ANOTHER VOICE

Why I would have supported Pinochet, but still think there's something wrong with his country

MATTHEW PARRIS

he Plaza de Armas, Santiago's main square, is as pleasant a place to while away an afternoon as you can find in this strangely soulless city. A military band is playing in the bandstand, families are eat- ing ice-cream, the palms barely tremble in the cool of a still, early spring afternoon and Santiago's besetting smog has thinned a little — sufficient to afford a blurred, yel- lowed view of a colossal Andean ridge smothered in new snow, hanging high above us in the sky.

The view is an increasingly rare sight here. In many visits I have never seen the city's mountain backdrop from the city; but there is a reason for the diminished pollu- tion today, Sunday 14 September. The weekend is the end of a national holiday which began on Thursday 11 September. Chileans know what the date means: the 24th anniversary of the violent overthrow and destruction of the Socialist Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet, in 1973. Seventeen years later the General stepped back after losing a plebiscite on his presidency, but he remains head of the somewhat autonomous armed forces. He says he will retire next year, at 82.

I did not know the significance of the day when, with friends, I walked down into Chile from a Bolivian volcano on Thursday. We had managed the gruelling ascent of Jequises, an 8,000ft heap of sterile red rocks, with difficulty. From the top I looked back over a hundred miles of savagely beautiful peaks and lakes, to Bolivians, just the bottom left-hand corner of their huge country, empty of all but flamingos and wild llamas, hot springs, salt flats and fields of boiling mud. There are minerals here but the region is virtually cut off from Bolivia's inadequate infrastructure and more easily reached from Chile. If I were Bolivia's foreign minister I would propose swapping this region, which Chile could use, for a bit of Pacific coastline, whose loss in 1884 Bolivians still feel like a dagger to the heart. Beanstalk-shaped Chile has lots of coast but a shortage of hinterland. A bit of Bolivia would fatten her up nicely at the top. A bit of Pacific coast would make a hero of any Bolivian politician.

Such were my thoughts atop this volcano as I turned my gaze away from my beloved Bolivia to the west whither we were head- ed: Chile. I could just see the corrugated tin and oasis greenery of San Pedro de Atacama, 40 miles away.

We walked there. It was a hell of a trudge but downhill all the way. Hitting our first metalled road in a fortnight — a soli- tary Chilean painting a solitary white line on it — felt like rejoining Western civilisa- tion, but to your urban Chilean in Santiago, San Pedro de Atacama, nearly 1,000 miles north and surrounded by nothingness, is the sticks. From our campsite there we sur- veyed Bolivia in the eastern sky: the very South American landscape to which Dis- raeli compared the front bench opposite him: 'a range of exhausted volcanoes'.

From our campsite, I said. We had no choice, the hotels being full. This was 11 September, even in the Atacama. That night — under a sky so starry you would not call it darkness pinpricked by light, but rather silver, masked a little by a thin black gauze — I lay on the ground listening to the drums of a police band playing patriotic marching songs.

Then silence. Then another sound, the jeering whistles of counter-marchers who found nothing to celebrate. Even in this frontier garrison, even after nearly a quar- ter of a century, some people were angry. 'Is the celebration by all Chileans?', I enquired of a respectable elderly couple breakfasting next morning, in a café-shack, on steak and a bottle of red wine. The man said nothing, but tilted his hand both ways in silent dubiety.

And so it is here in the Plaza de Armas, in Santiago, in the nation's heartland: dubi- ety. Something is slightly wrong with Chile, something tugs at her sleeve, troubles her heart.

It is not that most people now revere Allende's memory. Most probably support the legacy of his destroyer, Pinochet. I would have supported Pinochet. I would have gritted my teeth at the reports of tor- tures and disappearances, doubted whether repression on that scale was necessary or right, but reminded myself that Allende's hopes would have wrecked more lives in Chile than Pinochet's ever did. What a fate — with the world soon to turn its back on Marxism — for this most mature of South American democracies to have lurched towards the dying empires of the Eastern Bloc! Pinochet saved Chile from all that. His economic legacy, and the administra- tive originality of his democratic successors, is now the study of staider market economists in search of ideas. Frank Field visits.

So why should this apparently painless transition from dictatorship to democracy hang strangely heavy on the nation's soul? In the question I think you have the answer. The transition ought not to have been painless. Blood has been shed and blood should be shed to atone for it. The gods have been offended. What everyone has sought as a salvation — painless transi- tion — is the problem. Augusto Pinochet was in some ways a great man and in many ways a necessary man but he hurt or killed a great many people, including many good, brave, well-intentioned people, some almost noble. Can there be, in the most full-hearted sense, a peaceful transition from that?

I don't know about you, amigo, but in my middle years a sort of atavism grips my political imagination. I am no longer sure I believe in peaceful transition, if the gods are to be assuaged. We thought we had that in John Major, but Margaret Thatcher — a necessary woman — had shed much blood and somebody had to pay. When her own blood was shed not by those she had harmed but by her friends, the gods were doubly offended. Mr Major was the neces- sary sacrifice, and perhaps his party too, but what she did stays because it was need- ed; and what Pinochet did must stay, in modern Chile.

In Kangaroo, D.H. Lawrence remarks, of Australia, that the continent's soul is unformed, unsettled, because no one has really fought for the land: the earth is thirsty for the blood that should have been offered in the taking of it. What Lawrence found on landing in Perth seemed to me essentially unchanged some 70 years later: a civilisation scattered along the coast 'like packing cases fallen off a pantechnicon', the continent's dark interior unassuaged. No blood, you see.

But I must quit the Plaza de Armas. The army band has stopped playing and is marching around in uniform, but nobody quite has the heart to applaud. I must away to the airport and London, where I expect this will look rather odd, in print.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.