Foes Urge Transition to Democracy : Chile’s Pinochet Faces New Drive

The Andean spring has arrived but Chile seems almost immune to the season of renewal.

Stubborn smog obscures the awakening fields and the snow-crowned peaks. Violence, repression and intransigence hang on just as stubbornly in one of the hemisphere’s most enduring dictatorships.

As parks burst with the buds of September, so, too, does politics shake off winter’s dispiriting cloak. History demands it. Chile won its independence in September, 1810. For most of this century, while the country was a showcase democracy, voters chose their presidents in September. And its last elected president, the Marxist Salvador Allende, died in a September coup in 1973.

Now, new pressure is building against Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who directed the coup that finished Allende and has ruled Chile ever since. Pinochet is, as ever, scornful of civilian attempts--violent as well as peaceful--to drive him from office.

Foes’ Campaign Intensified

Against a backdrop of continuing violence directed by Chile’s tough and resilient Communist Party, what is new this spring is that Pinochet’s democratic opponents have intensified their campaign against him.

Two years ago, Pinochet’s opponents formed a tactical alliance to challenge him in the streets. They demanded his immediate ouster from the presidency, which, under the disputed constitution, he may occupy until 1989, perhaps longer.

Now, without saying so explicitly, important sectors of the democratic opposition appear to be willing to endure Pinochet, however grudgingly, for another four years on condition that he leaves in 1989 and begins beforehand to lay the groundwork for an elected successor.

But the working assumption of opponents is that Pinochet, now a healthy 69, plans to keep the presidency for life. The 1980 constitution calls for the four men of the military junta that Pinochet commands to name a single presidential nominee in 1989 for an eight-year term. The junta’s choice is to be ratified in a yes-or-no referendum.

‘Accord for Transition’

The keystone of the democratic campaign against Pinochet is a fragile but unprecedented unity forged at the initiative of Cardinal Juan Francisco Fresno, Chile’s Roman Catholic primate. Fresno appeals for national reconciliation while seeking to remain aloof from the partisan struggle.

Eleven political parties, ranging from the Establishment right to the Democratic Socialist left, have subscribed to what they call a “national accord for the transition to full democracy.” Historically, these parties have represented nearly 80% of the Chilean electorate. Not included among the signatories are the small extreme right, some Marxist fragments and the Communist Party, which won 16% of the vote in congressional elections of 1973.

The accord, announced on Aug. 25, does not contain a specific timetable. It calls for direct election of a president and Congress, constitutional reforms, guarantees for human rights and a mixed economy with developmental goals. Any political movement with avowed totalitarian ambitions would be proscribed, as would any that refused to renounce violence. The agreement also proposes a plebiscite so the people can vote on the political and economic changes.

As “immediate steps” toward these goals, the accord calls for abolition of decrees that limit political freedoms and for permission for 4,200 political activists to return home from exile. It urges formal rehabilitation of the political parties, which are technically in a state of “recess,” creation of a voters’ register and approval of an election law.

U.S. Lauded Proposal

Never in Pinochet’s 12 years has so large a segment of Chile’s contentious political spectrum been able to agree on so much. The U.S. State Department lauded the proposal, and drew a quick rebuke from the Foreign Ministry, which accused Washington of interfering in Chile’s internal affairs.

People who support the accord expect it to endure as the foundation of democratic opposition to Pinochet, no matter how long it takes him to leave office. According to Fernando Leniz, a center-right businessman and former minister of the economy under Pinochet, and one of the accord’s principal authors, it sends two powerful messages.

“We are saying that the alternative to Pinochet is not chaos, as he insists, but a constructive and broadly based democratic consensus,” Leniz said the other day. “Further, whether Pinochet leaves now or later, we have established the rules of the new democratic game for all to see, and outlined the field on which it will be played.”

Pinochet dismissed the accord as “the work of pseudo-politicians who scarcely weigh in the scales.” Periodically he threatens “drastic measures” against his opponents who use violence, and few doubt either his will or his ability to invoke them.

Drive for Signatures

The parties that support the accord have opened a national campaign to get individual citizens to sign it.

As usual in Chile, the most important political nay-sayers are the Communists, who until Allende’s fall had the largest, best-organized and most Moscow-obedient Communist Party in South America. They are Pinochet’s bete noire, but for 12 years Chile’s Communists have survived all his efforts to destroy them. Despite the repression, they continue to be an important political force with profound national impact.

Communist leaders, active even though they are legally proscribed, steadfastly deny having any direct link with the terrorists of the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, whose bombings have lent a measure of fear to everyday life in Chile. The party does, however, support violence--”popular self-defense” in Marxist jargon--as a tool against Pinochet.

In the Chilean spring then, Pinochet’s democratic and Marxist opponents are clawing at him from opposite poles--and in mutual distrust.

Persuading the Military

The Communists say that attempting to reason with Pinochet is akin to wishing a mountain to move. The moderates fear that violence will not only help Pinochet justify his continued existence but also drive him deeper into isolation from the rest of the country, and the armed forces with him.

Indeed, the real target of the political maneuvering this spring--in the streets and on paper--is not so much Pinochet himself as the handful of decision-makers within the armed forces. The opposition must persuade these officers that Pinochet is a liability to both their country and to their institution if there is to be any real prospect of political change.

For all the jostling, the Chilean equation today is just what it was when it was born in flames on a spring morning 12 years ago. Barring death from assassination or natural causes, Augusto Pinochet will continue to rule Chile for as long as his armed forces want him to rule.