Travels in a Thin Country (14 page)

By the middle of 1973 the Allende regime was tottering, though the various factions of the opposition also had their difficulties. A June coup orchestrated by the right-wing
Patria y Libertad
and officers of the Second Armoured Regiment was cancelled when plans were leaked, but three combat groups, including tanks, went ahead and converged on the centre of the city. The US ambassador at the time, Nathaniel Davis, reported that the vehicles all stopped obediently at red traffic lights and that at least one tank called into a regular garage to fill up with petrol.

Many of Popular Unity’s policies – those to reform land ownership, for example – were developments of policies pursued by the previous regime. But they were often radical developments nonetheless, and some of them attempted the impossible. In addition, a collapse in world copper prices handicapped Allende’s already massively challenging undertaking. More has been written about the three years of his government than about any other period in Chilean history, and the reasons for its failure are still bitterly disputed. There is little disagreement that it did fail. Hyperinflation and escalating economic, political and social chaos had paralyzed the country by 1973, although the government still won an increased majority of 43.4 per cent in the March 1973 elections at an extremely difficult moment in the socialist experiment. (In the British general election in 1992 41.85 per cent of the electorate voted for, and returned, a Conservative government.) Some of the ideas spewed out by the Popular Unity cabinet were too theoretical to stand any chance of being
converted into successful practice. The ultra-leftists weakened the socialist movement. The coalition itself was fragmented, yet it faced a press virtually united in opposition, much of it funded by foreign dollars. Allende ignored constant warnings from within his party that he should slow down the pace of his reforms to prevent a right-wing backlash. Agrarian reform incensed the élite. US manipulation of class conflict was highly successful. By September 1973 Washington didn’t have to worry about directly funding a coup: it had destabilized the country so effectively that it could leave the mechanics to the Chileans.

When Jimmy Carter was elected in 1977, four years after the junta entered the Moneda, he tried to make the United States confront its shame over Chile. He had said, in a campaign debate in October of the previous year, that the Nixon–Ford administration ‘had destroyed elected governments like Chile’. Unpalatable truths were dished up in the US over the years to discredit the network of people involved, provoking fraught public debate and interminable press coverage.

Allende had tried to redistribute Chilean wealth and ownership to benefit the poor; he had aimed at the creation of a more equitable society, and for this there were many who never abandoned him. His government represented hope for the economically disenfranchised and the exploited, and for that reason those likely to see a reduction in their own slice of the cake hated what he stood for. But he never gave up his hope for the people. On the day he died he said in Churchillian tones over the last radio station loyal to him which had not been disabled, ‘I say to you that I am assured that the seed we have planted in the dignified consciousness of thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot forever be kept down.’ His voice, he said, would soon be silenced (the Hawker Hunters had already taken off); ‘You shall continue to hear it. I shall always be with you.’

It was an ironic detail that in his last public utterance the world’s first democratically elected Marxist President used the same words as Christ did when he left the eleven disciples for the last time on a mountain in Galilee.

Germán, who was able to sort out so many of my logistical problems with a telephone call to a cousin or an old schoolfriend that I had taken to thinking of him as Mr Fixit, also arranged a personal wine tour for me. I had merely asked him to recommend two or three wineries offering public visits – but if Germán did anything, he did it in style. He had fixed up my tour like most people book a dentist’s appointment, apparently by dint of being related to most of the vineyard owners. The forty or so ‘old’ Chilean families were like that; it made the country seem very small.

I spent a week being shown round baked vineyards and mildewed cellars, dispatched first to the Maipo valley on the outskirts of Santiago, an area which has become synonymous with fine Chilean wine. There I visited Cousiño Macul, a family-owned company with the best vineyards in the country and a hundred and twenty-acre private park to boot. Like many Chilean wineries, the business was founded with capital amassed from minerals, in this case silver and coal. Arturo Cousiño, export director of the company and the son of the current owner, came to the reception area to greet me, impeccably turned out in a tweed jacket and polished brogues like a model for a
Country Life
shoot. He was in his thirties, one of a generation of wine producers to have increased the quantity of Chilean wine drunk abroad almost fifteenfold in a decade, pushing the country to third place among exporters to the massive North American market, led only by France and Italy. The wine critic of the
New York Times
recently described Chile as ‘probably the most exciting wine region in the world right now,’ and the walls of Arturo’s office were hung with
framed certificates printed with medals and rosettes and inscribed in various foreign languages.

