WAITING FOR PINOCHET
Philip Delves Broughton discovers that
even the General's enemies are prepared to forgive him
Santiago THEY are looking for bodies again in Pis- agua this weekend. This squalid fishing port on the edge of the Atacama desert was a prison camp under Chile's military government, and many of those 'disap- peared' by the army were killed here. Scores of bodies have been dug out of the local cemetery in the past ten years and returned to their families. But Juan Guz- man, the judge looking into 55 cases of kidnapping, torture and murder brought against General Pinochet in Chile, has been tipped off that there may be more.
To get to Pisagua, you drive through a Mad Max- wasteland of grey-brown desert, through abandoned nitrate mining towns and past burnt-out cars abandoned below billboards warning against dangerous driv- ing. Finally, you descend from the desert plain, skidding down hairpin bends to the Pacific. With the ocean on one side, the sheer coastal range and desert on the other, and not another village for miles, it makes a natural prison.
The old army buildings are still there, mostly falling down now and covered with lovers' graffiti. The prison has been turned into a hotel, where the rooms retain the names of the original occupants. You can stay in the guard room or the warden's room, which still has barred windows, Beside the cracked 'H' of the old helicopter landing pad, from which bodies of oppo- nents of the military regime would be flown out to be dumped in the Pacific, families now pitch their tents for beach holidays.
For Guzman, a devout Catholic and George Bernard Shaw fan, a few new corpses in Pisagua would help his expected attempt to have General Pinochet's immu- nity lifted. His work has been made easier by the General's absence. But now, like almost everyone else in Chile, Guzman is eager for him to come home.
Waiting for Pinochet has been an extraordinary, mostly salutary experience for Chile. Since the hysteria immediately after his arrest, the venom has been drawn both from his supporters and his oppo- nents. In the presidential election this month Pinochet's name was barely men- tioned. Neither the conservative nor socialist candidates saw any advantage in identifying themselves by their relation to an ever-fading ghost in Virginia Water, Surrey. For Chileans under 30, who were not old enough to vote in the 1988 plebiscite which removed Pinochet from office, the General is a spooky and now largely insignificant figure from the past, a Latin American Ted Heath.
The barriers are still up outside the home of the British ambassador, Glynne Evans, but her two Airedales no longer feast on eggs hurled into the compound by angry supporters of the General. The funky Ms Evans, who wore leather trousers to greet Oasis when they visited Santiago, never abandoned her official residence, even when faced with death threats. Now her guests can once more sit in the garden uninterrupted and drink their pisco sours.
In her office at a psychiatric hospital in a poor part of Santiago, Maria-Louisa Corder°, a passionate opponent of Pinochet who has treated many of those who were tortured or who lost relatives under the military government, sits down and hitches up her dress before talking. She resembles one of those stout-legged peas- ant heroines of the Spanish Civil War. 'In Chile,' she says, 'we're always with the underdog. Pinochet has become a victim in the UK and it almost erases his past. Many people, including myself, think Pinochet has already paid his dues with exile, the humili- ation of being under arrest, and now his sickness. The greatest kind of forgiveness is to forgive one's enemy and the worst pun- 'Alas, poor Sir Humphrey . . . ' ishment for Pinochet is that he won't have any lucidity to do that when he dies.'
Even General Pinochet's youngest daughter, Jacqueline, named after Jackie Kennedy, has managed to find a silver lin- ing in her father's arrest. The pin-up of the Pinochet family, she said this week, 'My father's detention has exacted a terrible price emotionally for our family, but now I know that had he not been detained, public opinion around the world would have con- tinued to imagine him as the soldier in the dark glasses from those early photos. The fact of his having been a prisoner, vulnera- ble, old and weak, has made people see him as human.'
Juan-Pablo Letelier, whose father Orlan- do was killed in 1977 in Washington, DC, by a car bomb planted by the Chilean secret police, is another prominent Pinochet hater who wants him back. Unlike his brother, who abandoned Chile and the burden of the Letelier name to become a third-tier Hollywood action star, Juan-Pablo became a congressman in Santiago, banging the anti-Pinochet drum. 'I want to have him back, to see him undergo medical tests here, and we'll decide if he is mad or not. I mean, I'd say he was mad when he was in power. How could he get any madder? Maybe he's actually more sane now.'
For the General's opponents, his absence has forced a satisfying acceleration towards a full acknowledgment of human-rights abuses during the military government. Since last August the army has been nego- tiating with the government a possible admission that regardless of what credit it might claim for saving Chile, some things should not have been done. It may not be the wholesale apology that some want, but it is an improvement on the past when, pre- sented with the evidence of the tortures and murders, the army and the General's diehards would simply repeat their mantra: `To make an omelette, you have to break eggs.'
The past 15 months have nonetheless been a chore for the new generation of armed-forces chiefs. Pinochet's arrest forced them back into politics at a time when they were hoping to depoliticise themselves. Their awkwardness was on show last week at a Mass held in Santiago's military cathedral for General Pinochet. The small gaggle of soldiers in the front rows was overwhelmed by 300 eye-dabbing Santiago housewives. Even the reddest-blooded Pinochetistas have tired of turning out to show support for the General, and it is clearly a slight to the mili- tary's pride that only they and the house- wives are left doing so.
The great X-factor in the wait for Pinochet is the chance that he might die either before coming home or soon after- wards, outfoxing those who want to see him forced to apologise or face tfial. 'But you forget that the old man wants one final victo- ry over the Left,' says an ex-minister under Pinochet. 'He is determined to see Fidel Castro's coffin lowered into the ground first.'
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