Hope Comes to Chile - Ricardo Lagos becomes president of Chile

Progressive, The, May, 2000 by Saul Landau

Chile, November 4, 1970. I filmed Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei (the father) as he placed the red, white, and blue sash of the presidency across the shoulder of the incoming Socialist executive, Salvador Allende. Then Frei gave the bespectacled doctor the Latin abrazo (hug). The brief swearing-in contained promises to uphold the law and the constitution. Then came the parade, Allende standing and waving from the convertible limo, bodyguards running alongside military officials on horseback.

Chile, March 11, 2000.

I watch Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei (the son) as he places that presidential sash across the body of the incoming Socialist executive, Ricardo Lagos. Then come the abrazos, the oaths, the glad-handing--just as in 1970. Socialists and progressives around the world again begin their expectant watch, albeit with a bit more skepticism.

In the early 1970s, socialists flocked to Chile to help Allende carry out basic reforms. They promoted the first significant social democratic experiment in the post-war world. Allende endured for three conflict-ridden years, despite a heavy CIA campaign to "mash up his good order" and a banking-credit squeeze that would have destroyed any struggling Third World nation. He planned to hold a plebiscite on September 11, 1973. The voters of Chile would have him continue or leave. But it never happened.

On that fateful day, Chilean workers and millions of their backers felt the painful shudder of loss as they watched the tanks surrounding and bombarding the Presidential Palace.

Then came seventeen long, dark years of military dictatorship. The obsequious, moderate Augusto Pinochet, who joined the plot at the last minute, outperformed the most zealous fanatics. His forces executed or "disappeared" 3,197 people. Tens of thousands were tortured, hundreds of thousands were forced into exile. Pinochet destroyed the constitution, the parliament, the political parties, the trade unions, and the free universities. His soldiers made bonfires out of books that contained the word "Marx." To fix Chile's economy in a way that would curry favor with the world's richest and most powerful, he brought in the Chicago Boys--the disciples of Milton Friedman. They taught their free market philosophy, which, after ten years of austerity imposed on the working class, showed impressive growth figures. Though real wages declined steadily during the Pinochet years, the free market model finally thrived under the culture of dictatorship.

Times have changed--for socialism and for Pinochet.

Missing at Lagos's inauguration is the eighty-four-year-old general, who returned from England one week before, after spending 503 days under arrest. A Spanish judge had ordered British authorities to detain him and then asked for his extradition to Spain to face charges of crimes against humanity, genocide, and terrorism. Only after British authorities deemed him too ill to stand trial was he allowed to return home, disgraced.

On Sunday, March 12, I join some 250,000 people, mostly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, as they celebrate in Parque Forestal in Santiago's downtown. Lagos will speak in the early evening. In the meantime, it's music and song. Young people wave banners demanding that Pinochet face trial. I see tattooed and pierced youth passing bottles and joints. Giant speakers emit rock rhythms from the pop bands playing on the stage hundreds of yards away. Every few minutes, groups rise from the grass amidst the familiar sweet, smoky odor and shout Juicio a Pinochet (put Pinochet on trial). An eighteen-year-old carries a banner bearing a picture of Allende's face.

"What does he mean to you?" I ask the young woman. "You surely have no memory of him."

"Freedom," she says, without pausing. "He means social justice and an end to the horrible black years of military fascism and the ten gray years of so-called transition to democracy under the Christian Democrats."

"Yes," adds a young man from the northern city of Antofagasta, who was sipping rot gut with a friend and holding up a Lagos poster that reads, "Say no to drugs." "We want real democracy, real freedom," he says.

Six months before, pot-smoking would have brought a swarm of pacos (cops), a quick arrest, and a long jail sentence. "On the day after Lagos's inaugural, it's time to declare independence from the tight-assed years," says a young woman with pink hair. "This is the time for the young people to come out of the closet and create our own freedom."

Juicio a Pinochet, they begin to shout, jumping and laughing.

"We're not afraid of him any more," an older man comments. "We're beginning to restore our memory."

"Ridiculous," says another elderly onlooker, who claims the military will never allow Pinochet to be tried.

"Fear," responds Carolina, nineteen years old, a university student with a stud in her lip. "Pinochet has thrown fear like a blanket across this country. But now, after his detention in London and after four countries are demanding his extradition, he no longer frightens me or my friends. Maybe we're too young. We did not know the murders, the disappearances, the torture, the constant sense of dread that the old goat's secret police inflicted."