Pinochet Hopes to Thwart Opposition, Stay in Power : Chile’s Leader Reported Pleased at Results of Crackdown on Dissent

President Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s military ruler, is described by close associates as euphoric over the results of his government’s hardened repression against political dissent.

“He is like a kid with a new bicycle,” said one person who has been in frequent contact with Pinochet over the last four months. During that time, the regime has toughened its anti-communist stance and virtually closed off contacts with the political opposition.

Since December, the 69-year-old Pinochet has told his close military advisers that he intends to remain in power beyond the end of his present constitutional term in 1989. He has also said that he wants to eliminate any growth of political opposition by employing censorship, repression of active dissidents and reprisals against anyone within the regime who does not go along with the Pinochet line.

Financial Aid Needed

In this strategy, Pinochet is counting heavily on foreign financial support for Chile’s badly shaken economy. Two months ago, Pinochet restored an economic policy of conservative monetary orthodoxy, represented by Finance Minister Hernan Buchi, who has negotiated a new three-year agreement with the International Monetary Fund providing Chile with $250 million a year in loans.

The IMF agreement is the key to renegotiating Chile’s $20-billion foreign debt with international banks, from which Buchi is trying to get $1 billion in new loans to help Chile pay interest on its present debt. Chile is also applying for a $750-million loan from the World Bank.

Without this international financial aid, Chile’s economy cannot recover from a 20% slide in national production since 1982, which has produced 30% unemployment and reduced living standards. The loans are also necessary for the fulfillment of Pinochet’s political plan to stay in power indefinitely.

Many people were shocked March 30 when the bodies of three slain dissidents, two of them Communist Party members, were found in a field near Santiago’s international airport. Their throats had been cut. Within 48 hours of that event, five other dissidents were killed by security forces in so-called “confrontations” with subversives.

Marxist Resistance

The outlawed Communist Party, which is run from exile by a committee headed by Secretary General Luis Corvalan, has an organized internal resistance movement known as the Manuel Rodriguez Front, named for a hero of Chile’s 19th-Century war for independence from Spain. The Revolutionary Left Movement, which has ties with Fidel Castro’s Cuban regime, also maintains an underground insurrection.

The Communists and the Revolutionary Left Movement carry out some bombings, organize bank robberies and have attacked isolated police and military installations, but the level of these activities is low and sporadic. Nevertheless, the government makes this armed opposition the basis for an increasingly repressive regime.

“There is a polarization taking place here between the hard-line right and the extreme left, and that is the way Pinochet wants things to develop so he will have a justification for staying in power indefinitely,” said Federico Willoughby, who was once Pinochet’s press secretary and now heads a small right-wing political movement.

When the Chilean armed forces overthrew the Marxist-led administration of President Salvador Allende in 1973, Pinochet was commander in chief of the army. He quickly imposed his authority over the ruling military junta, creating an intelligence agency that operated torture centers and prison camps for political opponents.

A U.S. district court convicted three men working for the intelligence agency of engineering the 1976 bombing assassination in Washington of Orlando Letelier, a former official of the Allende regime who was active in opposition work against Pinochet.

International Uproar

But the international uproar over the Letelier case, and internal pressure for liberalization, led to a softening of repression here in the late 1970s.

Many of the thousands of Chilean political exiles began returning in the early 1980s and democratic political parties were allowed to organize, although without legal recognition.

Now, the heavy-handed methods of the early stages of the military regime are back in evidence. A state of siege, which puts military courts in charge of political crimes, has been restored. Pinochet has sent at least 290 people to detention centers without trial for political dissent since December.

Pinochet has made it clear that this is more than just reaction to the challenge of armed violence from the extreme left. In March, he virtually announced that he would be in command of the Chilean political scene for years to come.

“This country is under active threat from the Communist conspiracy led by Moscow, which does not forget that the Chilean armed forces freed this country from the threat of a Communist takeover,” Pinochet told his Cabinet. “The political parties in this country are not able to maintain the defenses against communism, and only the military institutions can perform this national task.”

The hardening of Pinochet’s position was signaled by a Cabinet shake-up in early March in which the president named a virtual unknown, Ricardo Garcia, as minister of interior, the political post in the Cabinet.

Political Parties Rejected

Pinochet has never been willing to accept the active presence of the political parties that developed under Chile’s traditional democracy. He has rejected all attempts by the parties to restore an elected legislature or even municipal councils. Under Pinochet, everything is done by appointment from the top. Nothing is by popular election. The electoral registries have been burned.

Under Chile’s present constitution, drafted by the military and approved by a national plebiscite in 1980, Pinochet will serve as president of the ruling military junta until 1989. The junta will then propose the name of a president for a subsequent eight-year period, and this will again be submitted to a plebiscite.

According to his associates, Pinochet has already begun preparing the way for another decade in power under the current authoritarian system after his term ends in 1989.

Other Latin American military regimes, such as those in power until recently in Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay, have moved to restore democratic government in the last five years. But Chile, like Paraguay under the rule of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, is not going in a democratic direction.

Deep Recession, Unemployment

Two years ago, when a deep recession brought widespread hardship to the Chilean middle classes and unemployment reached 30%, the regime was taken by surprise when union leaders produced a succession of monthly days of “national protest” against Pinochet and in favor of restored democracy.

Scores of people were killed by official repression when demonstrators took to the streets, burning automobile tires, building barricades and banging pots and pans as a sign of protest. Pinochet was forced to change his government, installing a veteran conservative political leader, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, as minister of interior in charge of negotiations with the political opposition.

Preliminary Contacts

But negotiations for a “political opening” never got beyond the preliminary contacts, arranged through the mediation of Archbishop Juan Francisco Fresno of Santiago. The opposition demanded that Pinochet shorten his present term, call elections for a constitutional assembly and end the permanent state of emergency under which he rules and under which judicial guarantees are suspended in cases of internal security.

However, public support for the demonstrations cooled as month after month of rallies led to nothing in the way of concessions from the government and produced a growing toll of deaths and property damage, things that offend the Chilean preference for political civility built up over years of stable democratic government before 1973.