http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18bachelet-t.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The New York Times
November 18, 2007
After the Caudillo
By DAVID RIEFF
Bona fide examples of poetic justice in politics, where the innocent
are vindicated and the wicked get their just deserts, are about as
rare in real life as they have been commonplace in popular culture,
dating at least as far back as "The Count of Monte Cristo." And yet to
the extent that such things do occur, the political triumph of
Michelle Bachelet, the current president of Chile and the first
woman in South America who can be said to have earned the title on her
own merits has been just such an event. The woman who was, as a
23-year-old medical student, briefly imprisoned along with her mother
by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and whose father, Air
Force Gen. Alberto Bachelet, was tortured and died in military custody
in 1974, is now Chile's chief of state while the dictator died, his
reputation in tatters, shortly after she took office.
Of course, Bachelet is not a character in an adventure novel, and
Chilean reality is far more complicated than a morality play. To the
contrary, Bachelet, now two years into her presidency, is a prime
example of the moral quandaries and emotional strains that still
affect Chileans old enough to remember the Pinochet dictatorship. As
many pointed out to me during a recent visit, Chile is not South
Africa, and Bachelet's ruling Concertación alliance bringing
together a number of center and center-left parties is not the
African National Congress. The transition to democratic rule in Chile
was not, as in the case of South Africa, a case of a losing side and a
winning side. After the democratic government of President Patricio
Aylwin assumed power, Pinochet remained commander of the armed forces
and senator for life. (He was stripped of senatorial immunity after
his indictment for crimes against humanity by the Spanish magistrate,
Baltasar Garzón.) A result is that to this day, 17 years after the
return of democracy, Chileans of all political persuasions still live
in something of a state of contradiction.
Sometimes that is not easy. The writer Jorge Edwards, a supporter of
Bachelet's, told me that you need to remember how small the Chilean
elite was in 1973. Edwards was a diplomat under Salvador Allende, the
Socialist president whom the Chilean military overthrew that year, and
he spent most of the Pinochet era in exile, "Today," he said, "it is
not uncommon for a person who was tortured to cross paths with the
person who ordered his torture." What usually happens then? "Usually,
they pretend not to see each other," Edwards replied and, sighing,
added, "Perhaps it's for the best."
Bachelet certainly behaves as if she agrees and has governed
accordingly. During our interview, Bachelet evinced no particular
emotion about what happened to her either in jail or in exile. Chilean
friends who know her told me this was typical. Only twice, in fact,
did Bachelet seem to need to compose herself. The first time was when
she was describing the circumstances of her father's arrest, torture
and death. The second moment surprised me; it came when I asked
Bachelet whether as minister of defense the post she occupied under
her predecessor as president, Ricardo Lagos she had been tempted to
go after those who had killed her father. Even if she hadn't known
before who they were, she could certainly have found out.
She had not, she told me after a pause. She said this
matter-of-factly, without preening. It was, she said, a personal
choice, and she made a point of discussing it with her mother, making
it clear that her mother should not feel herself bound by her
daughter's decision. Her mother also decided not to investigate
further, and the family let the matter rest there.
In any case, Bachelet told me, "Many people who committed the worst
abuses are in jail, including several of the people I have reason to
believe were among my father's torturers." Then she added, "And you
know my father died of a myocardial infarction after torture, whereas
his torturers were in jail for far worse crimes."
Whatever else you can say about Michelle Bachelet, there is not an
ounce of self-pity in her. She herself says that she is "a
world-historical optimist. And of course, when one is in jail, one
discovers the real value of liberty. You come to appreciate what
before you took for granted. What I was mostly interested in, what I
remain committed to, is less dwelling on the past than creating a
better future."
There are limits to her optimism. As she puts it, "We Chileans may not
be able to agree about what happened, but we can agree we have
established the consensus that we have to resolve our problems
democratically," adding that "a strong consensus now exists in Chile
that human rights must be sacrosanct." But Bachelet is not naïve. She
knows full well that many Chileans still believe the military's coup
against Allende was warranted, and while the country is far less
divided than it used to be, important cleavages remain. Although she
does not say this explicitly, I had the impression that she is not
persuaded Chileans will ever reach a similar consensus about the past.
Painful as it is for many, above all the victims of the Pinochet era,
they may have to agree to disagree. Bachelet is careful not to claim
too much. "I don't use the phrase 'reconciliation' because it is a
religious expression," she told me. "Besides, reconciliation implies
turning the page."
