Author Envisions New Chapter for Chile After Pinochet Episode

Inspiration came to Marco Antonio de la Parra, a Chilean playwright and psychiatrist, in March, when the idea of former dictator Augusto Pinochet behind bars was beyond the imagination even of Latin America’s literary masters.

It was the day of pomp and riots when Pinochet retired, exchanging his general’s sword for the sash of a senator-for-life. As De la Parra watched the televised ceremony--his emotions reflected by protesters raging against the Senate’s acceptance of an ex-tyrant who once bombarded the presidential palace--the phone rang. Bad news: A fellow writer had just committed suicide.

“Death on the phone, death on television,” De la Parra said to himself.

Although the suicide was unrelated to Pinochet, De la Parra found the juxtaposition overwhelming. He dashed off a long letter to Pinochet--a combined monologue and accusatory epistle pouring out his feelings about Pinochet’s grip on a society that the writer sees as frightened, haunted and troubled by its dictatorial past and democratic present.

The work became a caustic and poetic book titled “Open Letter to Pinochet: A Monologue of the Chilean Middle Class With Its Father.”

It sold well and attracted attention abroad. And in October, De la Parra’s contribution to the literature about dictators acquired a new relevance and irony when British police arrested Pinochet on behalf of Spanish authorities seeking his extradition for killings and torture committed during his 17-year rule. Pinochet is awaiting a new hearing on his claim of diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

Epic Qualities of a Real-Life Drama

Pinochet’s real-life drama has epic qualities: bloodied history, philosophical dilemmas, political fury, courtroom theatrics and a narrative sprawling across three nations. Latin America has once again blurred the border between history and fiction: It has a rich tradition of literature that tells outsize, fantastic stories nonetheless rooted in the exploits of tyrants.

Pinochet, the last of a generation of Latin American strongmen, has not commented on De la Parra’s book. But another writer, left-wing sociologist Sergio Marras, expanded the monologue into a pseudo-dialogue with a book in a Pinochetian voice that imagines the 83-year-old leader’s response. His book is “Apocryphal Letter From Pinochet to a Chilean Psychiatrist.”

Not to be outdone, De la Parra performed his work as a monologue in November in Madrid. An empty chair represented Pinochet. A French publishing house plans to bring out a translation.

And De la Parra has now written a second, shorter letter about the incredible twist in the life of his protagonist: Pinochet finds himself uncharacteristically powerless, off stage and, like the audience, in suspense.

“I think it was guilt that pushed you to go to Europe,” De la Parra says in the second letter. “Guilt and perhaps the victim’s vanity of your heroic self-image. You knew the fate of Napoleon, of Julius Caesar. . . . Now you have let us recover our memory and filled us with hope. At last we have a real future. A future with a past, the only kind that is worthwhile.”

In the new work, De la Parra also examines Chile’s dysfunctional relationship with a man who is patriarch to some and villain to others. As a psychiatrist, he finds it ironic that British police held Pinochet in an exclusive psychiatric clinic, because he believes that Pinochet is sane but “Chile should be hospitalized . . . to cure itself of so many lies, of so many wounded truths.”

Pinochet Seen as a Dark Father Figure

The first letter describes Pinochet, an avid reader about Roman emperors and Napoleon, as a ruler with a flair for political choreography and for “power as the exercise of silence.” He has “the slyness of a country fox,” the book says. He is a dark father figure who “makes everyone infantile,” turning the nation into a “giant nursery school.”

“You remind me of Don Corleone,” De la Parra writes. “What did Italian gangsters tell defenseless shopkeepers? They offered protection. Today it’s called internal security. The market needs security. It’s true. It needs the strength of law. Of words. But you destroyed them. . . . You have your Catholic facade, your ethical double standard. Remember the montage in ‘The Godfather,’ the religious ceremony intercut with murders?”

Chile’s free-market bustle is another facade, according to the author, for a world where words are subverted, memories anesthetized, prosperity built on the bones of the military regime’s victims. “We entered your prosperous shopping malls and we felt like apologists for torture.”

The author does not spare himself: “Many pleasant things happened to me during your time. But they are stained. By my cowardice, by my passive complicity.”

This kind of printed defiance is still a rarity in a democracy marked by censorship and convoluted, cautious discourse.

In 1996, for example, Pinochet filed charges against the leader of the Communist Party when she called him a murderer. A squad of police arrested her, though she was quickly released. De la Parra says the Chilean media are dominated by rightists and would not have published “Open Letter.”

Indeed, the influential and conservative newspaper El Mercurio was not impressed. Its review chided the author for “pompous solemnity” and said he “drowns himself in rhetoric as coarse as an advertising jingle.”

British Put Aside Pinochet Decision

Meanwhile, Pinochet has new hope for a happy ending. Just when it appeared that he would spend years in London fighting extradition to Spain, a House of Lords judicial panel took the extraordinary step of setting aside a previous decision. It said that a judge who participated in an earlier ruling should have revealed his ties to Amnesty International, which supports the prosecution of Pinochet for his regime’s atrocities, and it set a new hearing on the immunity issue for Jan. 18.

Many observers believe that the legally and politically conservative British judges will rule in Pinochet’s favor, allowing him to return home. But De la Parra believes that the episode has been cathartic because it has forced Chileans to confront the ugly hatreds that still divide them.

“The last masks have fallen,” he said.

And whatever happens, Pinochet’s power has been permanently diminished, according to De la Parra: “The heroic aura that surrounded him has been extinguished.”

Rather than writing to the former dictator again, De la Parra believes that it would make more sense for him to write a letter to his fellow Chileans about the future.

“This has had a parricidal effect,” he said. “It’s like we are alone at the table now--the father isn’t here anymore. And we have to talk about what to do about the family.”