Pinochet at 82: Fascist or Father Figure?

In “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel about a seemingly immortal Latin American dictator, the fictional tyrant shelters deposed military rulers from other countries in a house by the sea. The gnarled general visits his disgraced cronies to “look at himself in the instructive mirror of their misery.”

As the autumn of Chile’s real-life patriarch slips into winter, Gen. Augusto Pinochet sees a former dictator in the mirror who has been neither deposed nor disgraced. Pinochet’s 82nd birthday this week marked a landmark moment in Chile’s political evolution.

Tuesday was Pinochet’s last birthday as army commander in chief. He retained that post in 1990 after ending 17 years as dictator to make way for an elected president.

In March, the man whom the Chilean press calls “the world’s oldest soldier”--and whom his many critics at home and abroad call an unrepentant and brutal tyrant--will retire to become senator-for-life, a job he created for himself.

“May God continue granting me strength to contribute from this honorable assembly to the development and well-being of all Chileans,” Pinochet told the crowd at a lavish birthday banquet.

Chileans’ reaction to the milestone reflected the divisive legacy of a stern figure who looms over the landscape as he gradually surrenders power. The competing images tend toward extremes: grandfatherly visionary or menacing thug.

When Pinochet entered the banquet hall accompanied by a platoon of security men Tuesday night, the portly general wore his white hair slicked back and a white dress uniform with a red sash and saucer-sized gold medal, Chile’s top military honor. His blue eyes blinking, his head jutting forward, he moved slowly and heavily like a sleepy bear.

Despite his pacemaker, hearing aid and chronic knee problems, Pinochet looked healthy and jovial. He raised two hands to acknowledge cheers. He murmured greetings in a hoarse, reedy voice to well-wishers who struggled past the bodyguards to hug him and shake hands.

The birthday gala exemplified the militaristic cult of personality that portrays Pinochet as a statesman who averted chaos with his 1973 coup and built Chile into Latin America’s economic powerhouse.

There were accolades via closed-circuit television from 36 celebrations across the nation organized by the nonprofit Pinochet Foundation, which is devoted to promoting his image and that of the armed forces.

A reverential Hernan Guiloff, the foundation’s vice president, recounted an anecdote from a night before the coup when he said Pinochet’s wife, Lucia, showed her husband their sleeping grandchildren and urged him to “save Chile from imminent Communist tyranny.”

“Now you can tell her: ‘Dearest Lucy, I have fulfilled my duty to you, to my army, to Chile, and most important I have the desire to continue fulfilling my duty to my Fatherland,’ ” Guiloff said.

In contrast, on Tuesday morning, student protesters offered Pinochet a scornful “gift”: a one-way ticket to Spain, where the justice system is investigating him in the slayings of Spanish citizens in Chile. Critics call the general the last of the uniformed dinosaurs, a fascistic ruler who used murder, torture and repression with impunity and now refuses to fade away.

The Pinochet camp’s obstruction of pending democratic reforms threatens to leave the nation “economically developed but politically underdeveloped,” said Sen. Sergio Bitar of the ruling center-left coalition, a former political prisoner. “This has become an obsession with power. At any price.”

Power and Personality

Pinochet’s power combines symbolism and substance.

His force of personality and control of the military have blocked efforts to punish abuses by his regime and preserved a hard-core political right. And his influence still permeates the government because his 1980 constitution established “authoritarian enclaves” of appointees, giving the military and the right disproportionate power in the Senate, judicial system and National Security Council.

Unlike Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, who died on the throne after 40 years, unlike Argentina’s brutal junta, which self-destructed, Pinochet has survived to fight in the battle to write his role in history.

“[Our enemies] have not hesitated to attack and dishonor the soldiers of Chile,” he declared Tuesday night. “The same soldiers who are ready to give their lives for them at dangerous moments for the Fatherland! They should know that we are perfectly aware of who acts with these destructive intentions and what it is they really want.”

A figure of mythic dimensions whom many compare to Franco, Pinochet regards silence as a supreme virtue. He distrusts intellectuals and politicians. He comes across as wary, shrewd, aloof and pragmatic, according to most accounts. He is fastidious about his health, avoiding wine and rich food, and he is superstitious.

