New Hope for Chile?

NEW HOPE FOR CHILE?

THE OFFICE of General Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile and currently heading the last of the military regimes of South America, is situated very close to the room of La Moneda Palace in which his predecessor, the Marxist Salvador Allende, met his death on September 11, 1973. Appropriately enough, Allende's room is to the left, Pincohet's to the right, of the main entrance.

Controversy still rages as to the exact cause of Allende's death. The international Left--to whom Allende has become something of a folk hero on a par with Patrice Lumumba and that teen idol, but abysmally inefficient guerilla leader, Che Guevara--now hold that Allende died heroically unde r Pinochet's bullets, still clasping the submachine gun given him by his friend Fidel Castro. There has, however, never seemed to me to be much reason to doubt the original version, given by Allende's doctor and broadcast by the BBC at the time, that the "Comrade President" had committed suicide with the said weapon, as t he insurgent troops entered the rocket-blasted palace. The manner of Allende's death might seem a technicality of little enough consequence, were it not that the legend-making efforts of the Left exemplify the hostility, superbly orchestrated, that has greeted every act of the Chilean government since.

This, it has to be admitted, has been often assisted by the sheer brutality shown by the Pinochet regime at various times, which has alienated many who might otherwise have supported those who saved this beautiful land, the most agreeable in South America, from the stultifying scourge of Marxism.

Among them I number myself. This is why I let 16 years pass before I returned to Chile. When I had last been there, in 1971, Allende had just been elected president, at the head of the Unidad Popular (UP) coalition--the first Marxist regime ever to win on a free ballot. Allende's victory, the result of a split in the "bourgeois parties," was by a plurality of only 39,000 votes over his nearest rival. Yey, even in the few weeks I spent in Chile in 1971, I saw Allende in his famous "Ninety Days" turning a country once described as "the England of South America," because of its moderation and espousal of the law, into a one-party Marxist state.

The press was cowed--admittedly by subtly indirect, rather than direct, pressures. By an ingenious manipulation of existing laws, the UP government seized strike-torn industries through imposing government interventas on them. An agrarian-reform program, devised by a Cuban-trained ideologue, reduced a relatively prosperous agriculture to a shambles. Within a year, Chile was importing chickens from France with foreign currency it did not possess. Down in the remote south, Tupamaro-style MIR guerrillas expropriated millions of acres of farms, while Allende turned a blind eye.

The discovery, in 1973, of large quantities of Cuban and Czech arms, with which paramilitary forces of the Left were rapidly being equipped, lent substance to the threat. This was a major factor in the decision of army leaders, headed by Pinochet, to move first. All the evidence indicated that Allende and his revolutionary associat es were bent on reducing Chile to a Marxist outpost every bit as nasty as Cuba. What has happened in Chile since 1973 has to be seen against this essential backdrop.

IN THE EYES of the international Left, Chile, in reversing the irreversible by becoming the first country to confront the Brezhnev Doctrine and overturn a Marxist regime, had committed the unforgivable. Henceforth Chile was to be blackballed by whatever means possible. Pinochet and the Chilean Junta played into the Left's hands by meeting subversion with repeated infractions of human rights. The best that could be said was that they reflected the insecurity felt by an isolated Chile in a hostile world.

Now, however, after 14 years of military rule, Pinochet has committed himself to returning Chile to democracy, with free elections by March 1989. The timetable is as follows: by December 1988 the ruling Junta will select a presidential candidate; one to two months later there will be a plebiscite, a straight yes-or-no vote on the official candidate, followed by open elections for a new Congress. If the Junta's candidate fails to win a clear majority, then he must face a second election, in which all parties (except the Marxists) can compete.

But will Pinochet keep his promises? That was the question on my mind when I went to see General Pinochet, apparently the first British journalist to be granted an interview in at least the last ten years. The president himself is shorter than I expected. Dressed in an elegantly tailored civilian suit. Pinochet is courteous, affable, relaxed--and forth-right. Throughout the interview, he repeatedly showed himself haunted by fears of a return to the bad old days of Allende, and determined that Chile should never gain fall into the clutches of Marxist totalitarianism. He laid the blame for subversive and terrorist activity directly on Soviet imperialism: "The evil is managed by Moscow." Gorbachev "is making a fool out of everybody in the whole world; he is as Communist as Stalin and Lenin were," he warned emphatically.

Nonetheless he expressed confidence that, rather than trying to disrupt the coming elections, Moscow would issue orders to "cut terrorism, for tactical purposes, so as not to frighten people." Already, terrorism in Chile "hardly existed." (And, indeed, the contrast between Chile and its terrorist-ridden neighbors Peru and colombia is manifest.)

I asked General Pinochet why, then, given Chile's new confidence, he had felt it necessary to pass a new law prohibiting "marxist propaganda" in the press, a move which has been sharply criticized by the Inter-American Press Association, as well as by Chilean journalists. Pinochet made it quite plain that he will do everything in his power to forestall a return to any form of socialism in Chile. No other South American country, he pointed out, had ever "reached the position it had in 1973 . . . The 1980 Constitution [which banned all "totalitarian propaganda against the government"] had been approved by 67 per cent of the population," and it now had to be reinforced by law so as "to protect institutionally future governments."

As Oinochet's Foreign Secretary, Ricardo Garcia--an attractive, youngish lawyer who is reckoned to have an important political future in any new democratic system--told me, the Chilean aim is "to recreate, not to return to, democracy . . . to create a Chilean political framework for many years, with stability." "Do you know," he added, "of any other dictatorship that has fixed its own end?"

When i tried to draw Pinochet out on the similarities of Chile's successful, free-market economy to Thatcherism, he remarked that he had first heard of Mrs. Thatcher's philosophies only six years ago, but now found himself in total accord with her--"without agreeing on details." It was also his ambition "to limit the power of the state in the economy." But, he stressed: "I am neither Right nor Left--I am a Chilean."

