Buying the Night Flight (17 page)

Chile: Reform and Despair

"If we always look outside for our blame, that is in itself a form of dependence, too. We must look for our own blame to find our own personality."
-- Eduardo Frei, President of Chile, 1964

Salvador Allende always reminded me a bit of a penguin. He was short and square and waddled slightly when he walked. He wore funny little hats that his vanity told him made him attractive to women, and his popping eyes sparkled with bemusement when he laughed. His "socialism" always seemed to me to be extraordinarily well buried under solid bourgeois egotism and the stolid bourgeois comfort in which he lived.

Frankly I never took him seriously until that fateful day in 1973 when he committed suicide in La Moneda, the battleship-gray presidential palace in sober Santiago, as the tanks and planes of his own country closed in on him and his disastrous Marxist experiment. Allende had a distinction: He was the first elected Marxist president in the world, and his regime should have or could have ushered in a new age of Marxist legitimacy. That was certainly what we were all watching for. Instead Allende's "experiment," in addition to killing the greatest democratic hope in the developing world, illustrated only the unrelentingly destructive and totalitarian nature of even this New World Marxism. This, I was to learn in my voyages through the revolutions of the world, was the way all attempts at the perfect society eventually end, destroying the possible good.

He shot himself with the machine gun given him by Fidel Castro, who had never liked him. And then even the effect of that dramatic act was mitigated a few days later when the military, which then ruthlessly took over, exhibited all the bizarre sex aids they found in the two grotesquely ostentatious mansions where Allende had lived with his mistress and his Cuban mercenary guards.

But why did he never appear this way to the world? Why should this man have become "the" symbol to the worldwide liberal democrats and free-floating radicals who took him as their clarion victim of American imperialism?

I had first met Allende the day of the fateful elections of 1964, which were to decide whether Chile would go Marxist or reformist Christian Democrat. Henry Raymond of
The New York Times
and I sat in Allende's office in the Senate interviewing him. In later years, when this world had changed so greatly and crumbled so tragically, I was to look back in my notes, which I always keep, to be sure what Allende had really said that day.

"Would a one-party state be good for Chile?" I asked him.

And he answered, thoughtfully but surely, "No ... no, not right away. It will take a while."

I saw him last, personally, several months before he became "the world's first elected Marxist president," in his attractive townhouse in Santiago. He had been ill, but he looked all right and was utterly convinced that he was going to win. Since the entire fight about Allende and his Marxists revolved around the question of whether they would in the end still observe democratic forms, again I posed what I considered to be "the" ideological question.

"If you are elected, will there be elections again?" I asked him.

He paused. "You must understand," he said, carefully but revealingly, "that by the next elections, everything will have changed."

In that same interview, as a comfortable fire crackled in the fireplace of his study, Allende told me many things. "The whole thing is distinct from '64," he said. "The last time, the Right voted for Frei. Today it is different. We have different groups with us. Large groups of priests have clearly delineated a Christian-Marxist point of view. A large group feels that if you respect our belief, there is no problem. In '64, all the church was for the Christian Democrats."

Then he went on to say, "We are going to win within the electoral system, but we'll build new institutions, make a new constitution. We are not going to live under the capitalist system." He smiled. "If we nationalize all this ... mess of American companies, if we control imports and exports and carry through a real agrarian reform, what other things can you do?"

In his speeches he had said that this is "not an electoral fight but the definitive battle," that there would be a "change of regime and of system." That was exactly what he meant; he was always an honest and forthright man.

But Salvador Allende, one of those fashionable Third World travelers in modish socialism who brought their peoples such unending and unfashionable misery, did not win the Chilean presidency that day in 1964. That day, Eduardo Frei, a tall, thin, dark man with a Catholic spiritual intensity that he applied to a love for democracy, was elected president. The country exploded in a massive outburst of relief and of obsessive joy. The importance of Chile was clear: In the age when everyone was seeking forms of development, Chile would show that rational democratic choosing and planning would win over Marxist totalitarian methods. Chile, a country with a long and revered constitutional heritage, was somehow chosen by history to show the way to a changing world -- we were convinced of it.

Personally I was jubilant over the Frei victory, although I was meticulous in writing fairly and comprehensively about Allende. It would be difficult -- impossible -- to forget the night of Frei's election. With my colleagues I roamed about the city that night, and it was as if a whole people had gone mad with joy. The relief -- to be delivered from Marxism -- erupted in the streets. Open cars spewing confetti ... floats with young people throwing streamers, music, impromptu speeches ... the haunting music that land had so long composed to its special beauty .... It was heady stuff. We didn't know then that it would all die with the same terrible intensity.

The next day Eduardo Frei gave a press conference for the Chilean press and for the hordes of foreign press. Never before or since have I witnessed the jaded, arrogant, egocentric, wonderful foreign correspondent corps spontaneously stand up and applaud a new president of anything! We were supposed to be tough and mean and immovable. That day our human side was clear.

At that press conference, and for the next five years, we heard words we would not hear again in the Third World. Asked about the American "domination" that the Allende Socialists and his coalition Communists always railed at, Frei said simply, "We ought to have a word in the world because we have our own personality. We ought to be independent not only economically but spiritually. If we always look outside for our blame, that is in itself a form of dependence. We must look for our own blame to find our own personality."

Here, in Chile in 1964, were displayed very simply
the
two options for Latin America: reform by totalitarian Left or rational reform by the democratic, Christian Left. And in the next happy years of Eduardo Frei's term I covered Chile regularly and came to know it intimately. I stayed always at the elegant, continental old Hotel Crillon, with its perfect satin bedspreads and its old windows that looked out on the gray Eastern Europe-style streets of Santiago. I made contacts on all sides, and then the Marxists were all too delighted to meet with American journalists. It was a refined conversation with them, and then they agreed on the rules of the game: then.