Bachelet was saying, in effect, that there have to be limits to
collective accountability even as the government tries its best to
prosecute those guilty of individual crimes during the dictatorship.
There can be judicial redress, but the chances of South African-style
truth and reconciliation are slim. South Africa had clear winners and
losers. In Chile, many of the leading figures within National Renewal,
the center-right opposition, supported the dictatorship and even
opposed the return to civilian rule in the plebiscite that Pinochet
called in 1988 and that led to his stepping down.
In any case, for Bachelet, reconciliation is a problematic concept for
reasons other than its practical applicability. "In my view," she told
me, "it does a disservice to the memories of the thousands of victims
of the Pinochet regime, to the many thousands more who were tortured
and to their families many of whom still do not know what actually
happened to their relatives, spouses, friends."
Bachelet's refusal to speak of reconciliation has been welcomed by the
associations representing the families of the disappeared. One of
their leaders, Lorena Pizarro, told me that she and her colleagues
felt that Bachelet was more open to their concerns than her
predecessors were. "The president understands in a visceral way, a way
I feel that none of her predecessors have, how imperative it is for us
to know what happened, what anguish it is not to know, even after all
these years. Perhaps it is because she suffered herself."
The Chilean political scientist Arturo Valenzuela, who knows Bachelet
well and admires her, told me that he considers her election the first
important event of what he calls "the post-transition" from the
dictatorship. Even under Ricardo Lagos, president from 2000 to 2006,
it was not yet clear that the military had relinquished all political
ambitions and returned once and for all to the apolitical status that
characterized the Chilean armed forces until the election of Allende
and that Bachelet's own father had exemplified. Indeed, Lagos told me
that early in his term, the chiefs of the army, navy, air force and
military police met publicly in a Santiago restaurant. He called them
into his office, said their display of independence was unacceptable.
He felt that facing them down was a key moment in the re-establishment
of democracy. That was in May 2000, soon after his inauguration.
Today, however, no Chilean speaks or writes as if the military poses
any threat to the country's democracy. Instead, the army is
transforming itself. Gen. Eduardo Aldunate, who oversees Chile's
military schools, started his career as an infantry officer but also
studied international humanitarian law at the Washington College of
Law at American University in Washington, where the dean is Claudio
Grossman a longstanding opponent of Pinochet's who fled Chile for
the Netherlands after Allende's fall. They speak warmly of each other.
Aldunate was acting force commander of Minustah, the United Nations
peacekeeping operation in Haiti, in 2005-6; in his office, he displays
prominently his U.N. blue helmet and other memorabilia of
international service. And he is adamant that the Chilean Army is now
emphasizing international and humanitarian missions. When I met him,
he spoke in great detail about the emphasis put on the laws of war
above all, the four Geneva conventions in the teaching of new
officer cadets, and the course syllabuses of the military academy very
much reflect these concerns.
Obviously, there are limits, which may be what disappoints some
left-wing critics of the Concertación and of Michelle Bachelet's
tenure as president. When I asked Aldunate whether there were
discussions in seminars about what happened during the Pinochet years
which he, like other officers I spoke with, referred to as a
"unique" or "anomalous" period he replied: "Not really. What we
emphasize is understanding of the law and the need to adhere to both
its letter and its spirit." He echoed Bachelet's insistence that human
rights were sacrosanct and that flouting them was incompatible with
the duty of a Chilean officer.
Understandably, the families of the disappeared continue to hope for
more. They remain largely unreconciled to the reigning spirit of
compromise. A measure of their bitterness was evident during last
year's funeral ceremonies for Pinochet, when Francisco Cuadrado Prats,
the grandson of Allende's army chief, Carlos Prats, who was
assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1974 on orders from Pinochet, waited
in line among the dictator's mourners for hours and then, when he
approached the coffin, spat on it. It would be unreasonable to expect
such wounds to ever heal. But as Bachelet pointed out to me several
times, more officers have been tried in Chile for crimes committed
during the dictatorship than in any other country where there has been
a transition from an abusive military regime to democracy.
Most Chileans seem to support Bachelet's careful, nonconfrontational
approach. Even those on the left who are disappointed with what she
has accomplished during the two years she has been in office are quick
to point out how important her election was. As the writer Ariel
Dorfman puts it, "Whether Bachelet does or doesn't do anything
significant during her tenure as president, she did something hugely
important, and hugely positive for Chile, just by being elected."