“I have a lucky star,” he once told former Gen. Ernesto Videla, now a conservative political analyst.

In 1986, after surviving an assassination attempt by guerrillas firing bazookas on a mountain road, Pinochet said the bullet holes in the windshield of his Mercedes formed the image of the Virgin Mary he wears on a chain around his neck.

In “Ego Sum,” a 1996 book of unusually frank interviews, Pinochet shifts from desk-thumping denials that his soldiers practiced torture (“these horrible things are from the Inquisition, not from today”) to folksy charm as he helps the female interviewers into their coats (“because someone who does not have a friend to help them with their coat has neither a friend nor a coat”).

When he speaks out, Pinochet lobs grenades.

He once ridiculed today’s German military as “longhairs” and “homosexuals.” He remarked that secret mass graves of victims of repression were a good way to save public funds. And he refuses to apologize for state-sponsored violence that claimed at least 3,000 lives and forced thousands into exile.

Two chiefs of his secret police were convicted here in 1993 in the 1976 car-bomb slaying in Washington of Orlando Letelier, an exile leader. But an amnesty covers most human rights crimes, and Pinochet resists attempted prosecutions.

On Tuesday, he bellowed: “What affects one member of the army affects all members of the army!”

Certain lines cannot be crossed in this society: A legislator who recently accused Pinochet of corruption was forced to apologize. It is hard to find a biography of Pinochet. The wounds are too fresh; the patriarch is still alive.

“There is still a sense of being haunted,” said Michael Shifter, a professor at Georgetown University. “One still has to be troubled by a political framework that has a lot of anti-democratic features.”

Enduring Control

Although democracy returned in 1990 after voters rejected a referendum on Pinochet’s bid to remain in power, two civilian governments have failed to dismantle his structural power bases--such as the 10 non-elected Senate seats where Pinochet will join fellow retired generals and other allies. Admirers hail the future senator as the guardian of conservative values in a nation that bans divorce and prizes conformity.

“If it were not for Gen. Pinochet, Chile would be like Cuba or Russia,” said Hernan Briones, president of the Pinochet Foundation. “He has the right and the duty to continue serving the nation.”

The $150-a-plate banquet ended a day of celebration that began with a morning birthday ritual outside the general’s home: A band played his favorite song, “Lili Marlene,” which became popular in World War II after it was broadcast by a Nazi propaganda station.

The banquet crowd of 1,400 included military commanders, ex-Cabinet ministers, executives and Col. Jaime Lepe, a former chief of Pinochet’s security detail who looked uneasy in the glare of camera flashes. In a case that seems a harbinger of the post-Pinochet era, President Eduardo Frei this month vetoed Lepe’s promotion to general because he was implicated in the 1976 murder of a Spanish diplomat.

Pinochet remains a pariah abroad. During a rare trip in 1980, then-Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos abruptly rescinded an invitation, forcing Pinochet’s plane to turn around in midair. This week, pressure from human rights groups reportedly scotched plans for a trip to Israel.

At home, opponents recoil from the displays of adulation that have accompanied his countrywide farewell tour.

“It is a circus,” said Pedro Alejandro Matta, a former political prisoner who suffered weeks of torture and spent years in exile in California. “It is a carefully planned campaign to clean up his image so he passes into history as the modernizer of Chile. . . . The Pinochet right is anchored in the past. Pinochet is still fighting the windmills of communism.”

But Pinochet has defenders among working Chileans, who refer to him as “My General.”

“They miss him,” Videla said. “He is not a man of the high-class neighborhoods. There are a lot of working people, taxi drivers, small-business owners, who are very concerned with order. . . . They miss the sense of order.”

Pinochet got 43% of the vote in a 1988 referendum in which voters rejected a proposal that he stay in power.

Videla admits that his popularity has declined since then, but predicts that it will be revived.

Born in the port city of Valparaiso, Pinochet joined the army 64 years ago and rose through the ranks, gaining fame for his marksmanship.

