Buying the Night Flight (19 page)

Since it was still partially light, we drove out in his truck to "Useless Bay," a new moon of lonely sand. By now the sunset was exploding over the darkening water, and a luminous yellow light glowed behind the clouds. By the time we got to the Hotel Tierra del Fuego, a little low place in simple but comfortable style, it was after 10:00 p.m. A small band of men, all very Yugoslav-looking (not surprising, since they were Yugoslavs) were sitting in the bar, talking politics. We had a drink, a mixture of Chilean Pisco and vermouth, before retiring into the dining room, a little room warmed by a glowing stove.

And now Walter Rauff, the silent recluse of The End of the World, began to talk slowly, hesitantly, about his past. This has happened to me before. Something about a woman interviewer puts men at ease. They sit there and sooner or later everything pours out. Men forget that they are with a journalist and respond as they do to women who have always and throughout all time been the listeners and the comforters. At times I have felt guilty about this "advantage." But after clearly telling men that I am a journalist, I do not feel it is my duty to maintain eternal vigilance and keep warning them.

"There is no brief way to explain it all," he said as we drank a white Chilean wine. "Nobody can explain simply what happened in Germany. You have to understand what Germany went through in the twenties and thirties. It was a proud country, humiliated. No people can stand that. There were terrible things done, later on -- I don't say there weren't terrible things. I'm not one who says he didn't know..." (He seemed, I thought here, almost strangely proud of not taking the "easy" way out on "knowing.") "I knew. But I was a soldier -- right or wrong, my country. A soldier obeys. That's what he is."

I pressed him, because I still did not, then, know all the details of his case. "Of what exactly are you accused?"

"They say that I was in charge of technical things," he said, his voice sinking lower. "What did I know of technical things? I was the organizer. Organization -- that was my strength."

Later I was to learn that he had started as a respectable career naval officer. He was already a commander when Hitler came to power and then joined the S.S. when Hitler began eliminating the Jews and other "undesirables." Rauff was in charge of the office that dispatched the trucks to the concentration camps; he personally approved of the "efficient" new method by which 100,000 people were gassed
in
the trucks en route. Organization: that was his talent.

Later, after he had fled to Chile, he was in jail briefly during an extradition trial that failed. "In the jail, I was so calm, so peaceful," he was saying, "as I have never been before. Once, one of the jailers came to me and asked, 'Now, tell us how it really was.' "As the corpulent hotelkeeper's wife served us lamb from Tierra del Fuego, I asked him, "If you could go back, would you do the same thing over again?"

"Yes," he said slowly, "I would have to say I would do the same thing again. There was nothing else to do."

But now he was beginning to look drawn and depressed. Outside a ferocious cold had set in and we said good night.

When I met him for breakfast, he looked a different man. His face was agonized, his eyes bloodshot. "I didn't sleep," he explained. "I don't know why." He tried to smile. "Old things ..."

He drove me to the little runway. "I know you will write something," he said, "but please don't say anything too bad about me."

And so I returned and left Walter Rauff alone at the end of the world. I still remember him, standing by the bleak gray shore, saying, "This is Porvenir, where there is no future."

***

The Chilean experiment in democratic change died. Eduardo Frei was unquestionably the most popular man ever to be president of Chile, but he could not succeed himself. And so, by a series of electoral quirks, Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970 -- the first Marxist ever to be elected president of any country in the history of the world.

Now the legendary free air of Chile hung with new fears. Now the two sides no longer sat and drank and laughed and loved together, for one side no longer respected the rules of the game. Whereas before I had always been on the friendliest of terms with Allende, now he refused to see most American journalists. The minute he became president, he was a different man; now he was in public the true Marxist he had always been inside himself. Worse, it was the same with Augusto Olivares.

I remember how my heart fell when over and over again I called Augusta's office at the national TV, which he now headed. I was unwilling to believe what in my heart I knew--under their new regime we were now the enemies. The tolerant, loving, rational, arguing, decent old Chile was dead.

Yet the defenders and apologists for Allende and his regime will say smugly even today that Allende was only another democratic president; that he had no intention of changing the system; that he was unfairly overthrown by American involvement and imperialism. Why did some of us refuse to believe this?

For one thing there was the question of who was supporting and abetting a far leftist activist group called the MIR
(Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario).
This was a group of fanatic leftist guerrillas and activists in the South, particularly around the coal-mining city of Concepcion, which was always a poor, leftist city. In sharp and total contradiction to everything that President Allende, dapper as always and now living in not one but two of the great mansions of the old rich in Santiago, was saying about obeying Chilean law, the MIR in the South was ruthlessly taking over small farms, terrorizing people, and driving out the small middle class and small farmer class that was the backbone of Chile. Apologists for Allende do not know or perhaps do not care that the big
fundos
were actually taken over by the government under Frei. Meanwhile Allende was angrily denying over and over in Santiago that he was a dangerous Marxist. He claimed to be simply a revolutionary reformer. Of the MIR, he said to all critics, "I can't control the MIR."

I decided to go to Concepción and look around; I had a feeling the answer to what Allende really was -- and to what Allende really intended to do -- might well be found there. An old friend, a professor in the university of leftist persuasion, gave me a letter to the leaders of the Socialist party in Concepcion and soon I was knocking on the door of one of those scabrous, shabby old buildings in the southern city. I asked to see Rafael Merino, head of the party, and to my surprise they did not even look at my letter. Within minutes I was ushered into the presence of Merino and five other leading party members. I found myself sitting in a prim circle, almost like a ladies' sewing bee.

I decided to wade right in. "Are the Socialists leading the
tomas
[the land takeovers]?" I asked forthrightly. There was a moment of silence, then all broke into laughter. "It would appear that they are," said Merino, smiling broadly. A husky, well-spoken man who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Concepción, Merino explained that "the position of the Left and the Socialist Party is to push land expropriations even faster."

