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| The Chile Information Project |
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Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile by Brian Kluepfel Mary Helen Spooner's Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile, originally published in 1994, has been reprinted in paperback by the University of California Press. The new edition gave the author the opportunity to include recent events Chile such as Pinochet's 1998 arrest in England. It then combs through the past three decades of Chilean history to see how its once-mighty dictator could be so humbled. Spooner seems well-qualified to paint such a picture, as she spent nine years as a journalist in Chile during the Pinochet era, arriving in Santiago in 1980 with a grant from the Inter American Press Association. And she has done a good job: broad historical events are brought into focus by as-told-to accounts of particular incidents and sharpened further in some cases by the author's own recollections. The book has copious footnotes (20 pages worth, wisely moved to the back of the text), a bibliography and a good index. While some obvious journalistic homework went into the tome, Spooner never lets us forget that the collective story of the dictatorship was formed by hundreds, even thousands of mini-dramas, tragedies and even semi-comedies. She allows Chileans, from ex-soldiers to students to cab drivers, to tell the tale. The portrayal of Pinochet himself is fascinating, detailing his rise from below-average student to competent officer, to unwilling coup participant, to Supreme Commander. Guided by a mistrust of outsiders and a fear of communism and disorder, Spooner shows Pinochet to have been a man who, once realizing that he ran the largest of the junta's armed services (the Army), slowly maximized his hold on the country by political appointments, legislation and finally, sheer terror. The general's willingness to get rid of any rival, perceived or otherwise, is remarkable. Jose Toha, President Salvador Allende's Interior Minister (and a person who, with his wife Moy, often hosted the Pinochets for tea) is shipped off to the Dawson Island penal camp, where he dies as Pinochet ignores Moy Tohaís pleas for intervention. But military allies are quick to depart, too: original coup plotters Sergio Arellano Stark (the infamous "butcher of the north") and Gustavo Leigh are jettisoned as the madness of Pinochet's secret service (the DINA) becomes apparent. In fact, the book begins with a quote from a retired Chilean Air Force general (like many in the book, he refused to give his name) saying, "We did not make the coup in order to establish a one-man dictatorship. We couldn't have imagined, 15 years ago, what would eventually come about in Chile." Familiar names crop up in the narrative: Stark's terrible deeds in the coup's first days are reviewed (the sense of betrayal within the military by a fellow officer is shown in the interview with Colonel Eugenio Rivera of the Calama unit, who is outraged by Stark and his underling Sergio Arredondo's murderous actions); recent presidential rivals Joaquin Lavin and (now President) Ricardo Lagos are shown in earlier incarnations as defenders and critics, respectively, of the regime (Lagos' home was stoned by a pro-regime mob after he criticized the country's economy, and he was also briefly held prisoner). The grim acts of DINA chief Manuel Contreras and the untouchable air with which he carried them out is illustrated in his early morning limousine rides and breakfasts with Pinochet. The two had a permanent two-way television hookup between their offices. The indifference and unawareness of the regime, personified by Pinochet, to the outside world is obvious in a number of instances. Pinochet is embarrassed by having to abandon a visit to the Philippines when fellow dictator Ferdinand Marcos (likely under U.S. pressure) denies him entry. The regime is surprised that DINA's car-bomb murder of exile leader and former Chilean ambassador to Washington Orlando Letelier and his American associate Roni Moffett draw any attention. Contreras' explanation to the FBI agent who interviews him about the assassination is almost comic in its transparency. Pinochet's screaming matches with ambassadors, reporters and his own staff show a man out of his element in the world of politics, a fault that proves his undoing. Spooner claims a good example of this is the general's dismantling of a professional diplomatic corps in favor of military flunkies, unskilled in the niceties of foreign relations. It is the regime's lack of political aplomb, finally, that allows the No campaign to vote Pinochet from office in 1989 and force an election the next year (won by coalition leader Patricio Aylwin). Amazingly, Pinochet lost the 1989 plebiscite as the only candidate. Spooner shows that in the end Pinochet's political epitaph. Is written by political indifference combined with economic disorder (ironically similar to what caused Allende's demise). Once hailed as free-market geniuses, the general's "Chicago Boys" (a group of Chilean economists educated at the University of Chicago in the mid-'70s) are shown to have built a house of cards founded on a huge foreign debt. The collapse of their system, abetted by cronyism as well as both external (foreign bank) and internal pressure proved too much for the regime. Even Pinochet's trusted gimmick of shuffling ministers doesn't work -- three finance ministers in four months can't halt the backslide. Miguel Kast, considered the brightest of the bunch, dies of a heart attack a year after the peso is devaluated. Economic excesses were sometimes explainable, but the blunders in trying to explain political repression shows a contempt for the truth that borders on the comic. A soldier who takes the fall in the death of labor leader Tucapel Jiménez is found after committing "suicide," yet an autopsy revealed that his wrists were cut before he was hanged (the first act naturally precluding his ability to perform the second). Two students, Carmen Quintana and Rodrigo Rojas, are burned, dumped and left for dead by a group of soldiers (Rojas dies in the hospital, Quintana survived after months of skin grafts and international support). The regime claims the two youths kicked over a can of gasoline and accidentally set themselves on fire, despite eyewitnesses to the contrary. Hundreds of executions are explained away as "prisoners shot while attempting to escape." The Orwellian ability of totalitarian regimes to rewrite the dictionary is shown in their rewriting of the newspapers: the coup or golpe de estado is referred to as "the military pronouncement"and torture is redefined in the country's top newspaper, El Mercurio, as "illegimate pressures." In the end, the long shadow of the U.S. over Chile is unavoidable, and the same country that was shown to help destabilize the Allende government does few favors for Pinochet, initiating a complete military embargo that other nations are quick to follow (Sen. Edward Kennedy is portrayed as a thorn in the general's side, and his visit to the country is memorable). Some support is shown from the strongly anticommunist Reagan administration, including visits by regime boosters UN ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick and ultra-conservative Sen. Jesse Helms. But the United States cannot support the regime's continuing human rights abuses, and bans Chilean grapes in a highly questionable case of cyanide contamination in 1989. Spooner theorizes that this action was the US's way of showing it still held the upper hand and that if Pinochet didn't go quietly, it could cripple his nation economically. Pinochet's frustration with North American moralizing is shown in an unbelievable showdown with then-ambassador George Landau in 1978 (an official of the Carter administration, no friends of the general). Landau recalls Pinochet, the continent's bulwark against communism, saying to him, "Chile can go to China. We are not married to the United States. I could even turn to the Soviet Union." Spooner's use of other quotes to invoke the mood of each chapter is effective. Often the words are Pinochet's, moving from statements like "I know our idiosyncrasies, which do not permit someone to perpetuate himself in power" (1974), to "Not a leaf moves in this country if I am not moving it. I want that to be clear!" (1981) Finally, the general compares himself to Christ being rejected for Barrabas when he loses the 1989 plebiscite. Overall, Spooner has done a thorough job in presenting a snapshot of Chile's 360-degree turn, from a turbulent democracy to military dictatorship and back again. The one thing lacking is perhaps a more complete picture of the country under Allende's presidency. What the book shows, more than anything, is how a peculiar set of circumstances, including Cold War thinking, allowed Pinochet to perpetuate his regime. And how a country that began by losing its faith in a socialist government wound up losing faith in its most revered and trusted institution, the military. Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile |
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