One of Latin America’s most enduring figures, a stiff old general hailed as Chile’s economic savior and reviled for atrocities under his long dictatorship, will resign as chief of the country’s army at the end of January.
“Whether we like him or not this guy is certainly one of the most important figures of the 20th Century in Chile,” Eduardo Gamarra, head of the Latin American-Caribbean Center at Florida International University, said of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. “What his regime did in 17 years was restructure an economy by brute force at a very high social cost. But he left a legacy.”
Pinochet, who took power in a 1973 coup and turned over power to a civilian government in 1990, will not disappear entirely from the political stage, however. Under the constitution his government wrote, he is automatically entitled to a lifelong Senate seat, which he plans to assume immediately.
Such military entitlements, which are common in Chile’s constitution, are perhaps the best evidence that this nation’s long transition back to democracy remains incomplete, analysts say.
“Pinochet’s stepping down is a good sign. It suggests Chile is taking one more step toward a democratic system,” said Peter Hakim, president of Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. “But the fact he’s staying means democracy is less than complete.”
Chile is in many respects one of Latin America’s shining success stories. It has had more than a decade of record economic growth, based largely on free-market reforms it undertook a generation before its neighbors. Poverty, one of the region’s most obdurate problems, has begun to decline.
What is less often mentioned is the price Chileans paid for that progress: from unemployment rates that once topped 30 percent to a long war on leftist political enemies that left at least 2,000 dead or vanished from 1973 to 1978.
“Pinochet’s legacy is important, but it needs to be properly recorded as very mixed,” said Gamarra, who had friends who were arrested and killed by Pinochet’s government. “The economic side is very positive, but I hope we never see that kind of repression again.”
Chile’s mixed feelings about the 82-year-old general have come clear in recent days. Last week, the nation’s lower house of Congress, led by a group of government-allied deputies, passed a non-binding resolution demanding Pinochet not be allowed a Senate seat on grounds he had unconstitutionally taken office in the first place.
The presence in the Senate of a man who flouted democracy “will not help reconciliation among Chileans” and will “imply a grave deterioration of the image of our country abroad,” the congressmen said.
The vote came just over a week after Pinochet publicly accused human rights activists in Chile of defending only “people with terrorist ideas,” Chilean newspapers reported. The general called charges of human rights violations under his regime “a very clever fabrication by Marxists.”
Chile’s government, led by President Eduardo Frei, quickly rebuked Pinochet, saying the constitution forbids military officers from making political statements.
The Chilean army, enraged, backed its leader, warning the government to watch its step.
Such confrontations, analysts say, suggest Chile’s powerful military is still far from fully subordinate to civilian power, one of the hallmarks of a strong democracy.
“That’s the unresolved problem in Chile, how a civilian government deals with a powerful military that in essence has not relinquished its prerogatives,” Gamarra said.
“Pinochet, a decade after stepping down as president, is still the most powerful man in Chile. And we’re talking about power emanating from the barrel of a gun,” he said. “That’s where power still resides in Chile.”
Chile’s military remains by far the most powerful in Latin America for the nation’s size. Under the constitution, it gets a 10 percent cut of income from the country’s huge government copper mines, money that Congress has traditionally had little ability to control.
It is currently in the process of trying to buy a fleet of F-16 fighter jets from the United States, an effort that worries neighbors like Argentina, which has slashed military spending and has no money to match the purchase.
“This is a country with no real territorial conflicts with its neighbors, but the civilian government has not been in a position to question these kind of purchases,” said Diego Garcia-Sayan, head of the Andean Commission of Jurists.
Just how the military’s power might change after Pinochet’s retirement from the army remains unclear.
Pinochet’s successor as army chief is 54-year-old Gen. Ricardo Izurieta, who served from 1993 to 1996 as Chile’s military attache in the U.S. Izurieta is “from another generation” and represents a strong break from Pinochet’s old guard, Garcia-Sayan said.
“He’s the best man they could have picked,” said Monica Gonzales, an editor at Chile’s respected Cosas magazine. “He has no political past or link with repression.”
On Wednesday, Pinochet’s opponents in Congress’ lower house intend to hold a special hearing to raise charges that the general violated Chile’s constitution with his bloody 1973 coup–a hearing similar to one Pinochet held in August 1973 in an effort to justify ousting Salvador Allende, the nation’s leftist president.
The purpose of this week’s hearing, Gonzales said, is not so much to block Pinochet’s entry into the Senate as to remind Chileans of his crimes against democracy as well as the economic achievements that have kept him a hero in the eyes of many.
“The dictatorship is over,” she said. “What’s important is how the history of the period is written.”
