Pinochet Has 1 Answer For All His Critics: No : Despite Wide Pressure for Reform, Strongman in Chile Has No Intention of Stepping Down

Juan Luis Gonzalez, the elegant, graying dean of Chile’s doctors, paced back and forth in his office, as tense as an actor on opening night.

“What is the structure of power today?” he asked rhetorically. “It is easy to chart. Put a picture of Augusto Pinochet on top with a line to a machine gun beneath it. That is all.”

He was referring, of course, to the 70-year-old general who is completing his 13th year of hard-line rule as president of Chile.

An hour later, Gonzalez and a group of other professional men strode past reporters and two busloads of riot policemen into the presidential palace. They were there to present the military government with the latest in a long list of civilian demands for the restoration of democracy in Chile.

It is frustrating work, for a doctor or anyone else. However Chile might look from the outside, however much encouragement might be drawn from the fall of dictators in Haiti and the Philippines, the outlook on the inside is unchanged: Pinochet has no intention of stepping down.

At the palace door, the guards were polite to Gonzalez. He is a man who commands respect--president of a national association of doctors, president of a group of organizations that represent architects, peasants, teachers, lawyers, union workers, shopkeepers and students. It was the demand of this group that Gonzalez had brought to the palace. Gatekeepers directed him to a building where clerks accept messages for the minister of the interior.

There was no progress that day, and not much drama. But at least there was none of the violence that sometimes greets the opposition here.

Demand and repression, thrust and parry, characterize the growing popular pressure on Pinochet and his response.

Pinochet’s opponents include people of all sorts--Establishment surgeons, Communist slum dwellers and bourgeois shopkeepers. Their demands may sometimes vary, but at bottom they all want the same thing: a return of Chile’s democratic system, one that was always exciting if sometimes chaotic, a system that was Chile’s pride until Pinochet’s coup against Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1973.

To all his critics, of whatever stripe, Pinochet has the same simple answer: No. By law, he may stay on as president until early 1989. Under the terms of a disputed constitution, tailor-made for him in 1980, he could conceivably stay on until the end of the century.

Pinochet, 70, is hard-working, puritanical and scrupulously honest, a military geographer who exercises with weights every morning. He has made it plain that his own inclination is to remain in office for as long as he continues to draw breath. There will always be Communists that need fighting.

In the short term at least, Pinochet appears to have all the support he needs: the allegiance of Latin America’s toughest and most professional armed forces.

‘Last Prussian Army’

“Chile has the world’s last Prussian army,” according to Emilio Filippi, editor of a news magazine friendly to the center-left Christian Democrats, Chile’s largest political party.

Discipline, the heritage of Prussian instructors who were brought over at the turn of the century, runs deep in the 57,000-man army. And it would be hard to find a less conspiratorial institution with fewer would-be politicians. Pinochet has kept a tight lid on military expenditures, but there have been no public complaints from his officers.

Pinochet’s opponents are quick to note that the more patrician British-style navy, with 29,000 men, and the 15,000-man air force, with close ties to the United States, are more liberal than the army. And they point out that the 28,000 Carabineros, Chile’s uniformed national police, are best able to judge the depth of popular discontent, for they are more directly involved with the people.

Best-Trained Police

But the opponents make less of the fact that the Carabineros are also Latin America’s most disciplined and best-trained national police force, just as indisposed to insubordination as are their colleagues in the armed forces.

The ruling junta is made up of the commanders of the four branches of the security services. The junta has legislative authority and, under the 1980 constitution, it is to name a single presidential candidate on Dec. 11, 1988. He then must be approved by a plebiscite and will take office in March or April of 1989.

All four members of the junta seem to be solidly behind Pinochet.

Gen. Julio Canessa, the army commander, is Pinochet’s man. Navy commander Jose Toribio Merino has been in the junta from the first. Air force chief Fernando Matthei has on occasion spoken out for political liberalization, and he was lectured by the British on the need for it when he recently visited London. But Matthei knows how far he can go in this direction; his predecessor was sacked for going too far. Rodolfo Stange, the new Carabineros commander, is the son of an immigrant German family of policemen and is married to the sister of Chile’s former national police chief.

Defending His Rule

For some time it has been widely assumed that the air force, the navy and probably the Carabineros would prefer to choose someone other than Pinochet as the next president. Defending his rule is said to be wearing for them.

As Pinochet’s opponents insist, it may ultimately prove damaging to institutional integrity as civilian support is eroded. The soldiers themselves can take little joy in harrying pedestrians along downtown streets or rousting slum dwellers from their homes in mass raids.

