What I Saw In Chile, Hart Meets Pinochet
Sunday, November 18, 2007
In Chile the popular Christian Democratic president Eduardo Frei was prevented by the Constitution from running for another six-year term. On September 4, 1970, the Socialist party candidate Salvador Allende won the presidency of Chile in a three-man race with a plurality 27.8 percent of the vote. Despite his support by a minority of the voters, President Allende, a Marxist, set in motion a “Chilean road to socialism,” and immediately became an international hero of the radical left, most immediately for me academic leftists. On September 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown by a military coup that installed General Augusto Pinochet in power. I was a senior editor of National Review and at the time was writing a syndicated column for King Features (Hearst). In the summer of 1978 I decided to go to Chile to see what was happening under the Pinochet regime.
My Boeing 707 surged powerfully into the air above Kennedy International Airport, headed for Miami, Lima, Santiago. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it’s a very long flight south to Santiago. When we stopped briefly at Lima, I was surprised by what I saw at the airport there: row after row of military equipment, hundreds of camouflaged jet fighters, troop transport planes, tanks, trucks, helicopters. It called to mind images of southern England before D-Day. I later found out that the Chileans were acutely aware of military buildup. In the 1879 “Pacific War,” Chile seized from Peru what are now its northernmost provinces, a mineral-rich area. Peruvian nationalists were talking publicly about a reconquista—perhaps in 1979, the hundredth anniversary of the Pacific War. When I got to Chile I learned that most of its army was stationed in those northern provinces.
Our landing in Santiago was spectacularly beautiful. The plane climbed high over the Andes then circled out over the Pacific and as it turned back toward the east you see Santiago against the snow-covered Andes, rising about ten thousand feet like a wall behind the Chilean capital and gleaming as the sun from the west struck their vast perpendicular sides. Flying in from the ocean, the airliner made its descent to the runway. Outside and in the terminal I noticed the heavy security, police and soldiers everywhere, many of them with small machine guns, Israeli Uzis or an imitation. The possibility, however remote, that bullets might suddenly squirt all over the place was—how to put it?—unfamiliar.
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After checking in at my hotel in downtown Santiago, I decided to take a first look at the city, and as I strolled the streets of Santiago my first impression had nothing to do with bullets or politics. It was simply the fact that Santiago had an unusually high percentage of spectacularly beautiful women. In its fashionable sections they wore the tightest slacks and jeans imaginable. The effect was spectacular. These garments seem to be rubberized. It was enough to disorganize my nervous system. Discreet inquiry revealed that a woman must lie down to pull them on since her legs swell slightly when she is standing. To a considerable degree the culture in Santiago is French, as is evident from the boutiques in the fashionable district.
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One of the most interesting men in Santiago was Pablo Baraona, the Economics Minister. We meet for lunch in the Union Club. Santiago is full of ironic symbols, one of them the Union Club. This nineteenth-century building radiates conservatism. It has marble columns, ancient cage elevators, thirty-foot high ceilings. But across the way on the other side of the Avenida Bernardo O’Higgens, the University of Chile glowered at the Union Club. During the Alllende days crowds of students would surge across the Avenida to hurl rocks and obscenities at the club and its membership of mostly conservative businessmen.
Pablo Baraona, a surprisingly young man, and two of his young friends had lunch in a private dining room at the Union Club. Baraona was about forty, tweedy, dark and handsome, trained in economics at the University of Chicago where Milton Friedman, a monetarist, was dominant as the champion of free market economics. Over lunch and later sitting in easy chairs the three of us, smoking cigars and looking out of the tall widows at the Avenida, it was exciting, even startling, to listen to these young Chileans from the University of Chicago reinvent the Chilean economy. They, along with about forty other Chicago economists led by Baraona, were what the arguments about Chile there and abroad were all about. They were busy returning industries nationalized by Allende back to private ownership. These young men, all of whom spoke English, maintained forcefully that Allende’s socialist planners had distorted the economy by moving the government ever more deeply into it. In addition, under earlier administrations non-competitive enterprises had been sustained for political reasons through government subsidies.
