Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  She was exactly my age, and I liked her at once. She had in her hand the proofs of an article she had written about the background to the Chilean women’s movement. This latter had been nourished during the fight for suffrage in national elections, but when that was granted in 1949 the victory failed to lead to wider reforms or even to begin to challenge male ideas about the role and value of women in public life, and the women’s movement disintegrated. I wondered where it had got to after another forty years.

  ‘Still very fragmented,’ she said after a long pause, during which she stirred her empty coffee cup. ‘And to a certain extent the movement has withdrawn into itself since the dictatorship fell. Its role for all those years was to promote the notion of non-violence, and now it has to reconsider its position. But there is a good network, yes, with a strong working-class constituency.’

  (Most organizations with any kind of social concerns were grappling with the question of what to do now they had achieved what they had campaigned for over so many years.)

  She had hope for a better future for Chilean women.

  ‘Though not for our generation. The men still had a very macbista upbringing. But younger ones can see the flexibility of roles. Yes, I am hopeful.’

  I wasn’t sure I could have been, in her position. There were three women senators and seven diputadas (members of the lower house), and although Chilean politicians had recognized that it was fashionable to show themselves to be prowomen and almost all the parties of the centre and left had instituted women’s sections, the trend had translated itself into reforms that were purely cosmetic. Pinochet had appointed numerous women mayors, but Sara dismissed them as ‘honorary men’; that, in the political context, was at least a concept I was familiar with. A recent public opinion poll among both sexes had revealed considerable resistance to women in power at parliamentary level (they liked them being on municipal councils, though; that was a projection of the domestic role, running the local scene like the house, no really big decisions involved). During my visit a drama was being played out involving the eventually aborted presidential campaign of Evelyn Matthei, an eminently capable politician. I heard many sexist comments about Matthei, even from leaders of her own National Renewal party. Although some male politicians would deny it, the whole complex business of her failed campaign demonstrated to many liberals that the country simply wasn’t ready to allow women into the upper reaches of power.

  I was supposed to be leaving the luxuries of the metropolis for the southern half of the country, but there was always a reason to stay another day, and then another. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go – I felt a leap of excitement whenever I thought of the glaciers and the fjords of the far south – but Santiago was a cornucopia, and I was very happy.

  Pepe and I went to Valparaiso, Chile’s second city and first port, only two hours from the capital. The first building I saw there was an old hat shop with elderly assistants in white coats serving at vast polished wood cabinets and counters, round hat boxes piled on shelves behind them twenty-five feet up to the ceiling. We took a tram past the magnificent pink customs house on the quay and rococo houses built in the nineteenth century during Valparaíso’s glory days as one of the leading ports on the Pacific rim (though most of these houses were reconstructed after an earthquake in 1906). The former government house, a grand and elegant confection, had been turned into naval offices and in the square in front of it Arturo Prat, most revered naval hero, was buried under an elaborate monument.

  I had heard the port called Pancho (the familiar version of Francisco). A sailor in a café where we stopped for a late breakfast told us that the spire of San Francisco’s church was the first thing seamen saw when their ships sailed into the bay. Pepe, however, thought it was a reference to Sir Francis Drake, ‘your pirate’.

  ‘He wasn’t a pirate,’ I said. Pepe opened his eyes very wide and laughed. He was laughing at me.

  I had absorbed all my history in Britain; I had the idea that Drake was a hero. In reality, his conduct up and down the Chilean and Peruvian coasts was so barbarous that his name entered the language as a synonym for terror and destruction. A nineteenth-century traveller records, ‘The mothers on the coast, when trying to hush their babes, cry, “aquí viene Draake” ’ [sic] – Here comes Drake. It wasn’t just him. The British had recently transformed themselves into an oceangoing nation, and the close relationship that existed between trade and violent theft failed to dampen the admiration in which the heroic expansion was held at home. By the 1560s, before Drake, routine plunder of places the Elizabethans had never heard of was apparently de rigueur – especially if they were Spanish. Some history books call the privateers armed, privately owned vessels commissioned for ‘war service’ by a government; in fact they frequently operated as officially sanctioned looters. Three centuries after Drake, Darwin travelled extensively within Chile during his expedition on HMS Beagle, and he tells a story which illustrates how profoundly English pirates had impinged upon the Chileans. He heard of an old woman who, at a dinner in Coquimbo in the north, remarked how wonderfully strange it was that she should have lived to dine in the same room as an Englishman, because she remembered very well that on two separate occasions when she was a girl at the mere cry ‘Los Ingleses!’ everyone hastily packed what they could and fled to the mountains.

