Allende Revival Stokes Animosity in Chile

President Salvador Allende did not leave this world quietly. With army tanks surrounding his offices in the downtown La Moneda palace, and jets overhead poised to drop bombs on him, he went on the radio for one last defiant speech.

“I will not resign,” he said. “I will offer my life to repay the loyalty of the Chilean people.” Then he donned a helmet, grabbed a machine gun -- and eventually shot himself.

In the three decades that have followed the military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the name of the democratically elected leftist president has been all but erased from the nation’s history. But now, on the 30th anniversary of the right-wing takeover, Chile’s current president, Ricardo Lagos, is bringing Allende back to the forefront of this country’s political life.

Allende is being honored this week in two acts of official remembrance that, though simple and muted, have shaken Chile’s establishment. A meeting room in the presidential palace was renamed after him Wednesday. And Lagos today will become the first president since the leftist leader’s death to enter La Moneda palace through the door by which Allende’s body was carried out on Sept. 11, 1973.

The potent symbolism has provoked anger not only from the right-wing parties and military officers who backed the Pinochet dictatorship, but also from the centrist allies in Lagos’ ruling center-left coalition, who have declined to attend the official ceremonies marking the coup’s anniversary.

“It doesn’t seem right to us that the former adversaries of the Allende government should be asked to attend an act in honor of a government we thought was a bad one,” said Patricio Aylwin, a former president, reflecting a common sentiment in the Christian Democratic Party.

Elected president in 1970, Allende ruled during a heady time in which he and his supporters imagined themselves leading their country down a “Chilean road to socialism.” He nationalized industries and earned the enmity of the Nixon administration, which worked covertly to undermine his government.

About 3,200 people died in the coup and in the 17 years of right-wing authoritarian rule that followed, according to the official “truth commission” report issued in 1991 under the government of Aylwin, the democratically elected president to whom Pinochet handed power in 1990.

Despite the reservations of Alywin and others, the image of Allende and his leftist Popular Unity government has undergone a remarkable rehabilitation here. No longer is he seen as the bumbling Marxist ideologue that the Chilean media once made him out to be. Instead, he is increasingly viewed as a courageous statesman and a victim of U.S. meddling in Chilean affairs.

Pinochet, meanwhile, is a largely discredited man who has escaped trial for gross human rights violations only because a judge said he suffers from “dementia.”

The horrors of the 1973 coup are being detailed on nightly documentaries, such as a recent one that offered viewers images long considered taboo here: workers recovering bodies of executed prisoners from the Santiago trash dumps and the Mapocho River.

Most tellingly, the report used the Spanish word for coup, golpe, rather than the long accepted euphemism -- “the military process.”

“There has been a 180-degree turn,” said Sen. Jorge Patricio Arancibia, a member of the rightist Independent Democratic Union.

During the 1973 coup, Arancibia was a naval officer overseeing the detention of workers at a coastal factory. He said no one was tortured or killed there, and he remains proud of the military’s overthrow of Allende.

Until 1998, he pointed out, Sept. 11 was a national holiday here, celebrated as the day of Chile’s liberation from “Marxist terror.” Then the holiday was canceled and replaced with a memorial Mass. Now Allende will be honored on that day.

“The government is making a mistake putting Allende’s name forward on Sept. 11,” Arancibia said. “Far from being a statesman, he was one of the worst presidents Chile has ever had. He ruined the country.”

Arancibia and other rightists see political motives in the celebration, a distraction from economic woes and scandals that have eaten away at the popularity of the ruling alliance, the Coalition of Parties for Democracy.

All three presidents elected since Pinochet stepped down -- Aylwin, Eduardo Frei and Lagos -- have been members of the coalition, which united two parties that were bitter foes during the Allende period, the Christian Democrats and Allende’s Socialist Party.

After taking office in 2000, Lagos enjoyed wide popularity until several congressmen from his coalition were implicated in a bribery scandal this year. Then a government fund was plundered by the worst case of financial fraud in Chilean history.

