Chile’s have-nots are still waiting...

Press, 4 January 1978, Page 17

Chile’s have-nots are still waiting...

JOHN WILSON recently made a short visit to Chile. He offers the following article as a brief impression of a nation in political and social turmoil . . .

One of the most vivid memories of my first visit to Latin America is of being driven from Lima’s airport past that city’s barriadas (shanty towns) to an opulently comfortable house in the fashionable suburb of San Isidro. It was my first encounter with the startling gap between rich and poor in an underdeveloped country.

on which Dr Allende died during the storming of the Moneda Palace in Santiago — is still constantly referred to, by privileged Chileans, with whom my contact was largely limited, as their “day of deliverance.” The Moneda Palace is now being repaired and Chile has the appearance of a country to which normalcy has been restored. It is no longer wracked by political controversy and violence; downtown Santiago has the trappings of prosperity.

which I had seen the military Government of Peru tolerating and even encouraging in the late 1960 s and early 19705) he assured me that those who were inclined to make political trouble had left the country, of their own free will, for other socialist States.

In the decade that passed since that visit to Peru and a recent brief visit to Chile little appears to have been done to narrow the gap. In Las Condes, a suburb of Santiago, I saw the secure affluence of the privileged rich of Chile; in the hills above the charming coastal city of Vina del Mar I walked for an afternoon through neighbourhoods where the grim misery of the was all too evident.

Almost without exception the Chileans I spoke to were anxious to convince me that the country was politically stable and had largely recovered economically. They spoke with great feeling about the disorder — political and economic — of the Allende years, especially of the chaos and shortages of the last few months of Popular Unity rule. But these were all, I kept reminding myself, people to whom the effort made between 1971 and 1973 to reduce the social and economic inequalities in Chile, were anathema; who dislike political upheaval because in any such upheaval their own postion is threatened. I kept reminding myself, too, that there was abundant evidence that the country was politically calm because the Government was so viciously repressive. When I asked a young Tourist Department official why there was none of the political agitation and violence of which I had read in other Latin American countries (and none, even, of the more orderly political activity

The facts, I knew, were that many had been executed immediately after the coup, that many had continued to “disappear” since then, and that many others had fled Chile in fear of their lives. If repression in Chile has indeed moderated that could well be, I thought, because there was no-one left to repress — and because those who remain are cowed and fearful. It was not easy to try to explain to such people as this young official that while I sympathised with their enjoyment of political order and stability after the obvious turmoil of the Allende years, I did not think it altogether a good thing to find a country in such order only because it was drained of political vitality. And because dissident elements had been repressed, especially while the social and economic, inequalities within the country remained so great. I managed to get one rich Chilean to admit, finally, that something would have to be done to reduce these inequalities. But he hastily added that Dr Allende had tried to do it far too fast.

And even then, judging by glimpses of other poor neighbourhoods and rural villages seen from a bus, I was not seeing the worst Chile could have shown me.

What made this contrast between rich and poor in Chile in 1977 particularly poignant was that I looked at it, always, remembering that an attempt had been made in the recent past to abridge the powers and privileges of the small sector of Chilean society which has wealth, comfort, and luxury, and to expand the opportunities and improve the standards of living of the deprived majority in the urban slums and poor rural villages.

It is now more than four years since the fall of the Popular Unity Government of Dr Salvador Allende, but September 11 — the day

I wondered how slow it would have to be to satisfy him — and whether even the efforts of the Popular Unity Government had not seemed slow to many of Chile’s poor.

We were clearly expected, to believe that because the police were not übiquitous on the streets, tooting machine guns and pushing the people around before our eyes, that Chile was not a police State. But it is, of course. Hidden fear — so difficult to detect during a short stay, and with my Spanish rusty after four years of disuse — characterises a police State. In even a few days I think, I saw and felt hints of such fear. Indeed, one Chilean who was with our party admitted, when someone remarked on the absence of political slogans painted on walls — prolific elsewhere in Latin America — that there were no slogans in Chile because the people were afraid. (In fact, in the country, I saw one faded slogan reading “Allende U.P.” (U.P. standing for Uniad Popular, or Popular Unity), and another reading “Frei” (the leading Chrstian Democr a t i c politician). Otherwise the walls were clean.

the crowd was uneasy. But certainly no-one would answer my queries about what was happening. (In the same way, such people as taxi-drivers or hotel maids who had been chatting with me, as best we could, about innocuous subjects such as how I liked their city, or the weather, or where I came from, would suddenly find my pidgin Spanish quite incomprehensible when I broached such subjects as Allende or their satisfaction with the present Government.)

