A Cultural War Breaks Out in Chile

On the surface, this nation is Latin America’s showcase of modernity.

The phones and mail are reliable. New foreign factories line the urban periphery of the capital. Asian luxury cars glide down wide avenues past well-guarded apartment towers and well-stocked shopping malls that are vaguely reminiscent of Southern California.

Such evidence of globalization and prosperity make it especially hard to believe that Chile is also Latin America’s staunchest outpost of cultural conservatism.

This is the only nation in the Americas and Europe that does not permit divorce. Children born out of wedlock are barred from joining the police force and attending exclusive schools. Military officers still censor films; television screens routinely go blank as private cable channels block broadcasts that are considered offensive.

Current debates over censorship and divorce expose the continuing contradictions of this remote nation of 14.5 million. Six years after democracy replaced dictatorship, Chile is fighting a peaceful civil war over fundamental cultural questions.

“The first fight against the dictatorship was for political liberties,” said Sen. Sergio Bitar of the Party for Democracy, a former government minister who was imprisoned in an island concentration camp after the 1973 military coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. “The second was the fight for economic equality. The third, which is starting now, is the cultural fight. . . . This country was frozen. And authoritarianism and fear penetrate other aspects of life, not just politics.”

The 17-year Pinochet dictatorship crushed cultural freedoms; his censors even outlawed the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” At the same time, however, the free-market reforms of the Pinochet years spurred growth and foreign investment, helping Chile become the economic juggernaut of Latin America.

Pinochet stepped down in 1990. But he retains command of the armed forces and exerts influence through his holdover appointees in the judiciary and a quarter of the Senate seats. The current government, an alliance of the centrist Christian Democrats with small, moderate leftist parties, is slowly dismantling the remaining vestiges of the dictatorship.

Pinochet’s survival symbolizes the entrenched influence of the conservative elite over the attitudes of Chile’s large middle class, critics say.

“We have to ask ourselves: Why is it so difficult in Chile to confront these issues of cultural values?” said Mariana Aylwin, a Christian Democratic congresswoman whose father, Patricio, was the first elected president after the return to democracy. “The social elite is very powerful, it controls the media, it is tremendously conservative. The Chilean middle class has always looked to the cultural canons of the upper class.”

Recent history is not the only reason for the resistance to change by politicians and the clergy, who have blocked initiatives such as Aylwin’s proposal to legalize divorce, she said. After all, neighboring societies--notably Argentina--whose memories of military rule are fresh have largely resolved such questions.

History and geography help explain Chile’s singularity. Physical isolation, demarcated by the mountain wall of the Andes, has shaped national life. The indomitable warriors of the indigenous Araucanian nation kept fighting against European colonizers for centuries after the continent’s other native peoples were subdued.

During this century, Chile rebuffed some outside influences and accepted others, mixing together progressive thinking, stolid traditionalism and fervent Roman Catholicism.

Chilean women were among the first in the region to be accepted into universities and professions, but among the last to vote. Chile has produced Nobel-winning poets as well as an authoritarian military machine once described as “the last Prussian army in the world.”

Chileans cherish a democratic tradition that distinguished the nation among its neighbors for decades before 1973. But many celebrate Pinochet’s coup against President Salvador Allende, asserting that Allende’s experiment with socialism had degenerated into chaos.

Isolation had its benefits, some Chileans argue. They are proud of low crime rates and other indicators of social solidity, though problems such as teenage pregnancy and child abuse are increasing rapidly.

There is no contradiction between economic progress--robust Chilean companies are investing billions in other Latin American countries--and cultural conservatism, said Francisco Donoso, director of a right-wing lobbying group known as the Future of Chile.

“I think it is good that there is a nation that has moral restrictions,” said Donoso. “If we want to preserve our society, we have to preserve our values. If this is backwardness, God bless our backwardness.”

Donoso is 31, a well-scrubbed lawyer who quotes Tocqueville and sees himself as a guardian of the family. In the tradition of the Moral Majority and like-minded U.S. organizations, the Future of Chile uses mass mailings, protest faxes and other weapons to attack television programs with suggestive content and government officials whom it considers left wing.

Donoso brings a combative glee to one crusade that has divided public opinion here: the struggle over “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Almost 10 years ago, the rest of the world argued over whether the movie, by director Martin Scorsese, was art or blasphemy, partly because it portrayed a Christ tormented by doubt. In Chile, “The Last Temptation” is still banned by a stern national film commission that includes representatives of the armed forces.

Recently the youth league of the Christian Democrats, the ruling centrist party, decided to defy that ban. The group held a free showing of the movie that drew a standing-room-only crowd--and criminal charges were filed promptly by the Future of Chile.