These young economists, who smoked cigars with me, were deciding what would be forced to the wall. Baraona knew that there would be bankruptcies and very serious problems of readjustment. For example, Chile could not compete with the United States, Japan, or the EU on marketing advanced electronic equipment. Under Baraona’s direction, the Chilean economy was taking a cold shower. Tariff barriers were coming down, foreign imports were soaring. Those economists could identify what enterprises would fail, and which would prosper. During the Allende years much of the Chilean cattle herd was slaughtered for meat. What was required then was a reinvestment in the herds so that meat would not be imported from Argentina and elsewhere. They were also designing a Social Security system amounting to several mutual funds in which employees would invest.
As we talked it became clear that Pinochet and the military intended to keep public order while Baraona and his Chicago friends pursued these economic policies. They saw the contest as the University of Chicago versus Havana. Pinochet was betting that Baraona had the economic answers and that in due course the devastation of the Allende years would be corrected, as stability and prosperity returned. What the military regime was doing was providing a shield—less metaphorically, critics say machine guns—behind which the painful measures were implemented.
As I visited other people in Santiago I was not surprised that Baraona and his economists had fierce critics. At first, I was a bit surprised that criticism was so freely expressed. Arguments about Baraona’s policies go on into the small hours of the morning. Marxists, Christian Democrats, Socialists. Baraona was called a “blackboard economist,” a man with no heart.
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At breakfast in the hotel dining room I skimed a morning newspaper chosen at random from the newsstand in the lobby. The contrast, in retrospect with El Diario, where I had an appointment later, was surprising and maybe symbolic. The front page of this newspaper was devoted to football (soccer) write-ups, and, this caught my eye, an account of an exorcism that is taking place in a town down the coast. An exorcism. The man afflicted by the Devil was named Miguel. Fisherman. Probably just a poor wretch with mental problems.
El Diaro, however, looked exactly like The Wall Street Journal and was a serious newspaper with a well-informed editorial board as I found when I met with eight or nine of them in mid-morning. In general the editorial policy resembled that of The Wall Street Journal, and the editors were generally sympathetic with what Baraona was trying to do with the protection of Pinochet.
I learned a few important things: 1) Per capita, Chile had the largest Communist Party in Latin America, despite the fact that it had a substantial educated middle class. 2) The Communist Party was still active underground. It devised clever ways of communicating. I was shown a match book with a small piece of microfilm on the inside of its cover. 3) Allende’s economic policies had run into strong resistance. For example, he had tried to nationalize the Chilean trucking industry. This consisted of hundreds of trucks owned by individual truckers. They went on strike, stopping their trucks along the single highway that ran north-south through Chile and along which all commerce must travel. The strike brought all commerce to a halt. Allende had to back down. Rising prices brought on the “frying pan” rebellion. Thousands of women gathered outside the Moneda Palace, Chile’s equivalent of the White House, and banged loudly for hours on pots and pans while shouting curses at the Allende regime.
Later that day I had an appointment with the editor of a weekly news magazine that looked exactly like Time. Its editor, a middle-aged and friendly man, was a Christian Democrat and a supporter of the previous president Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat and a favorite of Kennedy’s New Frontier. He thought, and his magazine reflected this, that the economic reforms were moving too quickly and that some were ill-considered. I was impressed that he could criticize the regime so publicly every week without apparent pressure from the government.
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The next morning I had an appointment with President Augusto Pinochet. His office was on the top floor of a downtown skyscraper called the Diego Portales. The Moneda palace, normally the residence and office of the president, had been partially destroyed when the military destroyed the regime. First the air force hit the Moneda Palace with a dozen rockets. Then soldiers stormed the wrecked building. They found that Allende had committed suicide using a submachine gun with a metal plaque on it wishing Allende best wishes from Fidel Castro.
I knew a bit of Marxist-Leninist theory. Clearly, Allende had been trying to make a revolution in the absence of a “revolutionary situation.” That required that both the military and the security forces be at least neutral. Instead Allende had been pursuing his Chilean road to socialism simultaneously with the insertion of sympathetic officers into key posts in the military. In that strategic sense, Allende had actually been to the left of the Chilean Communist Party, perhaps inspired by the writings of the French admirer of Fidel Castro, Regis Debray, a romantic revolutionary.