  There were so many British in Valparaíso during the nineteenth century that it was often referred to as a British colony. The city’s importance in the establishment of the Chilean Jewish community is a lesser known aspect of its past. There are probably not many more than half a million Jews on the whole continent (and over half of those are in Argentina) but, in Chile at least, they played a vital part in the modernization of the country.

  Despite the Valparaiso settlement in the nineteenth century and an influx of Jews after the Californian gold rush, by about 1910 there were still fewer than 500 in Chile. During the interwar period, however, approximately 15,000 Jews settled in the country, mostly from Eastern Europe and Germany. Few Chileans appreciate the role these immigrants and their descendants played and continue to play. Not only were most people, in my experience, anti-Semitic, but they were openly so; even otherwise liberal types paraded a distinctly un-raised consciousness regarding Jews with equanimity. This was a facet of a broadly Catholic society within which cultural pluralism was only a shade more visible than in Iran. Later in the trip I asked a well-known Jewish MP about this.

  ‘You can be a Jew here,’ he said candidly, ‘but you can’t be Jewish. The culture is so powerful that it occupies the entire space. Society doesn’t see diversity – it doesn’t see anything except itself. There’s no such thing as multi-culturalism in Chile.’

  Above the flat strip of land occupied by offices, venerable buildings, old-fashioned shops and the straggling port, a series of steep hills revealed an entirely different Valparaíso. We took an odd single-carriage funicular, and afterwards walked up uneven steps through quiet cat-filled streets where washing was drying outside multi-coloured houses jammed together in aleatory confusion.

  Neruda called Valparaíso ‘a filthy rose’, and bought a house there. He was fascinated by the sea. Disliking him and his poetry didn’t mean that I disliked his houses. On the contrary – and furthermore I had a strong feeling that I would be leaving the picture unfinished if I didn’t find his third home. It was concealed at the end of a narrow passage up in the peaceful hinterland, next to a narrow pink 1930s theatre. The facade of this theatre was pure art deco, ‘Teatro Mauri’ written at the top in angular black and silver letters, and as the old stage door was ajar, I tiptoed in, hoping to spy on a rehearsal.

  It had been turned into a dog biscuit factory.

  He had persuaded two friends to buy half of the house – called La Sebastiana – and one of them was a ceramicist who used uncut pebbles like a mosaic. Neruda had examples of her work in all his homes, and in La Sebastiana he had got her to copy an old map of Patagonia and Chilean Antarctica. The
house was tall and thin, and Neruda had made his part of it a jumble of cluttered and brightly coloured nooks, bulges and unorthodox shapes, as if he were trying to copy Valparaíso itself.

  The numerous Argentinians strolling in the streets vexed Pepe. All over Chile, people regularly launched into the Argentinian-bashing routine for my education, and it was always backed up by confused historical data centring on 1878, when Argentina ‘stole’ most of Patagonia (in reality a treaty was signed). This episode had burned itself into the national consciousness, and it was trotted out with grossly exaggerated rollings of ’r’s to mock the Argentinian accent. The mutual antipathy reached back a long way. I had read about it in nineteenth-century editions of The Times. Even then the Argentinians had considered their country preeminent on the continent, and I detected more than a trace of an inferiority complex on the part of the Chileans, though I generally kept this opinion to myself. For many years the Argentinian economy had been vastly superior to that of its thin neighbour. That was presumably why the Chileans only looked down on the Bolivians, and didn’t hate them: the Bolivian economy was quite a joke even by the demanding standards of South America.