The one I knew best was Augusto Olivares, then a newspaperman. A big, hearty man with laughing eyes and an enormous handlebar mustache, Olivares looked much like a Hungarian character actor whom no one could forget. We would go to lunch in one of the simple Chilean restaurants, with their reckless bottles of Chilean wine and excellent food, and talk and talk and talk until lunch blended into dinner and we had dissected the world and it was time for bed. One night at his beautiful home in the lush, British-style suburbs, I helped carve the magnificent fish he and his wife had brought. Later we sang and sang to the guitar of a friend of his. Those were lovely days, days too good, days that always and every where should warn you that the winter is coming. Augusto became President Allende's top adviser. He never spoke to any of us "democrats" after that. He shot himself that last day at the palace, immediately after Allende.

But in those halcyon days of the sixties Chile gathered in every one: ideologues of all shapes and shades, journalists, pilgrims to the new Jerusalem, to the Fourth Rome, viewers of the modern ideological mind. I covered it on a regular and deliberately unimpassioned basis. I went back regularly, drawn to a future that was indeed working. I sought out people on all sides, in particular the thinkers, because that was what it was all about.

Because Chile was indeed something new in Third World development. It was democratic but it was revolutionary. It was changing, but without destroying people in the process, and it was rationally redistributing wealth while building wealth. It was a combination of devout Roman Catholic reformism, of communitarian enterprise (capital and labor co-representation in management), land reform, redistribution of income, and nationalization of mineral wealth. It was as totally and spontaneously an open society as I have ever seen, as Christian Democrats sat with Marxists of every stripe long into the night, discussing, arguing, dreaming, raging.

On the Catholic side one of the most fascinating characters was the brilliant, arrogant Jesuit Father Roger Vekemans. The Belgian-born son of a Marxist father, he had come from Europe and set up
DESAL
, which was the Christian Democrats' social arm aimed at promoting "intermediate organizations."

Vekemans was tall and imposing and so quick that his words and concepts had a kind of metallic brittleness. He strode about Santiago with his long cigarette holder and his bemused mien -- a kind of Douglas MacArthur of the Church -- and made a lot of enemies. But I greatly appreciated him.

"In classic Latin American society," he told me one day, explaining what the whole fight for the decent development of peoples was about, "you find the dichotomy between the state and the atomized dust, and nothing in between; nothing in between the state and the individual. The individual takes no real part in decisions, for he is living only in a formal democracy. We want our people to live in an authentic democracy where all the decisions are participated in by them. A country like Chile is changing from a hierarchical society to an open society, from a closed society which prefers passive responses to an open society which demands active ones."

On behalf of the Christian Democrats and their ideology, he was out to establish the pressure groups that provide the give-and-take of any democracy. Self-help was a holy concept, in sharp contrast to the power-from-above ideas of the Marxists. "Nothing should be donated," Vekemans used to say to me, "no charity at all. In our thinking, charity is worse than communism."

But Vekemans and his social ideas were not the only ones developing in the now churning caldron of the once-static and oligarchical Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. There was the new "Theology of Liberation" in the Church -- and I believe I was the first to write about it. Suddenly there were all these young priests talking about "liberation," not only in spiritual terms but in temporal terms. What this eventually came to mean, in a practice that came into its own in the eighties in Central America, was the guerrilla-priest -- priests who naively eschewed thinking about any differences between Marxism and Catholicism.

Of these priests unquestionably the most important then and certainly the one to become the most famous was the young Colombian, Father Camilo Torres. I interviewed him one Sunday at 7:00 a.m. just before he rushed to the airport. A medium-sized, well-built man, he had an ethereal smile and curly brown hair. "The perfect leader," I wrote at the time, "especially for Latin American women: handsome, sensuous and a priest."

Even then Camilo was rejecting the traditional idea that the Church should not involve itself in socioeconomic measures. As we sat in his little apartment in Bogota that Sunday, he told me, "I consider the work of a priest is to take a person to God, to work toward the love of one's brother. I consider there are circumstances that do not permit a man to offer himself to God. A priest must fight those circumstances, and for me they are political.... Decisions are now produced by the minorities and not the majorities. Because of this, the majority must produce pressure groups; it must take political power."

"Pressure groups": these were the same words that Vekemans used. But the intent of the two men and their view of the outcome were totally different. Camilo crossed over. He became a Marxist priest. He was defrocked. I wrote of him in my book
The New Latins:

He tried for a while to work with his mass movement idea. Then, impatient and driven by whatever devils or saints inhabited him (his friends insist there were quite enough of both), he joined the Marxist guerrillas. On February 15, 1966, the government announced that Father Camilo Torres had been killed in an encounter with Colombian troops.

I don't know consciously just why I pursued this type of Church- Marxist spirits-in-torment story so doggedly. But later -- much later -- this story was to erupt with fury: Jesuits in El Salvador smuggling arms to the Marxists; priests proclaiming the right to be "Christian Marxists"; my Maryknoll friend, Father Miguel D'Escoto, riding to power with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and becoming their first foreign minister; the beautiful, rational Cardinal Oscar Romero being shot to death as he offered mass in the chapel in San Salvador. But, in 1964 and in 1966, these men and these extraordinary events were still shadows in the wings.

***

Perhaps I was watching these developments with such singular fascination -- and perhaps I was feeling them so much more deeply than most of the men correspondents -- because I, too, was deeply involved in these questions of independence and dependence. A woman's whole life, inner and outer, is if anything a complex of trying to learn how to deal with the inherent contradictions and demands of dependence versus independence.