Probably, you might try 10,000 cases and only get fifty convictions, but the fact of trying to punish those who were brutal is elementary...
...I think the difference won't be in terms of forgetting or not, it will be in terms of finding a way out that is more convenient for building democracy...
...Bitar: That's something else...
...Bitar: That all societies must have it within them...
...It depends very much on the way you put the problem into the political arena...
...We're sick of that...
...For the socialists, also, we've come away with very strong ideas of defending human rights...
...When I came back, I found many new words that hadn't existed before...
...And then the trauma will stay...
...When a country lives with that, you are not a healthy country...
...From what I can see, if a few things went wrong here, he could be back...
...Bitar: I would say something different: that there is a big constituency that fears justice...
...Bitar: Probably this is one of the striking conclusions many of us have reached: that whenever you destroy your institutions, the price is so high in terms of suffering and lives...
...You see that nothing is obvious when you are in a concentration camp...
...We knew a coup was coming, but no Chilean really knew what a coup meant...
...And I think we went beyond that limit...
...Bitar: Yes, those pictures were impressive...
...The words torture, fear, depression, hiding, exile—those words were more for literature than for real life before 1973...
...Pinochet has declared that the rule of law ends the minute the civilian government tries to call the military to account for what it did these past sixteen years...
...We, the opposition, we had a lot of international support, which was extremely important...
...We've abandoned those ideas that were common in the 1960s when human rights were pejoratively called matters of "bourgeois democracy...
...That was not the case...
...Considering the widespread level of human-rights abuses here, Aylwin is caught in a bind: He has to create some sense of justice to restore democracy and he has to do it without antagonizing the military...
...Once you open up the tide for democracy, and you do it in a way that is efficient and without major turmoil, it's extremely hard for those groups that have been imposing dictatorship to come back again...
...When we had the plebiscite in which people voted "No" against the dictator, that was the epic moment...
...We felt that we really were changing something, creating democracy and providing more equality—and that pushed us on...
...Q: Are you saying that rebuilding democracy lacks drama...
...So I would say many of us are more humble politically...
...Third, you need some trials, and you need to find some of the guilty people and to punish them...
...Part of the social trauma is that we have rejected what we were...
...Q: In Santiago, there is much talk that Pinochet will try a coup before Aylwin's term is up...
...In both cases, there's a direction that way—building democratic institutions...
...At the same time, there was a big community of people who supported the efforts of the opposition here—so we did not feel alone...
...Later, many of us would wonder how a society could survive with so much brutality latent within it...
...People are happy and smiling, but there are few bursts of joy and massive expressions in the street...
...Very young people...
...On the other side, if you provide information and deliberately avoid the marginalization of those fighting for human rights, and they become part of the mainstream, then things will be different...
...Like the word "authority...
...We know that our enemy is still Pinochet, with the armed forces behind him...
...It takes lots of time to recognize what a smile means, what a word means...
...Bitar: You have to differentiate the support for Pinochet himself, which is very low, to the support for continuing some of his policies and avoiding the negative aspects of democracy in the past...
...When they read something objective, they tend to accept and recognize and say, "This cannot happen again here...
...These days, he lectures, writes, and consults...
...How can he be "moderate" and "conciliatory" on something like this...
Vol. 54 • August 1990 • No. 8
