In San Pedro, I learned that the name Pinochet could stop a conversation
The last time I was in Chile it was the anniversary of the accession to power of General Augusto Pinochet. I had been unaware of the holiday. My companions and I had walked down from the high Andean plateau of south-western Bolivia into the little desert town of San Pedro de Atacama in the extreme north of the country.
About 1,000 miles from Santiago, this is close to the great copper mine of Chuquicamata, source of so much of Chile’s wealth; not far from the sticky, seedy mining port of Antofagasta; not far from the Pacific. But San Pedro inhabits a different world. Its situation is high and, in winter, cool; the air is dry and clear; the sky is eggshell blue; and on the horizon stands a range of exhausted volcanoes which it is easy to imagine Disraeli had in mind when comparing such a sight with his political opponents. The stone and adobe settlement has one of the oldest churches in South America — small, simple and serene — and a timeless, unspoilt quality which draws discerning visitors both from abroad and from within Chile.
The day we walked in was almost a quartercentury after Pinochet’s coup and years after he had quit the presidency. He was already an old man, clinging to the title of Head of the Armed Forces, but being delicately edged from the political stage. Over the years he had acquired some measure of international respectability, but was almost a spent force.
Yet you could feel the tension in the air in San Pedro that night. Both among inhabitants and among Chilean holidaymakers, the unease was palpable. It was not fear: the General’s capacity to terrorise had passed. Nor was it active political anger or sympathy, or attachment to one or another cause: Chilean politics had moved on.
It was personal: it was about him, about his past, about the fact that he was still alive and living in Chile, about the way he still polarised opinion, still caused some to shudder, others to revere, still unsettled any room where his name was mentioned, still haunted Chile after all those years. In a bar in San Pedro I tried gingerly throwing his name into a discussion.
The response was polite yet weird — not unlike the response in Spain if one mentions General Franco and the civil war. In a sense the effect was to unite rather than divide the company, there being one truth acknowledged by admirers and detractors alike. All knew they could not agree among themselves; that the subject was painful; and that they would rather not raise it. Impassioned debate about his record did of course occur in Chile — fights could break out — but most people preferred to avoid argument, fearful about where it might lead. To this day the late General touches the same raw nerve among his countrymen. On that day I decided to drop the subject and enjoy San Pedro.
Except in one regard I am not comparing Margaret Thatcher (whom I admire) with Pinochet when I say that in a milder way her name retains the potency to stop a conversation in 21st-century Britain. We know what we think about her, we are not likely to change our minds, and we would rather not start an argument. The name and reputation of Winston Churchill as a domestic and empire politician was a similarly touchy subject for many years, and among a few still is, but the second world war has, with the passage of time, tended to close the argument. To this day in Catalonia Francisco Franco and the Spanish civil war are off limits as a topic of polite conversation, and when (as a town councillor there) my sister helped with publicity for a historian who had compiled a nonpartisan record of local memories of the era, she found it controversial whether such a book should even be published. I suppose that for a long time after our own civil war the name of Oliver Cromwell would have continued to chill conviviality; I sense that a ghost of that chill still lingers today.
And in every case, good and bad Cromwell, Franco, Pinochet, Thatcher — the edginess arises (I suggest) not only because ‘the judgment of history’ on their record has not been finally pronounced, but because we sense it never will be. Such leaders remain controversial not for lack of more scrutiny or further assessment. They can be researched and discussed till the cows come home, but this will not settle the case. They are inherently controversial, even if the facts can be agreed.
Though supporters’ and detractors’ camps would vehemently resist the suggestion, I believe the key to this inherent divisiveness this sudden alarm at the mention of a name — is their capacity to divide not citizen from citizen, but each citizen within himself. Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are individually torn. The political leader, famous or infamous, has become a cipher for conflicts unresolved within our own breasts. England may briefly have divided itself into Roundheads and Cavaliers and staged pitched battles between them, but each of us is both a Roundhead and a Cavalier, and the internal battle continues. The keenest debates start within, not between, us.
Study of the life of General Franco suggests a smaller, duller and more secondrate man than either friend or foe would wish to think. I suspect this is true of Pinochet too: disappointingly mediocre. Margaret Thatcher’s strength is undeniable but her judgment was patchy and I doubt the depth or even consistency of her philo-sophy. Such leaders’ stature is partly totemic: totemic of a clash of ideas and interests capable of pulling any one of us both ways. It is this internal tension that generates the static with which their names crackle. Once dead, simple monsters — Idi Amin, for instance — do not. But long after the Baroness Thatcher has gone we shall agonise about her because almost none of us would really want to undo what she did, yet few of us would claim never to have shuddered at the brutality. ‘Give me the daggers,’ she said, and did what we half knew had to be done. We never quite forgive those who do our dirty work for us.
Few modern Chileans seriously wish Salvador Allende had been allowed to build a socialist state in their country; few modern Spaniards wish their country had become an atheistic satellite of the Soviet Union; few in either country are confident that such destinies could have been averted by more civilised means; yet few (whatever they may protest) are untroubled by the means chosen.
Divide your countrymen one from another and they may fight for a while. But lead the battle in a war within each breast and you will trouble them even from the grave. Augusto Pinochet, who died this week, will not rest in peace.
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