Chile’s poisonous past

Chile has developed a strong democracy in the 20 years since the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet ended, and yet the blue-eyed strongman who died in 2006 continues to cast a pall over the country’s current events in a stark demonstration of how difficult it is for a nation to recover from tyranny.

This week, the 1982 death of former Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei Montalva was back in the news when a Chilean judge ruled that he had been poisoned by Pinochet henchmen and charged six people with the killing and subsequent coverup. Frei preceded Socialist President Salvador Allende and supported the coup against him led by Pinochet, but later became a leading critic of the dictatorship, which has been blamed for the killing or disappearance of about 3,000 people. Frei’s death was initially attributed to septic shock, but an autopsy this year found chemicals used to make mustard gas and rat poison in his body. Four doctors and two members of Pinochet’s secret police were accused of the crime. “This shows that justice takes time, but it does finally arrive,” said Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, herself a victim of the torture common in Pinochet’s prisons.

The killing is a specter in the presidential election that will be held Sunday. Frei’s son, Sen. Eduardo Frei, who already served as president from 1994 to 2000, is again a leading candidate. He is likely to face a runoff against Harvard-trained economist and conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera, who polls say could wrest power from the center-left coalition that Frei represents and that has ruled since the end of the dictatorship. Some conservatives accused the left of trying to capitalize on the Frei Montalva case to sway the election; Pinochet’s legacy of abuse remains a powerful emotional issue on both sides of Chilean politics.

Meanwhile, Pinera came under fire for promising a group of retired military officers that he would try to expedite litigation of human rights cases dating from the Pinochet era. Frei accused him of making “obscure promises of immunity,” and Pinera shot back that Frei seemed consumed with hatred and “wedded to the past.”

The desire to move on is natural, and in many ways Chile already has, with an independent judicial system, free elections and, quite possibly now, the peaceful transfer of power to the opposition. But the brutal past still haunts a scarred and divided society. Many crimes of the dictatorship were exposed but never punished; some, such as the killing of Frei Montalva, are just being revealed. Rather than drag Chile backward, though, this case and others like it are actually part of the nation’s painful reckoning. As Carmen Frei, a daughter of the late president, told the Washington Post: “It is hard, but we are writing the true history of our country because the murder of an ex-president cannot be left there without justice, without truth.”