We moved on to the delicate issue of human rights. I boldly compared his approach to the French Army's during the Algerian War. By resorting to torure, it had won battles, but the ensuing public revulsion ultimately cost it the war. If there were a renewal of terrorism in the future, could the government guarantee that it would meet it without the unacceptably harsh measures of the past--specifically torture? "Do the Communists, do the Cubans, recognize human rights?" he asked in reply.

I Remarked, perhaps rather piously, that surely the West had to set higher standards? He laughed, and answered that it was "a problem of time for us to get over the torture image." The Soviet Union was "expert in disinformation and had spent millions of dollars in pursuit of its objectives."

Then, looking me straight in the eye, he declared, "There has not been torture"; and, for the future, the government would "reject every harsh measure," regardless of any new terrorism. I found the first statement as hard to accept as the second was encouraging. Later a government spokesman explained that the president had meant that torture had never been officially condoned: "If there had been excesses, these would have been made known to the judiciary." He drew my attention to charges of "excesses" recently filed against a number of policemen. And yet, despite Pinochet's encouraging words, forty suspects from the assassination attempt of September 1986 are still being held without trial; a senior Western diplomat in Santiago told me that isolated instances of torture still take place.

Over the past few years, Chile's achievements on the economic and social fronts have undoubtedly been quite remarkable, by almost any standards.

Santiago, which I remember as a grey, depressed city, is bustling. The terrible poblaciones--slums which once cordoned the city--have been replaced extensively by good, standard, council housing. (Pinochet told me that his government had built 400,000 housing units in ten years--I believe him.) There is also an impressive amount of road-building. Chile is reputed to achieve the most miles per dollar unit of any country in South America.

At the time of the Pinochet coup in September 1973, inflation peaked at 1,000 per cent. Today it stands at a stable 20 per cent or less, excellent by South American standards; the inflation rate in neighboring Peru hit nearly 120 per cent in 1987 and Brazil's was not much better. Chile's unemployment is around 10 per cent, roughly equal to Britain's. Foreign investment in Chile for the first nine months of 1987 doubled that for the same period in 1986, while Chile's trade surplus is close to the target agreed to with the IMF (International Monetary Fund). The public-sector deficit is very small. In November, the Santiago stock market must have been the only one in the world on the rise.

Of course, much of Chile's future prosperity must depend on world price trends. Some of the current boom comes from the unexpectedly high price of copper, which reached a peak of over $1 a pound in November. Chile has long been the world's largest producer of copper, and--as a "one-crop economy"--for many years it used to be dangerously vulnerable to the whims of the international metal market. Now, however, the Pinochet government has created a "stabilization fund,c ploughing back profits now to meet lean years in the future. Chile's farms are also back on stream, providing this year--despite droughts and floods--a significant surplus of wheat for export.

More fundamental has been a farranging diversification both of products and of trading partners. Two bright young economists (this is where the talent in Chile seems to go these days, instead of into politics) described to me, with enthusiastic optimism, how the "Pacific Rim" was now opening up as Chile's major new trading area. Over the past year "an avalanche" of new Australian and New Zealand investment had flooded in. Japan is also very active, buying fruit and selling motorcars on indecently attractive terms. And Communist China is making a bid for Chile's copper and forestry products.

This long tapeworm of a country--stretching for 2,500 miles from the Tropics down to Cape Horn, but in places little more than fifty miles wide--as far away from the rest of the world as you can go, has been called "an impossible geography with a difficult economy." At the beginning of the 1980s, the experiments of "the Chicago Boys" to get this "difficult economy" on the road again seemed to have foundered. But today the new-style, especially Chilean, free-market economy seems to have sparked a horde of new enterprises, ranging from berry- and asparagus-growing to forestry products and salmon fisheries, and even humus-producing worm farms.

Just as in Thatcher's Britain, national industries like electricity, telephones, the LAN Chile airline, and even pension funds are being privatized. Said my economist friend, by no means an uncritical supporter of Pinochet: "Compared to the highly protectionist society that existed even before Allende, what is happening is an economic revolution." He predicted that, within ten years at this rate, Chile might leave the ranks of the underdeveloped countries.

Next to their livelier competitors in Peru, and even Ecuador, Chilean newspapers, once the best on the continent, have become pretty boring reading. But the controls are slowly lifting, and in conversation there is absolutely no restraint. Compared with democratic but highly nervy Peru, there are few overt signs of a police state. When I was dining at a Santiago restaurant on my first night in Chile, Pinochet's daughter and a young man came in and sat at a table nearby; nobody paid any attention, and there was no obvious sign of security guards--despite threats to her father's life.

The next year will be an exciting and challenging time for Chile, perhaps the most exciting since 1973. It is not yet certain whether Pinochet himself will stand for election at the plebiscite, or whether he will win if he does; or even how the plebiscite will be worded. Other members of the Junta have openly said they would oppose his candidacy; 14 years is enough, especially for a man already in his seventies. On the other hand, recent polls suggest that Pinochet might well achieve a majority, honestly won. The nine opposition parties are still hopelessly divided, and no towering leader has emerged from their ranks. One university teacher told me that he opposed Pinochet, but thought he would vote yes at the plebiscite, simply "because there is no other alternative, and the thought of returning to the chaos of the Allende days is unthinkable." Still, by 1989 there will be many younger Chilean voters who do not remember those bad old days; and no one knows how they will vote.

Yet, there is optimism in the air, and the optimists look forward to a political era of "constructive transition." One senses that Chileans feel they know where they are going. They badly want to come out of the cold, from the psychological as well as the physical isolation that surrounds them. If Pinochet lives up to his pledges over the next 18 months, they will get their chance.