The country, too, is still under a curfew — from 2 a.m. to 5.30 a.m., reduced to 3 a.m. to 5.30 a.m. on Saturday mornings. On one occasion two waiters rode back into the city with us from a restaurant on the outskirts close to the curfew hour. Their nervous anxiety about the time and the rapidity with which they ran from the bus, rather undercut the assurances we were given that the curfew was not taken seriously any longer.

I asked what would happen to someone caught abroad after the curfew hour. We were told that the person would have to spend a night at the Police Station and to pay a fine of 150 pesos (about $6).

Walking one morning by the Central Station in a poorer part Of Santiago I saw someone being taken away by the police. He may have been a common criminal; it may have been my imagination that

A further question about what would happen to someone unable to pay the fine elicited the answer that he or she would probably have to sweep

the Pinochet Government has fallen into the traditional role of the military in Latin America of identifying with the traditional elite, to the exclusion even, judging by the junta’s “break” with the Christian Democrats, of the small but rising middle-classes.

the patio of the police station until noon and would then be released.

It had apparently not crossed the mind of the young official from the Tourist Department who gave this answer that any of us would find it distasteful, to say the least, that the poor should be subject to such random humiliation. It seemed a different spirit was abroad than there had been in the Allende years when efforts were made, through, for example, literacy and health care programmes, to treat the poor with greater dignity and respect while gradually extending material benefits to them. Almost without exception, the people of the upper-classes to whom I spoke were satisfied with the rule of the military. One of the exceptions I encountered was the owner of a blanket factory in Santiago. He spoke with some feeling of the problems his business was facing as a result of the Governent’s application of its "free market” principles with respect to imports. But this same blanket owner, later in the conversation, confessed that he was glad to be able to buy again whatever he needed. The satisfaction with the military Government which I heard these upper-class Chileans express constantly tended to confirm for me what other commentators on Latin American affairs had already remarked on — that

The supporters of the Government make some effort still to pretend that the interests of the poor are being attended to. I had been told before I went to Chile that between the airport and the city I would pass (as I had passed in Lima years before) endless rows of shanties.

Instead, the highway passed rows of new apartment blocks which were pointed out to me as evidence of the Government’s concern to rehouse the poor. (I am still not sure that these housing projects were not started by the Allende Government.) But then, from the air, I saw behind the apartment blocks (and also from the ground on the more distant fringes of Santiago) the sprawling acres of slums that the new blocks concealed. We heard claims constantly that the whole country was relieved when the coup occured. I see no reason to doubt that most were (being ignorant then of what would come afterwards) for Chile was clearly in a state of great disorder and disruption by September, 1973.

A Chilean who obviously regretted Chile’s departure from democratic ways declared that in 1973 the people were unhappy and afraid — a statement I readily believed because he clearly was not interested in pushing the junta’s barrow. What I never heard

admitted, or even mentioned, was that this chaos and disruption, political and economic, emanated much from the resistance of the privileged classes to the Government’s lawful acts, and from the interference of the C.I.A. and 1.T.& T., as from the economic incompetence of Allende’s advisers, and the political and economic irresponsibility of the Popular Unity Government. One did not need a very profound knowledge of events in Chile between 1970 and 1973 to notice this glaring omission in what the people of the privileged classes declared was happening then, or to see the lie in the claim made by the journalist from the paper “El Mercurio,” to whom we spoke in Santiago, that the junta had intervened in Chilean politics to save a democracy threatened by the Left-wing of Allende’s Popular Unity Government.

And I remain unconvinced, despite the frequency with which I heard it said, that everyone except a few Left-wing malcontents were happy when Allende was overthrown.

One upper class Chilean described the Allende years, in passing, as a “nightmare.” I am sure they must have been for Chileans of his wealth and privilege. But other Chi= leans, I suspect, have other nightmares. Their nightmare is poverty and they must now see little prosvect of it being alleviated; and those whose nightmare is being driven from their country, imprisoned, or even killed for their political beliefs, must be yearning for a government which would respect human rights.