Profile : A Voice From Chile’s Past Plays Key Role in Its Future : Edgardo Boeninger was one of many ejected from national life when Salvador Allende was ousted and killed. Now, he has bridged the gap of time and military rule to participate in the country’s new democracy.

The tall, slim man in the comfortable corner office on the ground floor of La Moneda, Chile’s historical government house, has materialized there like a time traveler from long ago. His name, Edgardo Boeninger, has a familiar ring, echoing the faded urgency of bygone newscasts, resounding with the drama of past struggles for power.

Seventeen years have passed since a military coup interrupted Chilean democracy, ejecting Boeninger and others from the nucleus of national life. Now, many have returned to the thick of things; their names reign once more in the headlines as they wield the trappings of office.

Foremost among them, of course, is Patricio Aylwin, chairman of the Christian Democratic Party at the time of the 1973 coup and now Chile’s elected civilian president. Then there are former congressmen, former ministers, longtime party leaders and other figures from the past who are among the people Aylwin relies on to help run the revived democracy.

By most accounts, the president relies on no one more than Boeninger, 65, whose official title is “minister secretary general of the presidency.” A kind of right-hand man to Aylwin, he is a prime example of the political veteran who has bridged the gap of time and military rule to assume a key position in the new democratic order.

In fact, Boeninger played a major role in formulating the political strategy that carried the country through a remarkably smooth transition from military to civilian rule. In his ministerial position, he is a combination chief of staff, strategist, trouble-shooter and mediator whose intellectual prowess is sometimes said to make him indispensable to the president.

“There is no doubt in my mind that he is the closest adviser and the one the president pays most attention to,” said an opposition politician.

“Aylwin would not be viable without Boeninger,” commented another politician who has known both men for many years.

Chileans recall other, more turbulent times when Boeninger’s formidable political skills were in play. In 1973, before the coup, the chants of marching youths and clouds of tear gas often rose over Santiago streets as rival political parties contended for power at the University of Chile. Boeninger was at the center of the fray as the university’s elected rector.

With the support of conservative parties and center-straddling Christian Democrats, he had won university elections three times in the previous four years, defeating leftist forces that supported Chilean President Salvador Allende, a socialist.

Asked in a recent interview if he was against the coup on Sept. 11, 1973, Boeninger said he “shared the feeling that the situation had come to a point of crisis beyond return” but favored another solution. “We were working on the proposal that both the president and Parliament resign, to have elections all over again, to start from scratch.”

Although Boeninger was deeply involved in the political process at the time, he did not belong to a party. After the coup, he joined the Christian Democrats, just as the military junta, led by army Gen. Augusto Pinochet, banned all parties.

“I was the last man to be admitted into a political party,” Boeninger recalled. “I requested the president of the party at the time, which precisely was Patricio Aylwin, to admit me into the party. . . . It was my way of protesting the shutting down of the political system by the military.”

When the new regime intervened in the university administration, Boeninger resigned his post as rector, abruptly ending that phase of his career in public service.

Like a number of prominent Chileans, Boeninger comes from German stock. His father, a white-collar worker, immigrated to Chile from Germany after World War I, and his mother was also of German descent.

Boeninger attended some of Santiago’s best secondary schools, then earned a degree in civil engineering at the Catholic University of Chile. He taught calculus and analytical geometry at the Catholic University School of Engineering for two years before serving for a decade as Santiago’s first traffic engineer.

Meanwhile, he completed a degree in business and economics at the University of Chile, where he became dean of economics in 1959. Under President Eduardo Frei, from 1964 to 1969, Boeninger was the national budget director. He was elected rector of the University of Chile in 1969.

After the 1973 coup, he worked as a consultant to international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. In 1975, he spent half a year at UCLA teaching a seminar and studying political science.

He continued to study social sciences at private Chilean research institutions, “trying to sort of bring together economic thinking and political thinking,” he said. “And that got me gradually involved in, first of all, bridging the gap of people who had been on different sides of the fence in the previous political conflicts.”