After that astonishing acknowledgment that they -- Allende's own party -- were indeed behind the provocations, I traveled all over the province. And it became even clearer that Allende's Socialists were indeed behind everything. I talked my way into the jail in Ñuble in the province harboring thirty-eight thousand farms and stretching from Santiago to the southern lake country, and there I talked to a young leader of the MIR. An engaging young man with a ready smile and intense eyes, "Ugarte" carried the Socialist line one step further. "We have to exterminate the
patrones,
" he said, referring to the bosses of the big estates. "Soon the fight is not going to be only for land. Now we are preparing for war. Civil war. The type in Spain or Indonesia." Then he brought one fist down on a knee. "God, how I hate," he said, his voice nearly breaking. "It's a terrible hate, but I hate the
patrones."

So it really was true. The Socialists were behind the MIR, behind the takeovers of the mini-estates. They were not only fighting for greater social justice within the system but for total revolution in which whole classes would be exterminated.

Already at this time the little farmers of the province had fled their farms and were staying in hotels, hiding out. Some would hesitantly meet me in a small park, looking over their shoulders at every word they said. When I drove out to the
tomas
or the little farms of ten and twelve acres that had been taken over in total contravention of all laws and Allende's statements, there were lines of hostile-looking men standing in front of the farms. They stared at me from behind hooded eyes, pointing always to the one man who talked for all: the Socialist organizer. This was a "spontaneous" revolution?

The sense of inner paralysis that so many Chileans felt in those days was perhaps expressed best by the youthful, open editor of the big Concepcion newspaper,
El Sur,
Ivan Cienfuegos. "Why does no one act?" he said to me. "Because we're not accustomed to such things [the violence] here. We can't believe they're happening."

I came back to Santiago with, for the first time, a real understanding of what was going on. And I could see, too, everywhere I went in the South, from Chilian to Ñuble to Concepcion itself, that the army was waiting.... They were not going to interfere so long as Chile still hung on the brink of being a democracy.

But it was clear to me -- it would have been clear to anyone -- that the army and the forces of traditional democracy were not going to wait forever and let the Marxist forces establish a leftist dictatorship. As awful and as reprehensible as was the rightist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which was to come, anyone who could not see that Allende's policies were leading directly to that certainly knew nothing of political dynamics.

Ironically, those who did know this were the Communist Party leaders. The Communist Party, which was the traditional Moscow- line party and far more sober than Allende's Castroite Socialist Party, wanted a long period of transition rule. They had a theory of history and they applied it, but they also saw that Chile, with its impressive history of democratic traditions, would not bear the kind of shock it was getting from Allende's
MIR
tactics.

In the winter of 1972, for instance, I stopped by the gray, formal Chilean Senate building to see Senator Volodie Teitelboim, who was "the" ideologue and thinker of the Communist Party, and I was astonished at what he told me. Teitelboim, who was a Communist but a realistic one, told me that Chile was such a traditional parliamentary democracy -- and so deeply so -- that it would have to continue as such for many years before becoming "socialist." It would need to continue to get aid from the United States. But Allende and the
MIR
were pushing things so much too fast that tragedy was approaching. If they continued things like the land takeovers in the South, which were enraging so many people, there would be a military coup that would destroy everything they were trying to do.

When would that coup be? Teitelboim, a little gnomelike man with heavy glasses, looked at me for a moment. "About eighteen months from now," he answered.

Later I looked back at my notes and found my breath catching. That was exactly when Allende was overthrown and committed suicide. And Teitelboim was one of the few to escape the new rightist tyranny -- he was in Paris, showing again that realistic analysis knowledge is not only power but, often, survival!

Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military in September of 1973. As the Chilean bombers closed in on the palace, Allende shot himself and Augusto killed himself just afterward. When certain liberal commentators put forth the theory that Allende was some "innocent" overthrown by American imperialism and that his regime was neither Marxist nor flawed, I knew too much to take them seriously.

Journalists know what it is to mourn a country, and I mourned Chile as I have few others. Lebanon, Cambodia, Iran, El Salvador, all taught me firsthand and painfully that societies can die, that they can disintegrate, that they can fade. But Chile confronted me with the cruelest pairing of dream and nightmare--first with the extravagant hope that the terrible problems of a poor country could be solved in our lifetimes, then with the cruelest devastation of those hopes.

Che in Bolivia: They Made Him the Stranger

"A new concept of guerrilla warfare has seen the light ... the cities are graveyards for revolutionary individuals and resources .... Any individual, though he be a comrade, who has lived his life in the city is a bourgeois without realizing it in comparison to the guerrilla fighter .... All modern American experience confirms this disharmony and disagreement between the mountain and the plains forces, giving it the force of law."
-- Régis Debray in
Revolution Within the Revolution?

As luck would have it, I found myself in Russia for that vast, closed land's brief opening to the world -- the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its revolution -- when something of transcendental importance occurred across the globe in the world of revolution in which I had become so deeply involved.

The legendary Che Guevara was dead, killed in Bolivia after one of the more bizarre "adventures" (it could, in fairness, be called nothing other than that) of modern times. That is the way things happen. If I were to gain any solace from history, it would be from Vincent Sheean's classic of journalism,
Personal History.
Sheean, in China for its great revolutionary upheaval, had waited and planned for months to travel with the great Russian ideologue, Michael Borodin, back to Russia when he was expelled by Chiang Kai-shek's forces. When the time came, Sheean was out in the countryside, and Borodin made his way dramatically across China, Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia and Siberia and Russia ... alone! I was impressed in his book with how unembittered Sheean was. I did not have the same gracious feelings about missing Che's denouement. Besides, all my friends were there for it.