  We ate lunch in an old restaurant near the port. It had dark wood panelling and embossed, peeling wallpaper, a high ceiling with two large whirring fans, colossal gilt-framed mirrors, a tiled floor and tables draped in starched white linen with tiny darns. The barrels behind the bar breathed a winy smell over the room, and the waiters wore bow ties and white jackets. It was the kind of place to drink a bottle of heavy red wine and snooze behind newspapers in the lounge after lunch. With unusual restraint we did not do this, but we did eat a bowl of especially pungent shellfish, and afterwards, full and content, we lay down on the grass in a palmy park next to the monstrous new parliament building. An old man in a cream jacket, as old fashioned as everything else in Valparaíso, offered to take a photograph of us with a box camera.

  I had intended to visit a museum, but it was hot, and the perfume of the flowers in the park was like a narcotic; the museum was altogether too much trouble.

  ‘Where did parliament sit before this was built, then?’ I asked Pepe.

  He turned to look at me quizzically.

  ‘Well, there wasn’t one for seventeen years.’

  He often came out with prosaic remarks which made the horror of the junta more real than any academic analysis I read. Once, I said that I was anxious to get back to London in time for the election. He had looked blank, and screwed up his eyes.

  ‘Well,’ I went on, ‘don’t you feel at election time that you wouldn’t want to miss it?’

  ‘For almost all my adult life there haven’t been any elections.’

  The Vicaría de la Solidaridad was located on the top two floors of an unmarked stone building next to the cathedral in the main square of Santiago, and its doors were always open. When I walked through them, early in the afternoon on a hot Tuesday in January, I found the cloisters hung with appliqué collages incorporating messages about peace and justice, and black-and-white photographs of young men, tiny on the massive walls, captioned, ‘Juan Luis, where are you?’ The Vicaría was an institution born in adversity, and it had been David against Pinochet’s Goliath; it was a symbol of right against wrong. There wasn’t much for the Church to be proud of in modern Chile, but it had the Vicaría. Its work in assisting ordinary Chileans and organizing their legal defence during the dictatorship had been of incalculable value.

  The Church had not consistently taken the victims’ side. In 1973, the bishops’ individual reactions to the coup cast some light on the officially neutral line they had taken during the socialist experiment. On the day of Allende’s death, Bishop Francisco Valdés of Osorno wrote a public prayer of thanksgiving, giving God the credit for having freed Chile ‘from the worst clutches of lies and evil that have ever plagued poor humanity’. A retired Archbishop of La Serena presented his episcopal ring to the junta. There were others. I wondered how Catholics whose sons and daughters had electrodes clamped to their heads and genitals as their spiritual fathers thanked the Lord reconciled themselves to their religion.

  The bishops did explicitly condemn violence, especially as the extent of the horror was revealed; generally, nonetheless, the hierarchy agreed to keep fairly quiet in return for the freedom to do what it wanted.

  One official move, however, was of superlative importance. Almost immediately after the coup the Church set up a cooperative venture with the Protestants, Greek Orthodox and Jews. This led to the Committee of Cooperation for Peace in Chile, known by its acronym Copachi, which offered legal help and economic aid to people suffering under the junta. This committee helped well over 10,000 Chileans. Pinochet inevitably asked Cardinal Silva to close Copachi. He did so, in December 1975, but in January 1976 set up the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, which was exclusively Catholic and part of the Church – so Pinochet couldn’t touch it, at least openly.

  The dictator meanwhile clung to his belief that it was he and God against the Marxists. Like Maradona, he claimed ‘the hand of God’ was with him, and in his 1988 campaign he used the allegory of Christ and Barabbas to portray the choice before the voters (he was not Barabbas). When a cardinal with a conservative reputation was chosen to replace Silva, Lucía Hirart, the First Lady, said, ‘Our prayers have been answered’.