Donoso said he filed charges on showing a prohibited film and offending Catholics against the young Christian Democrats, who, he said, violated “the base of morality and faith of our nation.” Like most opponents of “The Last Temptation” around the world, Donoso has not seen the film, but he has read news accounts. “When you destroy that moral common ground, you kill the foundation of the democratic system and you end up with anarchy, civil war,” he declared.

On the other side of the battlefield, the young Christian Democrats do not look like wild-eyed heretics or scruffy cultural guerrillas. In fact, Jaime Binder, the thin-faced, 28-year-old secretary of the youth movement, resembles his nemesis Donoso: Binder is also an earnest and devoutly Catholic lawyer.

On a recent morning, Binder puffed a cigarette and fielded a phone call from a fellow youth leader who was worried that they might end up in jail. Binder assured him that they would probably get off with a fine. After hanging up the phone, he said he did not regret showing the film.

“We wanted a national public debate about censorship,” he said. “And we were moved by the conviction that the censorship laws in this country have to be modified. They are archaic.”

The dictatorship instilled a habit of “self-censorship” that persists today, according to Binder and others.

Commenting on Chilean cable operators who block international broadcasts that are shown elsewhere without incident, a U.S.-based executive of HBO Ole--the cable network’s Spanish-language channel--told the El Mercurio newspaper that Chile is the continent’s “most conservative nation” in the area of censorship. Among movies that have run into trouble here: “Rumble Fish,” a 1983 film about young toughs, and “The Omen, Part 2.”

The Catholic church has waded into the cultural fray. An outspoken bishop in the coastal city of Valparaiso bought up stacks of pornographic magazines, which he said he intended to burn in symbolic repudiation. And the church hierarchy has condemned a sex-education curriculum introduced by the government this year because it featured photos of condoms.

The church enjoys special influence on cultural matters because many clergymen took courageous stands in defense of human rights during the Pinochet regime.

“The church is highly rated in terms of credibility because it was very close to the people who suffered most during the dictatorship,” said Bishop Javier Prado, the secretary of the nation’s episcopal council.

The bespectacled bishop embodies the church’s varied attitudes. On one hand, Prado gently rebukes foreign financiers and journalists who call Chile an economic miracle; the emphasis on macroeconomics obscures lingering problems of poverty, he said.

Prado also called it “an honor” that Chile’s rejection of divorce has outlasted those of other resolutely Catholic nations such as Ireland and Spain.

In a society where the dictatorship polarized everything from soccer to literary tastes, there is little middle ground. Aylwin, the congresswoman leading the pro-divorce cause, is no radical. Her project seems timid to an outsider: The proposed law requires a couple to attempt reconciliation for a period of two to five years--an effort that would be monitored by a judge.

Nonetheless, Aylwin’s legislation has been stymied in the National Congress and incurred the wrath of rightist lawmakers and the church. Bishop Prado described the congresswoman unsmilingly as “very pro-divorce.”

Traditionalists warn that the woes of the family in the United States and Europe are an apocalyptic mirror of the future. They predict that Chile will suffer an epidemic of broken homes if divorce is permitted and urge new laws to fortify the family instead.

“In an explosion of divorce, children are those who suffer most,” Prado said. “If anyone were to take a poll among children, the majority would be against divorce.”

Proponents retort that banning divorce is hypocritical and equally damaging and that polls show that Chileans favor legalizing it.

In fact, Chileans have developed an elaborate legal fiction to annul marriages. If a couple have money and want to break up, they hire a lawyer, who finds cooperative witnesses and a sympathetic judge. Then they all participate in a ritualized lie based on a law that requires people to get married in their home jurisdiction. They claim the couple got married in the wrong district and that the marriage is invalid.

Judges grant about 12,000 annulments a year. The number of remarriages and cases of unmarried couples living together is high, Aylwin said. In response to fears that families will crumble, Aylwin cites a statistic indicating that the institution of marriage is weaker today than many would imagine: 40% of births in the nation last year occurred out of wedlock.

“It is incredible,” Aylwin said. “These obviously are not all children of single mothers.”

The congresswoman’s desk is stacked with letters from constituents describing the hardships of the world of shadow-divorce. Second families are obstructed from receiving inheritances, even if the first marriage was brief. Former families struggle to get fathers to support them. Discrimination against children is codified to the point that former spouses have to pay more money to feed “legitimate” children than those born out of wedlock.

“The broken family is completely unprotected,” Aylwin said. “And the new family that is formed is also on the margin of the law. What we are accepting is immoral, and causes social damage.”