Chile's ghosts might finally be put to rest

This week, the Chilean judiciary ruled that former dictator Augusto Pinochet should be tried for kidnap and murder. It may help the country to deal with its horrific past, writes Martin Mullins.

The past year has seen historic breakthroughs in the attempt to address the human rights abuses of Chile's past. In May 2004, a Chilean court stripped former military dictator Augosto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. In December, he was placed under house arrest. And this week, the judiciary cleared the way for him to be tried on one charge of murder and nine of kidnap.

With immunity no longer an issue, it is now only Pinochet's failing health that stands in the way of a trial. He suffered a stroke last month, and his lawyers have requested he be moved to a hospital in case he suffers another stroke.

This ongoing legal process will decide the fate of the country's former ruler. But there are also wider issues at stake, and these relate to the legacy of the Pinochet regime, its place in history and the nature of Chilean identity.

During Pinochet's 16-year reign, over 3,000 people were killed and some 30,000 detained and tortured.

The extraordinary brutality of the regime is best understood in the context of a serious attempt to change the trajectory of Chilean history. The ideologues of the regime sought to legitimise their rule on the grounds that it was they that were the upholders of traditional national virtues, and that Allende's socialist government (which the military had overthrown in a violent coup on 11 September 11, 1973) had deviated from the nation's natural path.

They sought to clothe themselves in language of patriotism. The figure of Pinochet was compared favourably with the strong leaders of the past.

At the same time, the military and their civilian allies undertook a project to profoundly alter the workings of Chilean society.

The stakes were high, and nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of this Neo-liberal revolution. On leaving power in 1990, the military were anxious to preserve their legacy, and the civilian governments of that decade had to operate a constitution that retained many authoritarian characteristics.

Among the civilian rulers there was little appetite to confront the military. Although human rights abuses were documented in the Retig report of 1991, the political class were anxious to close that chapter of Chilean history. The priority of first civilian governments lay in institutional stability.

In 1993, an attempt to investigate fraudulent practices by members of Pinochet's family resulted in troops being sent out onto the street of the capital. This was proof, if any were needed, of the precarious state of Chilean democracy. The imperative of political stability resulted in the past being largely absent from public discourse.

The past came to be seen as a threat to the status quo. The players that occupied the political arena of the 1990s were highly disciplined, and saw stability as being the key to maintaining the county's positive economic performance.

This period is known as the transition. The length of this process is highly contested locally, and for many it is only in the last few months that this period is coming to a close.

The arrest of Pinochet in London during 1998 fell within this period of transition, and this explains the willingness of a Centre-Left government to defend Pinochet and to have him sent home from Britain.

One of the arguments put forward then was that any trial should take place in Chile. At the time, many doubted that such a trial would ever come to pass. However, now that prospect is ever closer.

The importance of these judgements lies in the impact of both the dictatorship and the limited democracy that followed. At the end of military rule, Chile was a country of enemies. The experience of military rule was very different depending on social class and location.

For some sectors of society, the repression was a tangible phenomenon that scared their neighbourhoods, took away their friends and shattered lives.

For the wealthy, living away from the sprawling slums, the experience was very different. The curfews represented a mere inconvenience and they had little direct contact with the security forces. Pinochet was a hero for a sizable percentage of the Chilean people and was particularly popular amongst the middle and upper classes.

Across Chilean society there was no shared experience of those 16 years, nor was there a shared concept of the meaning of those times. The reluctance of the post-Pinochet administrations to address the past compounded this problem.

For those of us Irish who lived in Chile in the early 1990s, the atmosphere was reminiscent of Northern Ireland. Social gatherings were marked by a reluctance to be identified with one side of the political divide or the other. Without prior knowledge of another's past, to discuss the violence of the 1970s and 1980s was foolhardy.

When the General did enter the conversation, he would only do so only in company of those who shared the same ideological position.

Again, like Ireland, one could tell a great deal from the cultural artefacts on display in homes. This served to indicate positions without them having to be verbalised. If Neruda's poetry was visible on the shelves, and the record collection was populated by indigenous music, then some criticism of the previous regime might be possible

In this rarefied atmosphere, the past started to disappear from social occasions. It was as if the country was haunted by the disappeared, their spectre hanging over the land, over homes the length of this country, intervening in conversations, generating uncomfortable silences.

The inability of Chileans to share social spaces is reflected in the country's soap operas, where the safe, tightly controlled domestic scene dominates.

The uncanny nature of this state was brilliantly captured in the photography of a friend, Hernan Azocar. His pictures are of cityscapes. They feature, in one small corner or in a reflection, say in a puddle, an historical monument or a building known to have figured in the coup of September 1973. The impact of this on the remainder of the image is telling. Santiago is a city haunted by the past.

Living in such an atmosphere has not been easy for the Chilean people. As a society, Chile has suffered the consequences of the terror and the silence that followed. Social trust levels in the country are extremely low, and local sociologists write of the ubiquity of fear in Chilean society.

A 2002 report by the United Nations highlights the absence of a shared notion as to what constitutes "Chileaness".

There has also been a wholesale decline in respect for political institutions. All this has had a corrosive effect on Chilean society. The attempt to preserve institutional stability was successful but a high price has been exacted from the general population.

In effect, during the 1990s, we saw the displacement of the terror associated with the recent past from the public to the private sphere. The private citizens were left to deal with the trauma of the Pinochet years as best they could.

Memory is a political position in Chile. The political spectrum in the country not only stretched from Left to Right, but also from the past into the future. Contrary to the historical pattern, now it is the Left that are associated with the past and the Right, who seek to keep the populace focused on the future. It is the Left who are now setting the agenda.

Earlier this year, there was the publication of a report on human rights abuses and an offer to compensate some 30,000 victims. There are hundreds of cases being processed through the courts relating to humans rights abuses committed during Pinochet's tenure in office.

Apologists for Pinochet label all this "the politics of revenge" and speak of Leftist conspiracies. Something more profound is afoot. The past is finding its way back into the present, and as it does so, it becomes less threatening. This now allows the country to debate those years of military rule and to perhaps come to terms with the terrible events of that time.

It may be that the country's cultural heritage will again be shared and cease to be ideologically coded. In time, being Chilean will include having lived through the years of Pinochet. By having the judiciary pass judgement on him, in effect criminalizing him, the citizens can wrestle back their history and dispel this notion of Pinochet as part of a series of Chilean patriots.

"Chileaness" will become accessible to the mass of Chilean people. The beatings, the torture, the rapes and the killings will become part of a shared history. The year 2004 has been a watershed in Chile. It is the year that the country started to address its past in order to give itself a future.p

Dr Martin Mullins is a Lecturer in Kemmy School of Business at the University of Limerick and researches on public policy in the Southern Cone of Latin America