The Politics of Fear: Chile Under Pinochet : FEAR IN CHILE Lives Under Pinochet<i> by Patricia Politzer (Pantheon Books: $18.95; 225 pp; 0-394-56476-6) </i>

Like Chilean novelist Jose Dono so’s fictional protagonist, Judit Torre, the 14 people profiled in “Fear in Chile: Lives Under Pinochet,” people who oppose and support Gen. Augusto Pinochet, are haunted by the events that brought about the end of the constitutional government of Salvador Allende during September of 1973. Through them, journalist Patricia Politzer, one of the first dissident voices against Pinochet in 1978 and a weekly columnist in the opposition daily, La Epoca, presents a cross-section of Chileans ranging from a colonel loyal to Pinochet to the mother of a “disappeared” to the widow of the minister of defense under Allende, Moy de Toha. That this demographic representation echoes Donoso’s fictional account speaks to the power of the collective memory of the events of 1973 in the contemporary Chilean mind.

First published in 1984, with the purpose of documenting the experiences of the coup and its aftermath, the interviews revealed according to Politzer, a country that was and is afraid. Despite Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite and the forthcoming elections scheduled for December of this year, Politzer sees Chileans living in an atmosphere in which everyone is “caught in a system that determines what we can and cannot do, what we think, what we create, what we dream, and what we suppress.” There is, she says in the foreword, some political freedom today. Yet in the last three years, two young people were burned alive by the military patrol, three Communist professionals were beheaded, and thousands have been tortured. Such actions preclude that Chileans continue to live under a cloud of uncertain distrust despite the relative political freedom that prevails.

Politzer’s interviews weave a chronicle of sustained horror, made all the more vivid by the laconic tone of many of the narrators. The voices intermingle, beginning with Blanca Ester Valdeas Garrido who remembers that:

“I knew they were going to kill us. I knew because all their movements indicated it . . . I wasn’t afraid. I knew that I hadn’t done anything . . . I’m not a murderer . . . . What hurt me most . . . was that they were going to kill my husband. Why him? He wasn’t guilty either. I was more guilty because I was the mayor.”

Col. Juan Deichler Guzman, on the other hand, speaks in defense of the coup, citing the chaos in which the country found itself in the summer of 1973. Popular Unity for him was a “dreadful thing.” From his perspective, the lack of organization and shortages necessitated “military intervention.” The price of lives was in his opinion, an exaggeration, an opinion often shared by those loyal to Pinochet’s Military Regime:

“When they talk about how many people were killed, they make me laugh. I assure you--and I would take an oath on it--that on the 11th of September and the days after, there were fewer than 5,000 corpses in Chile on both sides . . . in El Salvador, for example there are 36,000 deaths in one year. So thinking about it doesn’t upset me . . . . In Chile it was very calm. Very calm.”

Riding a bus one night last August in the Providencia section of Santiago and seeing crowds of evening shoppers milling through the prosperous business district of Santiago’s Providencia quarter, this pervasive fear, this terror, these contradictions that Politzer so ably extracts from her subjects seemed very distant. Yet, a simple incident that night interrupted that apparent normalcy, a sudden reminder that the nightmare of anguish that pervades throughout these narratives continues: A ragged child about 14 years old, rode in the back of the bus, singing a poem that he had obviously composed himself. As someone gave him a coin, he called out: “Thank you. Bless you. I’m an orphan. My parents are ‘disappeared.’ I live off my songs.”