But Chilean officers do not discuss their internal affairs, much less politics, with outsiders. Over the years, Pinochet has had to remove only a handful of officers for political reasons. By tradition and training, Chilean officers follow their commander in chief, particularly if he is one of them. Led by about 120 professionals of general-officer rank, they are the narrow but solid guarantor of Pinochet’s rule.

Much Wishful Thinking

In looking at the military, what might happen in 1989, the year for inaugurating a president, may be less pertinent than the fact that apart from rumors and much wishful thinking, there is no evidence to suggest that any one of the services even daydreams about jettisoning Pinochet before then.

This reality is well-known in Chile, although it understandably is resented by Chilean politicians. In a round of conversations with politicians across the spectrum, only a spokesman for the Communists professed to have any expectation that Pinochet could be forced out before then.

Recognizing the depth of Pinochet’s military support, opponents who are now embarked on their fourth year of organized protest are looking for a wedge to drive between Pinochet and the officer corps. Their goal is, first, to persuade the armed forces that the popular demand for change is overwhelming and, second, to convince military decision-makers that the civilians are capable of providing a democratic alternative to Pinochet that would be viable, orderly and non-Marxist.

One Manifest, One Is Not

If the first is already manifest, the second is not.

Civilian strategies range, right to left, from reasoned and measured written proposals to street protests and strikes to terrorism sponsored by the outlawed Communist Party, Pinochet’s bete noir.

None of this has worked, in part because of the staunchness of the armed forces, in part because of the contentious and fragmented nature of the opposition.

Pinochet’s opponents include all the traditional political parties, the Roman Catholic Church, the U.S. government and, by most counts, as many as four Chileans out of five. All would be delighted to see Pinochet go soon, but most would be satisfied to see him go three years from now in favor of a freely elected successor.

Most of the pressure, including that from Washington, is aimed at getting the junta to liberalize the constitution and to oversee a democratic transition in 1989 after elections in 1988. The argument is that the longer Pinochet remains, the more polarized Chile will become, and the more likely it will be that Pinochet is followed by extremism.

Lack of Agreement

The opposition, however, is diffused as well as broad. For all its maneuvering, it has been unable to agree on an alternative to hard-line military rule that is acceptable to all.

Last year, at the behest of Cardinal Juan Francisco Fresno, political parties from the socialist left to the free-enterprise right proposed a “national accord” that sketched the outlines of a restored democracy. It was politically and economically centrist. The accord, supported by Washington, pointedly excluded parties that refused to renounce the use of violence--meaning the Communists.

But when Fresno went to talk with Pinochet about the accord, just before Christmas, he was rebuffed.

“That page is already turned,” Pinochet said.

With the accord dead, its Christian Democratic and socialist signatories again began seeking a common front that would include the Moscow-line Communists.

Tough, organized and intransigent, tireless political intriguers and sponsors of terrorism, the Communists are Pinochet’s most uncompromising opponents. They make up the bulk of the 20% of Chileans who have historically voted Marxist.

Complicating the Search

The presence of the Communists complicates the search for a democratic transition, just as their exclusion from any future political system diminishes its chances of success.

At present the Communists are collaborating with the center-left Christian Democrats, Chile’s largest political party, in advancing the so-called Demand of Chile that Gonzalez tried to present to the government on behalf of the professional associations, or colegios, as they are called here.

The demand is less coherent than the national accord but has the same underlying premise: that the military dictatorship is an aberration that has outlived its usefulness in a country historically wed to democratic rule. After the government failed to respond to the demand, organizers said they will attempt a nationwide general strike against Pinochet on July 2 and 3.

Anti-government protests are quickly put down, but they have become a staple of Chilean life. All are gauged by the impact they have, or are thought to have, or the civilians would like them to have, on the armed forces.

Most Repudiate Terror

Terrorism is repudiated, except by the Communists. The center-left believes that continued public protests are necessary to keep the pressure on. By contrast, the center-right is chary of protests, believing that they push the armed forces ever closer to their commander by reinforcing Pinochet’s message that the only alternative to him is renewed tumult from which the Communists are likely to profit most.

But none of this stops the political merry-go-round. Nor does the absence of political parties, which are proscribed by law, nor the absence of a roll of registered voters, nor even the lack of any sign that the Pinochet government is willing to negotiate.

In one of those Chilean idiosyncracies that reflect the democratic heritage and at the same time the present unreality of political life, this has become a presidential season in Chile.

Suddenly there is an abundance of would-be presidents. A magazine recently listed as potential presidents no fewer than nine independents and 61 members of 19 parties and movements, and noted that in 1989, they will range in age from 33 to 88.

Few seem willing to wait till then. Most are ready right now, even though the outlook for an election under the old rules seems increasingly remote.