By the time of my appointment with Pinochet I had rented a small Seat, the Spanish version of the Fiat, to get around Santiago. I found the Diego Portales and looked around for a parking space, soon spotting a parking garage. I turned in to it. It wasn’t a parking garage. At least not for me. Three young soldiers met me, all with Uzis, and waved me back with these weapons. “No, Senor! NO, Senor!” I noticed that the garage was full of tanks.
So I backed out as quickly as possible, and soon found a parking spot nearby.
The lobby of the Diego Portales, a modern office building, was full of more soldiers, all with these damned Uzis. I hoped a car didn’t backfire outside in the street. These Chilean soldiers were smaller and darker than the average Chilean, Indians I supposed. An express elevator took me up to Pinochet’s office many floors above.
At the desk a receptionist phoned someone, and Pinochet’s translator emerged, who, though he was Spanish seemed to have a German accent, and took me to Pinochet’s office, its picture windows providing a spectacular view of the city. Pinochet rose behind his large desk and shook hands. Though he wore a blue suit, he was unmistakably a general. In my experience generals and admirals, whatever their nationality or politics, are always unmistakable as what they are. In New York I had sometimes played squash with General Telford Taylor, the liberal American prosecutor at Nuremberg. No one would have thought him anything but a general.
My conversation with Pinochet was peculiarly unenlightening. He had no opinions about the influence of the Chilean Communist Party or its relationship to the socialist Allende. He understood that the Chilean economy had to be renovated, yes indeed. The economists were seeing to that. He seemed to have no interest at all in free market theory. What seemed to be on his mind was anchovies! Chilean anchovies from the cold waters off the coast were the best in the world. And—here he leaned forward confidentially—anchovies, senor, are VERY good for your masculinity! He seemed especially interested in that. I seemed to be in the world of one of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels.
The appearance of a photographer signaled the end of our interview. A photograph of me with Pinochet arrived at my hotel the following morning. It subsequently adorned the wall of my Dartmouth office as a sort of political pornography.
I wound up the afternoon by meeting some Chilean friends at a restaurant and café on a small mountain in the middle of Santiago, and there discovered a marvelous Chilean drink, the pisco sour, a sort of daiquiri—but powerful.
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I had skied in the California Sierra Nevadas, in New Hampshire and Vermont, and in the Swiss and Austrian Alps, so I certainly wasn’t going to pass up a chance to ski in the Chilean Andes. Before I left for home I took my Seat and set out for Portillo, a ski resort about an hour north of Santiago.
Outside of Santiago, I saw a great deal of poverty: poor villages, people living in shacks, even what looked like shelters built out of crates. The Chilean poor were smaller and darker than the people you see in Santiago.
Very likely it is this that explains the fact that while Chile has an educated middle class it also has per capita the largest Communist Party in Latin America. Intellectuals are usually middle class, and some were undoubtedly drawn to Marxist theory and the need for radical change.
At Portillo I rented boots, skiis, and poles, bought a ski sweater, and took of on the chair lift up the mountain. From the chair as we went up I could see the main trail on which expert skiers were trying to break the world speed record, descending the mountain at terrific speeds. After several hours of skiing at high altitudes in the mountains I called it a day, relaxed in a chair on the terrace of the ski lodge, and ordered a glass of red wine. After the high altitudes the wine hit me hard. A strange effect. But after a while of sobering up I took my Seat back to Santiago and prepared to head for home.
It was summer in New York, so when I arrived at JFK I rented another car, headed out to visit friends in the Hamptons and spent a few days at the beach.
Afterwards I read up on the events surrounding the overthrow of Allende. Apparently about 4000 people died as the military coup unfolded. In fact this was a coup plus a civil war between Allende’s supporters and enemies.
But many were captured and tortured. Inexcusable. I don’t have figures for the torture. On the other side of the balance sheet, the free market reforms introduced under Pinochet did establish the basis for the stability and moderate prosperity Chile enjoys today. There was no Chilean road to socialism. n
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