Sensing the government’s weakness on the issue, the right-wing Independent Democratic Union in May put forward its a plan to prosecute human rights abuses from the Allende era.

Four months later, the Lagos government announced that it would expand and accelerate the prosecution of the military men and security agents guilty of the worst excesses during the dictatorship. And, for the first time, lower-ranking officers would be given immunity to testify against their superiors.

“There is no perfect justice on this Earth,” said Jose Zalaquett, Lagos’ top human rights advisor. “But we will achieve a significant measure of justice if we ensure that the worst cases do not go unpunished.”

The effort is slowly gaining traction in what has become a regionwide effort to accelerate the prosecution of past human rights abuses, with Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Peru all taking steps to revisit a recent history of political violence, torture and killings.

In Chile, a handful of former “repressors” have been convicted in the last two years and are serving prison sentences. Before then, officers had been tried in only one prominent case, the 1976 assassination in Washington of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s exiled defense minister.

Gen. Manuel Contreras, head of Pinochet’s secret police, who was found guilty in 1993 by a Chilean court of ordering Letelier’s assassination, was arrested again this year on new charges.

“And his boss, Pinochet,” said Zalaquett, “has avoided prison only because biology and time took their course. In the moment he was held to answer [for his crimes], he was mentally impaired.”

One of the most important legacies of the Pinochet era was a law that granted amnesty to any military man who committed a crime in the line of duty between 1973 and 1978.

In recent years, however, a growing number of former officials have been prosecuted thanks to a loophole: Cases involving victims who remain “disappeared” are being treated by many judges as if they were ongoing kidnapping cases, and thus as crimes that continued to occur after the amnesty period.

Several prominent officers have been convicted, dozens of ex-soldiers and security agents are in custody, and about 200 other military men are facing charges, while hundreds more cases remain dormant.

Ongoing judicial proceedings, carried out in private, are shedding new light on the horrors of that Sept. 11 of three decades ago, according to lawyer Nelson Caucoto, who represents family members seeking prosecution in dozens of cases. Court proceedings have revealed that the arrested personnel from La Moneda were taken to a military base, where they were killed with hand grenades, he said.

The Lagos government’s new proposal would increase the number of special judges to prosecute human rights cases and also increase the benefits paid to former political prisoners and the relatives of the disappeared.

And yet, many here feel the government’s plan is a surrender to Chile’s still-powerful right.

“Each time we see these repressors free on the streets, it is an insult to the memory of our loved ones,” said Lorena Pizarro, 37, whose parents disappeared during the dictatorship.

Pizarro is president of the Union of Families of Disappeared Prisoners. She was 7 years old the day Allende fell. Both of her parents, high-ranking militants in the Communist Party, went into hiding. Eventually, the entire family lived in safe houses under new identities, forcing the children to address their parents by different names. Then her parents were captured at a party meeting, and she never saw them again.

At the Pinochet Foundation, established to celebrate the general’s 80th birthday in 1995, Sergio Jarpa believes that most Chileans do not want to dwell on the horrors of the past.

Yes, some excesses were committed during the “military process,” and the people responsible should be prosecuted, said Jarpa, a former minister in Pinochet’s government. But he believes history will look kindly upon the dictator’s reign.

Despite the recent malaise, Chile’s economy remains one of the strongest in South America and Pinochet’s application of strict fiscal discipline after the “excesses” and hyperinflation of the Allende government deserves the credit, Jarpa said.

Sen. Arancibia also believes history will be kind to Pinochet.

“Look at how many people were killed in Argentina [as many as 30,000], and their problems were not even half as bad as ours,” he said. “Or look at Peru, where they are now saying [more than 69,000] people were killed. And let’s not even mention places like Africa.

“When you look at it from that point of view,” Arancibia continued, “what we had in Chile was practically a surgical operation.”

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Tobar was recently on assignment in Santiago.