  Though formal ties were maintained, during the later years relations between the Church and the junta became increasingly strained. This made the Church more popular with the left, and much less popular with the rich, who once saw it as their own province. It was clear to me as I travelled down the country that this polarization still prevails. Intellectuals of the right used to love to tell me, with some bitterness, how the Vicaría had been infiltrated by Communists. I was talking once to an upper-class banker about an encounter with a priest. Before I had said anything about the priest’s views, the banker asked sharply, ‘Was he a Communist?’

  The director I met at the Vicaría was a gimlet-eyed man in his early forties. He was immediately engaging. When I asked about the Vatican, he said, ‘Pablo gave us real help. Juan Pablo, well, the Vatican’s priorities are different now. It wants more explicit evangelization, emphasizing individual morality, not so much the world we live in … The Chilean Church is helping us a lot, though the conservative bishops don’t let us work in their dioceses. Luckily there aren’t many of them.’

  A poster on the peeling office wall said, ‘No a l’impunidad’ (‘No impunity’) in lime green letters. Impunidad was an inflammatory word. The Rettig Commission (properly called the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation) had been set up by the new government to document human rights abuse during the dictatorship, and the Vicaría had provided much of the information. It was one thing, however, to document the crimes, and another to try the accused. Although several trials were working their way through the courts, the government was moving slowly, and its efforts were frequently stalled or stymied by the military courts, the Supreme Court (the judges of which had been appointed for life by Pinochet) or the 1978 amnesty law. This law, which applied to all ‘authors, accomplices or concealers’ of politically connected crimes between 1973 and 1978, could not be annulled, as Pinochet appointees still controlled the Senate. I had met someone who lived in the same block of flats as a known torturer. If the two met in the lift, the torturer would travel up to the top floor, where my friend’s flat was, and then descend alone, so he wouldn’t be obliged to reveal his own floor.

  I asked if the government was afraid to confront the powerful right wing.

  ‘Miedo [fear] is too strong a word. But the majority of the crimes were committed by military personnel, so the government has to weigh up the cost of annoying them with prosecutions. Political instability is a high cost, very high. The government wants it all behind it.’

  Did he have hope? He closed his eyes and pushed his head back in anticipation of a sneeze which never came.

  ‘I have no hope that the torturers wil
l be punished. Our democracy is weak. But punishment was never our principal objective. That was and is to defend the victims. Of course, punishment is one way of making amends, but it is equally, if not more important to ensure that the experience is not repeated, hence our educative role. For this I have hope, yes, I do.’

  The question of impunity for the perpetrators of the crimes of the dictatorship was a major issue – perhaps the major issue. I asked Jorge Schaulsohn about it when I went to talk to him the next day in his twenty-first floor office in downtown Santiago. He was an MP for Santiago Central, and a leader of the Party for Democracy (PPD), a new progressive party on the centre-left of the governing coalition. As a young radical activist during the dictatorship he had been sent off to the US by his father, also a politician, and he returned the epitome of the exile caught between the two realities of Chile and the United States. He was intelligent, committed, pragmatic and a man of integrity; Schaulsohn was the kind of person who gives you hope for the continent.

  ‘You can’t apply the standards of a fully fledged democracy here. We can’t annul the amnesty law, and that’s that.’

  ‘Doesn’t that weigh heavily on your conscience?’

  ‘Not at all. I have to decide what’s best: to take the line you are implying, and pursue the guilty, or to maintain a stable society and work for the betterment of the people within it. We can’t have both.’

  His confidence has been supported by events, at least to a certain extent. In January 1993 Congress impeached a Supreme Court judge, and shortly before that a military court ruled that the amnesty law did not preclude certain kinds of investigation against the torturers. On 3 February 1993 the Guardian’s excellent correspondent in Chile, Malcolm Coad, published a story in which he said, ‘Chile has won an international reputation as an example of how a nation can come to terms with a legacy of repression and abuse without tearing itself apart.’ He quoted José Zalaquett, former deputy general secretary of Amnesty International, who said, ‘Chile is now widely seen as the country in transition from dictatorship where social peace has been achieved most completely and most rapidly.’