As a Christian Democrat, Boeninger formed a close association with Patricio Aylwin and became a party vice president in 1987. Boeninger is often credited with devising the formula for an intricate alliance between the Christian Democrats and other parties, including the socialists, that won the elections last October.

Using a favorite engineering metaphor, he told The Times that his earlier work in think tanks with both leftists and conservatives had helped prepare him for his political role.

“I had helped build the initial bridges, so it was easy for me to make a contribution in doing this same bridge-building thing now in the political field,” he said.

Genaro Arriagada, a vice president of the Christian Democratic Party, said it was also Boeninger’s strategy that won struggles within the party and within the electoral alliance to give Aylwin the nomination.

“The mastermind of that was Boeninger,” said Arriagada. As a result, he said, Boeninger took his pick of posts in the administration that began March 11.

“He is perhaps the only Aylwin minister who could choose for himself where he would be,” Arriagada said.

He called Boeninger “profoundly analytical, rational” and “morally impeccable,” capable of resisting pressure but bent on avoiding conflicts that could jeopardize the democratic process.

Miguel Otero, a vice president of the conservative National Renovation Party, described Boeninger as “muy simpatico, “ but calculatedly so.

“Boeninger never loses his calm, never,” Otero said. “He knows exactly where he is going and how, and he uses all of the charm in his power to get there.”

Boeninger said an important part of his job is to mediate between parties and the government, between the Congress and the government and between ministries within the government. On a bookshelf, within his reach as he spoke in his La Moneda office, was a book entitled “The Resolution of Conflict.”

Boeninger is a voluminous reader. “I read all sorts of novels,” he said. Once he favored authors of Latin America’s literary “boom” generation of the 1960s, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but lately he has been exploring Japanese and Egyptian literature, he said.

He also relaxes with jogging and Ping-Pong. “I’m fond of the theater, I’m fond of the movies, I like to dance,” he added. “I’ve never been bored in my life. Too many things interest me.”

He and his wife, Marta, have been married 22 years. He has two grown children from a previous marriage and she has four.

Boeninger makes a distinction between his political and private lives. “His house is not the politician’s house where everyone comes,” said Christian Democrat Arriagada. “His friends come, and that’s it.”

What Boeninger does most, however, is work, according to those who know him. He is capable, according to the newsmagazine Hoy, “of working until 2 in the morning and returning to work at 8 a.m. with a memo ready containing a proposal for solving the problem under discussion.”

A major problem faced by the administration Boeninger serves is what to do about human rights violations that took place under Pinochet’s military government. Many Chileans want punishment for violators, but others, including Pinochet, oppose it.

“The issue of human rights is the only one in which you cannot expect to reach a consensus,” Boeninger said. “What you can do is ride a narrow path to finally get to what I call the grudging acceptance of all the parties involved.

“What does that really mean? That the expectations of punishment for violators of human rights will be limited. . . .”

He said Chileans will have to accept a small number of human rights trials for crimes that took place after 1978. Violations before that are pardoned by an amnesty, decreed under Pinochet’s regime.

“We will not try to change the amnesty law,” Boeninger said. “We think that would produce a conflict hardly manageable.”

Boeninger predicted that the armed forces will not interfere with the government’s overriding goal of consolidating democracy.

“I don’t think that the authoritarian temptation is any risk now in this country,” he said. “I don’t think that anyone believes that there could be a regression to any kind of authoritarian regime.”

When the current four-year term is over, Boeninger will end his public service career and do some writing, he said. “I plan to try to write my vision of the events of Chile from 1973 to 1993.”

Biography

Name: Edgardo Boeninger

Title: Minister secretary general of the presidency. A key aide to Chilean President Patricio Aylwin.

Age: 65

Personal: Born in Chile from German stock. Earned a degree in civil engineering at Catholic University of Chile and a degree in business and economics at University of Chile. Formerly rector of the University of Chile. Married. Has two grown children from his first marriage.

Quote: “I don’t think that the authoritarian temptation is any risk now in this country. I don’t think anyone believes there could be regression to any kind of authoritarian regime.”