‘The only reason the industry is taken seriously inside Chile is because of our export success,’ he said as we strolled out among muddy rows of vines. ‘Domestic consumption is not only relatively indiscriminating, but it has also dropped off dramatically over the past two or three decades from about sixty litres [eighty regular-size bottles] per capita per annum to about twenty-eight [thirty-seven bottles].’

I thought, That’s nothing.

‘Beer has become more popular, and sugary fizzy drinks have appeared from abroad. Besides, the standard of education is far higher than it used to be, and that’s created a heightened social consciousness. In other words, a number of factors have contributed to vastly reduced wine consumption. I might add that between 1938 and 1974 certain laws virtually prohibited the planting of vineyards – that was the government’s way of controlling alcoholism!’

Every vintner I spoke to complained about the absence of a wine culture in the country. ‘No one in Chile knows anything about wine,’ one said. ‘They think it can’t cost more than a thousand pesos [less than £1.50] a bottle.’

Later I found that I couldn’t buy the fine wines I tasted on my tour in the supermarkets. It was all being sent abroad.

Traditionally, they were great wine drinkers, consuming prodigious quantities made from the
país
grapes brought over by the
conquistadores
. Much of the wine drunk is still produced from these grapes, cultivated largely on unirrigated land; quality wines, including almost all exports, are made from pre-phylloxera grapes shipped from Europe in the nineteenth century.

Arturo told a story which showed that the authorities and the winemakers take the industry seriously, even if the punters don’t. When a freak frost struck the Maipo valley in
October 1991, the army offered their helicopters for hire, and they duly took off over the vineyards, creating a wind to thaw the frost. It was one of Pinochet’s more heartwarming acts (he was still commander-in-chief of the army).

The thin branches were already bending under the weight of a heavy crop.

‘Yes,’ said Arturo, when I remarked on it. ‘And although our average yield here is extremely low for Chile, it’s still far higher than a Bordeaux yield. If we can make wine like we do with our abundant crops, just imagine what we could produce with a low yield like they get over there!’

We arrived at a row of brand new stainless steel vats outside the brick cellars. The country won its reputation with red wines, largely because no one had enough money to purchase the technology required for fine whites, but most top producers went on, in time, to acquire state-of-the-art equipment, and their subsequent success has occasioned a rush of foreign investment and joint ventures. Cousiño Macul, which claims to be the only winery in the Maipo valley not to buy grapes to supplement its own crop, was wooed by Moët & Chandon, but having been independent since 1856 the family were anxious to remain so. As Arturo put it to me, ‘We can make a good wine alone.’

Germán came with me when I visited Errazuriz Panquehue, the only quality winery in the Aconcagua valley north of Santiago. The oenologist took us to lunch at a local restaurant owned by an old gaffer who used to sell pigs door-to-door in Santiago. He had started the restaurant with one table in his front room, and now turned over about four million pesos a month. The food was famous, and it all came from the fields at the back. He was particularly proud of his
arrollado
, a boneless roll of pork served with raw onions in wine vinegar. When we thought we had finished he lurched out of the kitchen carrying a dish of
alcayota
with chestnut puree and
walnuts.
Alcayota
, which looks like a melon, is a dark green squash-type vegetable with white crunchy flesh. We ate it with jugs of
chicha
, partially fermented grape juice, which was dark orange and very sweet.