To a foreigner, the subtext of trauma that the dictatorship still
engenders among Chileans is initially hard to discern. Santiago is
booming; its skyline punctuated by construction cranes. The whole
nation is prospering, having benefited both from the extraordinary
rise in commodity prices of the past few years and from increased
trade with the United States, the European Union and, above all, the
rising economies of East Asia, especially China. Poverty, though still
widespread, was drastically reduced under Ricardo Lagos, and Bachelet
has reduced it further. Educational opportunities have been expanded.
Chileans talk about their country's future not in terms of Latin
American models but in comparison to Asian economies like Singapore's
and South Korea's. Sebastián Piñera, a National Renewal leader and the
right's likely standard bearer in the 2010 presidential elections,
told me flatly that there was no reason Chile couldn't enjoy similar
success, and no senior member of the Concertación seemed to disagree.
To be sure, successive Chilean governments have had little success
helping the 10-to-15 percent of Chileans who live in poverty.
(Government statistics suggest a lower percentage but are widely
contested by activists.) Ricardo Lagos told me regretfully that the
tools that worked to reduce poverty from 21 percent to 13 percent had
not proved effective in reducing the rate still further. For Piñera,
many of whose ideas seem close to those of Nicolas Sarkozy in France,
voucher systems for health and education provide a large part of the
answer, though whether such a solution will appeal to Chileans, who
have grown accustomed to having the state play a central role, is an
open question. Bachelet has emphasized education and given her
minister, Yasna Provoste, considerable leeway in restructuring it. And
in fairness, reducing core poverty is hardly something that the major
industrial countries have had much success with, either, in the past
several decades.
Outside the poorest precincts, young Chileans have high expectations
of their own futures and take democratic stability for granted. After
all, most Chilean high schoolers weren't even born when Augusto
Pinochet relinquished power. But at least among people over 30 in
Chile, you can still identify a somewhat inchoate undercurrent of
anxiety about the dictatorship and its legacy. The anxiety is not
limited to those outraged by the fact that, as Jorge Edwards pointed
out, so many of those complicit in the dictatorship have not only
escaped punishment but have also prospered. (A number of the great
Chilean fortunes of today were made during the Pinochet years, in a
way not so dissimilar to the rise of the plutocracy in Russia under
Boris Yeltsin.) There is also anxiety among those who were, in one way
or another, whether enthusiastically or tacitly, on Pinochet's side.
The uncomfortable truth is that they numbered in the millions, and
pretending that the coup was simply a plot hatched between Chilean
officers and the C.I.A. is to deny this crucial reality.
Some Chilean retired military officers go as far as to insist that
"the nation asked the army to carry out the coup." As the former army
commander Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre put it to me, "The coup was not
exactly like other coups, because while Allende was elected
legitimately, he governed illegitimately." These are overstatements,
but it is true that both the coup itself and the military dictatorship
had widespread popular support. And Chile remains as divided as it was
on Sept. 11, 1973, when the presidential palace was in flames,
attacked from both the ground and the air by units of the armed
forces. The last photographs taken of the events that day show Allende
incongruously dressed in a business suit while wearing a military
helmet and carrying an AK-47, surrounded by his personal guards. He
died of gunshot wounds soon afterward.
Bachelet's insistence on the need for a "re-encounter" between
Chileans, rather than a reconciliation, is meant to recognize the
reality and the enduring importance of these divisions. Cheyre
displays considerable discomfort with the idea that the military
should be singled out for blame for what happened after Allende's
overthrow, when, as he put it to me, "the entire nation demanded that
we take action." And yet, by all accounts, Cheyre proselytized
tirelessly within the military, traveling from cantonment to
cantonment, lecturing, cajoling, listening, persuading his brother
officers to take another path. And it was Cheyre who literally made
history when, in a crucial speech on the future of the army, he
pronounced the two words that sum up the demands and the vision of
those who have campaigned so long and hard for there to be
accountability for the crimes of the Pinochet years: "Nunca mas."
"Never again."
Many of the shrewdest observers of the Chilean scene believe that it
was only someone like Cheyre a freshly minted second lieutenant at
the time of the coup who could have nudged the army along toward the
new dispensation. José Zalaquett is a professor of law at the
University of Chile and arguably the most distinguished Chilean expert
on human rights. He was imprisoned for three months by the Pinochet
regime. But Zalaquett says that Cheyre did exactly what needed to be
done, and that Lagos (and his minister of defense, Bachelet) were
absolutely correct in not demanding that the army go faster than it
did. Claudio Grossman is even more emphatic: "Those who are demanding
that the Concertación take a more absolutist stance are indulging
themselves in aesthetics, not politics. And one of the things I
learned in my years in exile is that aesthetics belong in museums!"