In 1973, the general led the coup only weeks after embattled President Salvador Allende made the fatal error of naming him army commander.

Many Chileans welcomed the overthrow of the freely elected Allende, whose downfall interrupted a stellar democratic tradition. Political conflict and a campaign of disruption by the CIA--the U.S. opposed Allende’s Socialist administration--had generated a chaos of strikes and violence. The right paints a heroic picture of the coup, which triumphed when planes bombed the presidential palace and Allende committed suicide.

“This was virtually a civil war,” said Jaime Bulnes, who organized the birthday event. “There was a huge propaganda campaign by international socialism to distort the reality of what happened here. It was a war, and people fell on both sides.”

Adversaries scoff at Pinochet’s claim that 15,000 Cuban-led foreign guerrillas had infiltrated Chile.

“Like the Nazis, dictatorships have to invent an enemy,” Bitar said. “Everybody knows that is a lie. There were a few pseudo-armed groups of [Allende’s] Popular Unity coalition who had enough weaponry to resist for five minutes.”

Even scholars partial to Pinochet would be hard-pressed to document the supposed invasion by thousands of foreigners, according to Shifter.

Economic progress sustained one of the continent’s most powerful militaries.

A team of University of Chicago-trained economists turned this nation of 15 million into a thriving free-market laboratory.

Chile’s 7% growth rate now makes it an economic force that is next in line to join the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“If it were not for the economic reforms, he would have gone down in history as a classic dictator,” said Enrique Correa, a top advisor to former President Patricio Aylwin, the first elected leader after Pinochet relinquished the presidency.

Despite several near-rebellions by the armed forces, Aylwin developed a respectful relationship with Pinochet and recently praised him for the peaceful transition.

Pinochet’s retirement will have mainly a “psychological effect” on civilian-military relations, Defense Ministry spokesman Rodrigo Atria said.

“The weight of the figure of Gen. Pinochet is steadily less,” he said. “And that’s natural.”

‘Without Tanks’

Pinochet’s new base will be his foundation’s house in the elegant Vitacura neighborhood. His garden-level office has been outfitted with bulletproof glass and mementos of the presidential palace.

Senatorial duties will bring him back to Valparaiso, where he will take the Senate floor “in civilian clothes and without tanks behind him,” as Bitar put it.

Legislators Juan Pablo Letelier, son of the slain exiled leader, and Isabel Allende, daughter of the late president, have promised him an unpleasant parliamentary baptism.

Two conflicting images of Pinochet will persist because there are two conflicting Chiles.

The more recent image will be the patriarch who hugged his wife, blew out the candles Tuesday and gloried in a feast of nostalgia and adulation, the father of five whose eyes teared over as Guiloff described an encounter in rugged mining country years ago when Pinochet shook hands with a small boy.

“The boy’s eyes locked on the clear and clean gaze of the soldier,” Guiloff said. “The scene symbolized everything that you represent.”

The other image dates back to a prophetic episode a year before the 1973 coup when Pinochet was in charge of the Santiago region.

One night during labor disturbances in October 1972, Pinochet summoned reporters to his headquarters, according to veteran journalist Eduardo Gallardo. Wearing combat fatigues, sunglasses and a holstered pistol, the general delivered a brief statement in a cordial tone. He urged journalists to spread a message of calm to prevent intervention by the military.

Pinochet saluted, turned on his heel and left after concluding with these words: “Because unfortunately, if the army has to take to the streets, it may be obligated to do what it has been trained to do: kill.”

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Pinochet Era

1973--President Salvador Allende names Gen. Augusto Pinochet army commander. Nineteen days later, Pinochet leads a coup that overthrows Allende, installing a junta that gives way to his one-man rule.

1980--Government establishes a constitution that remains today and gives conservatives and military disproportionate power.

1988--In a landmark referendum, voters reject Pinochet’s proposal that he remain president-for-life, paving the way for the return of democracy.

1989--Patricio Aylwin of Christian Democrat Party wins presidency.

1990--Pinochet steps down as president but remains army chief.

1997--Pinochet announces his intent to retire.