When I went down to Concha y Toro, by far the biggest wine producer in the country, the staff were in a panic, as it had been raining hard for two days and the vines were beginning to spoil. I panicked myself later that day when I was driving back (Hertz had again obliged, though with a car, not one of my Rockies) and discovered that the streets of Santiago have no drainage. The speed with which the whole of the south of the city virtually stopped functioning was astonishing: roads turned into torrents and cars were abandoned, up to their doorhandles in water. A black economy loves a crisis, however, and out of nowhere sprang an army of men riding tricycles with high platforms attached to convey people across the streets.

It took me hours to get home, and even in the heavy rain people on crutches limped to the car window asking for money. I sat in the darkness in a stationary line of traffic in a rough and anonymous part of the town, the reflections of streetlights distorting into oily rainbows on the surface of the water swirling around outside. Cold and totally unable to move the car, I was shocked that this could happen to me only a few miles from the city centre, and for the first time in months I was afraid.

In the days following the wine tour the Chilean newspapers, which I read nursing cups of Nescafé at noisy pavement tables, were full of stories about a new development in the long-running drama of the political prisoners. Out of almost four hundred
presos políticos
in jail when Patricio Aylwin’s government took over from the military in 1990, approximately three hundred and fifty had already been released. As
most of those who remained had been charged with or convicted of blood crimes (they were called political prisoners nonetheless), the government – who would have been delighted to get shot of this emotive issue once and for all – was compelled to keep them locked up. Some were awaiting trial, some had been convicted, some were up for multiple charges, and all their cases were complex.

It was clear from the newspaper stories, and from a number of conversations I had at the pavement tables, that the question of what to do with the political prisoners was tremendously important; it had become a symbol of the national healing process. The jail most of them were held in was in central Santiago, and it occurred to me that I should visit it, and meet some of these famous prisoners. I had a feeling that this was not something on which I should consult Mr Fixit.

One unusually cold summer morning I stood outside the monolithic old jail itself, more Victorian in appearance than anything built under the auspices of Queen Victoria, and when I knocked two dark-eyed men opened a hatch in the door and pressed their noses to a grille. A queue of women stood in a line by this door, waiting in silence for visiting time. They weren’t allowed to take anything in with them, so a crippled woman with an eye for the main chance had set herself up in business, squatting on the pavement guarding handbags, baskets and pushchairs for a small fee. Wielding my press card like a weapon and repeating faceless names culled from numerous telephone calls and frustrating visits to offices within the Department of the Interior I got in, and was shunted from one room to the next by ‘prison guards’ who looked suspiciously like soldiers. After a lot of doorclanking I was dispatched for a final administrative check to the
Dirección Nacional
, a kind of state department, in order to obtain one of the
papels
(pieces of paper) so beloved of
Chilean bureaucracy. After sufficient authority had been exercised on the various floors of this building I was sent back to the prison with a message that the governor had been telephoned: I was in.

The governor was a short, balding man with a squint and an eggstain on his tie, and he seemed to be under the illusion that I wanted to talk to him. I fidgeted on the dralon sofa in his office for half an hour until I was delivered to a member of staff, frisked and escorted across a high-walled courtyard reminiscent of Colditz. A hatchet-faced guard held open a grey metal door, and I stepped into a room with cracked plaster walls and a high ceiling, bare except for a formica table and three chairs. Sunlight from a single, high window gilded the opposite wall, and in an arc of this light stood two men.

They were wearing jeans and sweaters, and they walked towards me, cold hands outstretched, and kissed me on both cheeks, introducing themselves as representatives of the National Coordinating Committee for Political Prisoners. We sat down.

‘Thank you,’ said the younger one, ‘for coming to us.’ He had shoulder-length frizzy hair and large, deep brown eyes, and he was a
mirísta
– a member of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left – in his late twenties. The other man, about forty, was larger set with short black hair plastered to his head. He told me that he was a Communist, and I later learnt that he was a member of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, the armed wing of the Communist Party, formed in 1983 and named after an Independence hero. (This man was subsequently offered voluntary exile in Belgium in exchange for a life sentence, and left Chile later in 1992.) They had both been inside for six years.