The pressing question in Chile today, however, is whether Bachelet can
actually manage Chile's future as well as she manages its past.
Bachelet's critics, inside and outside her coalition, insist that she
is not an able administrator. They point out that she was wrong-footed
first by widespread protests by high-school students shortly after she
assumed the presidency and then saw her government's popularity
shattered by the failure of the Transantiago metropolitan
transportation plan.
The students could be pacified, particularly once Bachelet replaced
her minister of education with Yasna Provoste, who was minister of
planning under Lagos. But although Bachelet also replaced her minister
of transportation with a widely admired figure from the private
sector, René Cortázar, Transantiago continues to undermine the
credibility of the government, particularly with its natural
constituency among the poor and the lower middle class. Bachelet
herself minces no words: "We have let down the people we most want to
help, and we have to make it right."
Both Cortázar and Clemente Perez, another replacement Bachelet brought
into government from the private sector, who now runs the Santiago
subway system, are convinced that they have turned the corner. For the
moment, however, it takes ordinary Chileans far longer to get to work
than it did before the Transantiago plan was implemented. In fairness,
Transantiago was Ricardo Lagos's brainchild, and indeed, it was partly
on the basis of promises he made about how people's lives would be
eased by the new transit plan that Lagos succeeded in leaving office
with 70 percent approval ratings. (Chilean presidents may not serve
consecutive terms, though they can run again, as Lagos is rumored to
be considering doing in 2010.) There is even a story making the rounds
in Santiago political circles one denied by Lagos and Bachelet but
widely credited just the same that at Bachelet's inauguration, as he
handed her the sash that is the symbol of presidential office in
Chile, Lagos whispered in her ear, "I'm leaving you a few problems."
From her first days in office, Bachelet has followed a very different
style from that of her predecessors. She has also been under a
political microscope. After all, Bachelet did not have her office
bequeathed upon her by a powerful husband, as Juan Perón did for his
wife Isabel in Argentina in 1974, or as the Argentine president,
Néstor Kirchner, did late last month with his wife, Cristina, who has
now succeeded him. More than most contemporary politicians, Bachelet
has made a point of trying to maintain a home life distinct from her
political one. When possible, members of her staff will tell you,
Bachelet, a single mother in a country where conservative social mores
remain at least the official norm, spends Sundays at home with her
three children. (She and her husband, the Chilean architect Jorge
Davalos, separated after she returned to Chile in 1979.) Recently,
when her elder daughter fell gravely ill, Bachelet, who is herself a
physician, first was able to diagnose what was wrong, then to drive
her daughter to the hospital and finally to spend more than 48 hours
at her daughter's bedside until it was clear that the danger had
passed.
It is not a modus operandi that you can easily imagine being followed
by Bachelet's (male) predecessors or the current roster of her (mostly
male) political rivals. But then, Bachelet is anything but a typical
politician. During the presidential campaign in 2006, Bachelet liked
to say that "as the old joke goes, I have all the sins together. I am
a woman, a Socialist, separated and agnostic." The gender issue loomed
large in Bachelet's political campaign and, if anything, has loomed
larger in her administration. It seemed to me, after only a few days
in Chile, that the longer people had to complain about Bachelet, the
likelier it was that the gender issue would come up. She has faced the
issue head on, and to a large extent succeeded in turning it to her
advantage during her campaign. Although Lagos, her predecessor, was
extremely sympathetic to women's issues and pushed the first law in
Chilean history permitting divorce through Parliament as well as
taking symbolic steps, like ordering that women be included in the
detail guarding the presidential palace Bachelet went further,
insisting on gender parity in both cabinet and subcabinet positions in
her administration.
Bachelet was stating a fact, not boasting, when she told me that
"women say that my election represents a cultural break with the past
a past of sexism, of misogyny." It is increasingly common to hear
Bachelet's critics identify her with failings that men conventionally
impute to women in politics indecisiveness and the like. The polls
consistently suggest, however, that at a time when her government's
popularity has fallen sharply, her own popularity seems more durable.
