Dancing in the Streets--but Dancing Alone : Chile: The euphoria of shedding 16 years of dictatorship is tempered by the sound of thousands of silent voices forever ‘disappeared.’

We finally danced in the forbidden streets.

It was a fitting end to the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who had come to power in a bloody coup in 1973. For 16 years he had denied those streets to the people of this country, he had persecuted and imprisoned, exiled and tortured, the bodies that now danced. For 16 years, he had tried to silence those voices and blindfold those eyes and paralyze those hearts. But the people had found a way to speak and look and survive in spite of the dictator. In October, 1988, they found the courage to vote no to eight more years of Pinochet’s rule, in a plebiscite that the general had expected to win through intimidation or fraud; and that victory had opened the way one year later for the opposition candidate Patricio Aylwin to win the presidency by a landslide. We danced to tell ourselves and the world that the nightmare was over, that democracy had really returned.

And yet, in the midst of the singing, the hugging, the chanting, I could not help but remember another sort of dance, a lonelier, more painfully persistent one, which I had watched just a week ago. The cuecka, our national dance, requires a man to colorfully court a woman, imitating the swooping prancing of a rooster wooing its mate. The version I saw, however, had only a dozen black-clad women in it, waving their handkerchiefs aloft as always, but without a shadow of a man in sight. The husbands, fathers, brothers, sons who once danced the cuecka are gone. The dictatorship “disappeared” them--arresting them and then refusing, for more than a decade, to reveal their whereabouts. The cuecka is now symbolic of the suffering of Chile, of everything we have lost. And it reminds us that, no matter how resplendent today’s victory dance of democracy may be, the streets will never truly be ours or safe for our descendants unless we can insure that the madness of these years will never again be repeated.

Is the dictatorship effectively over? Or will Pinochet haunt Chile for years to come? Could it not be that our wild celebration is premature?

Though there can be no doubt that Pinochet had no alternative but to hand over the reins of power, it is also incontestable that his shadowy influence will continue to pervert and thwart every effort that we make to redress the regime’s sad legacy: the unjust economic structure that has left almost half the population in abject poverty, the lack of housing, educational facilities and health care, and, above all, the effect of prolonged and systematic terror on the psyche of the citizenry. This is not a merely metaphoric presence. Along with placing his trusted cronies in the most crucial institutions in the land--the Supreme Court, the National Television Council, the Secret Police, the Senate--Pinochet has announced his intention of remaining commander-in-chief of the army for another eight years, guaranteeing that no one can dislodge his followers from their positions of power. He has also stated that he will stage another coup if even one of his officers is put on trial for human-rights violations--is judged, for instance, for the kidnaping and murder of those very men who will never again be able to dance the cuecka or fill our streets with laughter.

To top it all, even if we manage to force the general’s resignation, the military that he has brought permanently into the political arena will be watchful, ready to veto any changes in the status quo, the very changes that could attack the roots and causes of the dictatorship and therefore block the infinite replication of other Pinochets.

In spite of these foreboding developments, most Chileans are optimistic and even euphoric. In all my many visits to my country, this is the first time in many years that I have found people to be relaxed, confident of the future, emerging from a state of chronic emotional depression.

For many years, it looked as if history had stood still, as if Pinochet were eternal and omnipotent, as if he had the capacity to exclude us from the streets of our country forever. If we have been able to gradually push him out of our lives, it is because countless Chileans dared to dream that the dictator was in fact not eternal and that they could make a difference. Countless Chileans turned that defiance into a series of small laborious steps that, inch by inch, took the country away from the general, setting apart zones that he could not command. The TV cameras click on and capture the dance in the streets, but the final dance is possible only because we have been rehearsing it in multiple, hardly visible forums all these years. The election was not won by millions who suddenly decided that they had suffered enough. It was won, like the plebiscite before it, because ordinary men and women were ready to risk their lives and the lives of their children for the belief that democracy would return. Many Chileans, some of them dead, some of them damaged beyond belief, some of them dancing to undo the damage, reached a fierce collective decision to not allow tyranny the final word.

In the difficult years ahead, it will be up to those men and women to prove that, when all was said, when all was done, it was not the general’s dance of death that prevailed, but our peaceful dance of life and joy in the streets, those streets that we will never give up again.