Jubilant Chileans Hail Expected Victory

Dancing the salsa and singing “The People Win,” a crowd its organizers claimed was the largest ever to gather in Chile saluted the opposition Sunday on the verge of its expected victory in elections this week.

The gathering, at a downtown park in the capital, was as much a fiesta for the return of democracy after 16 years of military rule as a final campaign rally for presidential candidate Patricio Aylwin. He is the leader of a 17-party “rainbow coalition.”

Coalition leaders estimated the crowd at 1 million. Local journalists calculated that several hundred thousand filled the park, with other thousands celebrating in adjacent streets.

“This is not an expression for one man but an expression of faith in the future of Chile,” said Aylwin, 71, who heads the centrist Christian Democratic Party, the largest partner in the alliance.

Aylwin has run consistently ahead in opinion polls by about 55% to 28% over Hernan Buchi, the conservative candidate and former finance minister for lame-duck President Augusto Pinochet. Most analysts doubt that Buchi and a minor third candidate will be able to deny Aylwin a simple majority and force a two-man runoff in February.

Worried about overconfidence, Aylwin reminded his jubilant supporters that the opposition needs to win heavily in the 120 House and 38 Senate races. Congress has been closed since Pinochet came to power after a bloody coup toppled Marxist President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973.

“We need to assure a big parliamentary majority to be able to untie the lashes of the dictatorship,” said Aylwin, a former senator who initially supported Pinochet’s coup to end the chaos of Allende’s years but later emerged as the principal opposition leader.

He became one of the architects of the campaign last October to defeat Pinochet in a plebiscite in which the 74-year-old Army commander sought another eight years in power and lost.

Many in Sunday’s crowd were under 34 years old, and thus among the 47% of the population who have never voted in direct presidential or congressional elections. Chileans have registered in record numbers; 91% of the eligible voters are signed up, compared to 81% in 1973, when the political system was suspended.

Chilean journalists said the crowd was substantially larger than the one that gathered to greet Pope John Paul II at the same spot in 1987.

Aylwin, the only speaker at a rally featuring the best of Chile’s pop and folk stars, reminded the gathering of the Pope’s words: “Love is stronger!”

“In Chile, we are tired of hatred, of persecution, of violence,” Aylwin said. “We are tired of having a country divided into enemies and friends.”

In the crowd were the mothers of some of an estimated 700 government opponents who were arrested and disappeared during the fiercely anti-Communist Pinochet’s years in power.

If he wins, Aylwin faces a major challenge in building relations with the military, especially since Pinochet will stay on as commander of the army for up to eight more years.

Aylwin promised that his government will seek the truth about human rights violations. But he is widely expected to forgo prosecutions of former soldiers and police officers, given the certain conflict with the armed forces that would follow.

Pinochet, the focus of the plebiscite campaign last year, was strikingly absent from the rally. Aylwin didn’t ever refer to him by name.

Jorge Schaulsohn of the leftist Party for Democracy, one of the many congressional candidates who attended Sunday’s rally, said:

“Pinochet is something from the past, with his talk of the evil empire. After (the summit at) Malta, of what use is Pinochet?

“The process itself has become more important in Chile than who wins. What is important is that we all have come to value the democratic process itself. That means everybody will win--except Buchi.”