That is largely because she retains a tremendous popularity among
women. Anecdotally, at least, this finding seems borne out by what is
so immediately striking at any public event at which Bachelet appears:
the women in the crowd seem far more enthusiastic than the men.
For her part, Bachelet says firmly, "I believe that we have succeeded
in creating a stable, solid democracy, and surely I'm not being
self-serving when I say that it is extraordinary that a woman can be
elected in a society like this one." At the same time, she added:
"There are tremendous expectations. Symbolically, we've opened the
windows and doors to let ordinary people in, to encourage them to
participate, but things simply cannot move as fast as people hope. And
in a sense, the fact that people hope for change, as they did,
rightly, with Transantiago, makes them angrier when change is not
immediately forthcoming." That anger has continued to swell over the
past few months, even as the public outrage over the Transantiago
fiasco has begun to subside. There have been trade-union and student
demonstrations in which, much to Bachelet's publicly expressed
annoyance, some members of her government have participated a
breakdown in discipline that Lagos never faced and that is a
continuing challenge to Bachelet's authority. Still, the betting in
Santiago is that she will weather the storm.
Having said that, the two years remaining in her term are an eternity
in politics, and it is dangerous to judge Bachelet's future on the
basis of what the newspapers (which are mostly controlled by the
right) and the chattering classes in Santiago say. As Arturo
Valenzuela, the Chilean political scientist, points out, Bachelet's
election was anything but a fluke: "What Bachelet perceived was the
urgent need to renew politics in Chile. She saw that the parties of
the Concertación had been losing contact with their base and that as a
coalition they were having increasing difficulty holding themselves
together." Bachelet, he added, only really became active in politics
in the 1990s, but she was "right to see the crisis looming for the
Concertación." When I spoke with him in New York, Ricardo Lagos
agreed. "We have been in power for 17 years," he said flatly, "and
that is a very long time in politics longer than Thatcher had or
Mitterrand. I think that if we are going to win again in 2010, we are
going to have to have a new agenda and new faces, not the same old
cast of characters."
Valenzuela emphasized that Bachelet's is the first post-transition
government Chile has had and also the first in which a majority of
important cabinet and subcabinet officials were neither witnesses to
nor actors in the dictatorship. "When Pinochet left," he told me, "the
Concertación had to fulfill three imperatives: show they knew how to
rebuild the country's democratic institutions, show that in contrast
to Allende the left could govern effectively and stay united
politically themselves." Like most observers, Valenzuela says he
believes they did a fairly good job of fulfilling all three. But, he
insists, this achievement is eroding, and he points to the steep
decline in voter turnout as testimony to the souring public mood. It
is, Valenzuela insists, "a structural problem, not just an issue of
how effective a leader Bachelet has proven to be."
There are worse challenges to face. Valenzuela has said that Chile has
"the problems of success," and there is every reason to believe he is
right. That is no small accomplishment, above all in the Latin
American context, where a return to populism seems to have taken hold
in a number of the continent's most important countries, like
Venezuela and Argentina. But it is hardly reasonable for the Chilean
political class to expect citizens to be satisfied with being better
off than their Argentine, Peruvian and Bolivian neighbors when the
record commodity prices that have fueled the boom in Chile's exports
make them dream of living like Singaporeans or South Koreans. Whether
that ambition is warranted obviously depends on Chile making good use
of the revenues flowing into the state treasury and not falling
victim, as so many countries have done, to what development economists
call the "resource curse."
Bachelet argues passionately that this is precisely what her
government has been doing, though Sebastián Piñera, who will doubtless
run for president in 2010, just as passionately argues the reverse. In
a sense, the debate itself is an accomplishment, for it is an emblem
of the fact that, today, politics as practiced in Chile is much the
same as politics in any country that is basically at peace with
itself, reasonably prosperous, in which there is no systemic crisis
and in which hope is the common coin of sane political discourse
rather than the obscene distortion of reality that it becomes when
employed by populist charlatans or self-serving oligarchies. Because
Chileans are like everyone else and can't go on being grateful for how
much better things are in the present than they were in the past, they
don't tend to see things that way, nor should they be expected to. But
transformation of their country from the Chile of Pinochet to the
Chile of Michelle Bachelet is that rarest of commodities in our
wounded times genuine good news.
David Rieff, a contributing writer, covered the recent elections in
Bolivia and Mexico for the magazine. His book "Swimming in a Sea of
Death: A Son's Memoir," about the struggle of his mother, Susan
Sontag, with cancer, will be published early next year.
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