In Depth
Chile
Word on the street: Pinochet
In Santiago, talk is cheap, and free, about the dying dictator
Last Updated December 8, 2006
Peter McCluskey, CBC.ca
Supporters of former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet gathered outside the Military Hospital in Santiago, Chile, on Wednesday. The 91-year-old suffered an acute heart attack and was treated at the hospital. (Santiago Llanquin/Associated Press)
The small crowd outside Santiago's Hopital Militar only gets excited when the television cameras are turned on. At just the right time, they chant their pro-Pinochet message and wave their flags and pictures of the former strongman. Inside the hospital, the 91-year-old recuperates from a heart attack, still suffering from a list of medical complaints that would normally fell a much younger man.
Augusto Pinochet is a figure of menace no longer in Chile. His days of running the country are over. He now spends most of his days in bed attended to by nurses and surrounded by family. But more than 30 years after leading the coup that deposed Salvador Allende, Pinochet is still a name that can provoke deep divisions within Chilean society.
Standing in the hot sun on Avenida Provedencia outside the hospital, the crowd of "Pinochetistas" chant for a return to a military government. Although the crowd is small, it represents a significant section of Chilean society — people who are convinced the heavy-handed methods employed by the military are exactly what the country, the economy and the justice system still need.
Maria Eugenia Read would never be caught standing with the crowd outside the hospital. She lives in a beautiful, sun-drenched, middle-class neighbourhood on the slopes of Cerro San Cristobal. Most people in this neighbourhood spend their days pruning flowers and watering their lawns, not talking politics. But the mention of Pinochet never fails to get a response.
"I really appreciate Pinochet," Read says as she sits back in a comfortable chair in her home, surrounded by flowering jacaranda trees and rose bushes, "because if he hadn't taken up at that moment maybe we'd be Cuba right now."
Many Chileans believe that Allende was leading their country into the communist camp and that the armed forces had no choice but to take over. Read says Chile was fighting a civil war in 1973. Something had to be done.
"Oh, they [said] in the newspapers that people were dying in the streets and they're taking them away in trucks," the 53-year-old mother recalls. "I never saw a man dying in the street. I never saw that. I never saw nothing."
It is this refusal to accept there were torture, death and human rights violations that has frustrated so many young Chileans today.
Isabel Moreno is typical. "Some people said, 'No, there was no torture, there was nobody killed.'"
"Then they realize, yes, there was a lot of torture, a lot of murder, but they say, 'Yes, but that was fine. They were communist so that was fine.'"
"It's like, what really surprises me is that two years ago when they found Pinochet [had stolen money], they said, 'Oh, now that's bad.'"
"So it wasn't bad to kill people, but it's bad to steal."
The 28-year-old teacher was born after the coup, in the midst of the Pinochet years, but that doesn't mean she wasn't deeply affected. "We live the consequences," she says as she thinks about his legacy.
"My family wasn't affected but a lot of my friends, and a lot of friends of my friends were affected. They were tortured or killed, or had to move to another country. So I understand why they still feel hate about Pinochet. But actually, I don't understand why some people love him. I mean, they say, 'Yeah, he killed the communists and he should have killed more communists.'"
But she fears what will be unleashed when Pinochet does finally die.
"Chile's kind of balanced right now," she says, meaning that neither political side appears to have the upper hand.
To hear opinion on Pinochet is easy in Santiago these days. If you want a discussion, all you have to do is ask. Cafes and bars are thick with talk about him. So are family get-togethers.
At the Weinmann family dinner table,17-year-old Leonardo talks about the history lessons he's heard in school, while his friend chips in with comments about the lack of information. It only takes a few words until his father, Eduardo and mother Christina, have joined the discussion to correct a few facts and challenge some assumptions. The talk lasts for more than an hour.
"I don't think he was good for this country," says Leonardo, speaking in Spanish. Some in this South American nation are trying to find ways to explain Pinochet and the human rights abuses that he unleashed on Chile. But after 30 years they are no further ahead. Many fear that Pinochet's ultimate demise will unleash a period of anger and violence between the opposing forces.
According to Isabel Moren there will be only one outcome. "We're going to be polarized."
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Population: 15,498,930
Capital: Santiago
Government type: Republic
President/chief of state: Ricardo Lagos Escobar
Ambassador to Canada: Alvaro Zuniga
Major languages: Spanish
Major religions: Roman Catholic 89%, Protestant 11%
Location: Southern South America, bordering on Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and the South Atlantic and South Pacific Oceans
Area total: 756,950 sq. km
Natural resources: copper, timber, iron ore, nitrates, precious metals, molybdenum, hydropower
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