Travels in a Thin Country (19 page)

‘Where did parliament sit before this was built, then?’ I asked Pepe.

He turned to look at me quizzically.

‘Well, there wasn’t one for seventeen years.’

He often came out with prosaic remarks which made the horror of the junta more real than any academic analysis I read. Once, I said that I was anxious to get back to London in time for the election. He had looked blank, and screwed up his eyes.

‘Well,’ I went on, ‘don’t you feel at election time that you wouldn’t want to miss it?’

‘For almost all my adult life there haven’t been any elections.’

The Vicaría de la Solidaridad was located on the top two floors of an unmarked stone building next to the cathedral in the main square of Santiago, and its doors were always open. When I walked through them, early in the afternoon on a hot Tuesday in January, I found the cloisters hung with appliqué collages incorporating messages about peace and justice, and black-and-white photographs of young men, tiny on the
massive walls, captioned, ‘
Juan Luis, where are you
?’ The Vicaría was an institution born in adversity, and it had been David against Pinochet’s Goliath; it was a symbol of right against wrong. There wasn’t much for the Church to be proud of in modern Chile, but it had the Vicaría. Its work in assisting ordinary Chileans and organizing their legal defence during the dictatorship had been of incalculable value.

The Church had not consistently taken the victims’ side. In 1973, the bishops’ individual reactions to the coup cast some light on the officially neutral line they had taken during the socialist experiment. On the day of Allende’s death, Bishop Francisco Valdés of Osorno wrote a public prayer of thanksgiving, giving God the credit for having freed Chile ‘from the worst clutches of lies and evil that have ever plagued poor humanity’. A retired Archbishop of La Serena presented his episcopal ring to the junta. There were others. I wondered how Catholics whose sons and daughters had electrodes clamped to their heads and genitals as their spiritual fathers thanked the Lord reconciled themselves to their religion.

The bishops did explicitly condemn violence, especially as the extent of the horror was revealed; generally, nonetheless, the hierarchy agreed to keep fairly quiet in return for the freedom to do what it wanted.

One official move, however, was of superlative importance. Almost immediately after the coup the Church set up a cooperative venture with the Protestants, Greek Orthodox and Jews. This led to the Committee of Cooperation for Peace in Chile, known by its acronym Copachi, which offered legal help and economic aid to people suffering under the junta. This committee helped well over 10,000 Chileans. Pinochet inevitably asked Cardinal Silva to close Copachi. He did so, in December 1975, but in January 1976 set up the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, which was exclusively Catholic and part of the Church – so Pinochet couldn’t touch it, at least openly.

The dictator meanwhile clung to his belief that it was he and God against the Marxists. Like Maradona, he claimed ‘the hand of God’ was with him, and in his 1988 campaign he used the allegory of Christ and Barabbas to portray the choice before the voters (he was not Barabbas). When a cardinal with a conservative reputation was chosen to replace Silva, Lucía Hirart, the First Lady, said, ‘Our prayers have been answered’.

Though formal ties were maintained, during the later years relations between the Church and the junta became increasingly strained. This made the Church more popular with the left, and much less popular with the rich, who once saw it as their own province. It was clear to me as I travelled down the country that this polarization still prevails. Intellectuals of the right used to love to tell me, with some bitterness, how the Vicaría had been infiltrated by Communists. I was talking once to an upper-class banker about an encounter with a priest. Before I had said anything about the priest’s views, the banker asked sharply, ‘Was he a Communist?’

The director I met at the Vicaría was a gimlet-eyed man in his early forties. He was immediately engaging. When I asked about the Vatican, he said, ‘Pablo gave us real help. Juan Pablo, well, the Vatican’s priorities are different now. It wants more explicit evangelization, emphasizing individual morality, not so much the world we live in … The Chilean Church is helping us a lot, though the conservative bishops don’t let us work in their dioceses. Luckily there aren’t many of them.’

A poster on the peeling office wall said, ‘
No a l’impunidad
’ (‘No impunity’) in lime green letters.
Impunidad
was an inflammatory word. The Rettig Commission (properly called the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation) had been set up by the new government to document human rights abuse during the dictatorship, and the Vicaría had provided much of the information. It was one thing, however, to document the crimes, and another to try the accused.
Although several trials were working their way through the courts, the government was moving slowly, and its efforts were frequently stalled or stymied by the military courts, the Supreme Court (the judges of which had been appointed for life by Pinochet) or the 1978 amnesty law. This law, which applied to all ‘authors, accomplices or concealers’ of politically connected crimes between 1973 and 1978, could not be annulled, as Pinochet appointees still controlled the Senate. I had met someone who lived in the same block of flats as a known torturer. If the two met in the lift, the torturer would travel up to the top floor, where my friend’s flat was, and then descend alone, so he wouldn’t be obliged to reveal his own floor.

I asked if the government was afraid to confront the powerful right wing.

‘
Miedo
[fear] is too strong a word. But the majority of the crimes were committed by military personnel, so the government has to weigh up the cost of annoying them with prosecutions. Political instability is a high cost, very high. The government wants it all behind it.’

Did he have hope? He closed his eyes and pushed his head back in anticipation of a sneeze which never came.

‘I have no hope that the torturers will be punished. Our democracy is weak. But punishment was never our principal objective. That was and is to defend the victims. Of course, punishment is one way of making amends, but it is equally, if not more important to ensure that the experience is not repeated, hence our educative role. For this I have hope, yes, I do.’

The question of impunity for the perpetrators of the crimes of the dictatorship was a major issue – perhaps
the
major issue. I asked Jorge Schaulsohn about it when I went to talk to him the next day in his twenty-first floor office in downtown Santiago. He was an MP for Santiago Central, and a
leader of the Party for Democracy (PPD), a new progressive party on the centre-left of the governing coalition. As a young radical activist during the dictatorship he had been sent off to the US by his father, also a politician, and he returned the epitome of the exile caught between the two realities of Chile and the United States. He was intelligent, committed, pragmatic and a man of integrity; Schaulsohn was the kind of person who gives you hope for the continent.

‘You can’t apply the standards of a fully fledged democracy here. We can’t annul the amnesty law, and that’s that.’

‘Doesn’t that weigh heavily on your conscience?’

‘Not at all. I have to decide what’s best: to take the line you are implying, and pursue the guilty, or to maintain a stable society and work for the betterment of the people within it. We can’t have both.’

His confidence has been supported by events, at least to a certain extent. In January 1993 Congress impeached a Supreme Court judge, and shortly before that a military court ruled that the amnesty law did not preclude certain kinds of investigation against the torturers. On 3 February 1993 the
Guardian
’s excellent correspondent in Chile, Malcolm Coad, published a story in which he said, ‘Chile has won an international reputation as an example of how a nation can come to terms with a legacy of repression and abuse without tearing itself apart.’ He quoted José Zalaquett, former deputy general secretary of Amnesty International, who said, ‘Chile is now widely seen as the country in transition from dictatorship where social peace has been achieved most completely and most rapidly.’

After I had left Chile, in November 1992, the Vicaría closed itself down. In its official statement, published in several newspapers, it acknowledged that there was still work to be done, but asserted that state institutions and secular organizations must take up the baton. It was a highly symbolic move
which marked the end of an era, but – as many who opposed the closure of the Vicaría said – it did not mean that the work or the healing were complete. A quasi-replacement Vicariate for Social Action was established, to work in the field on behalf of the Church.

‘We don’t want to relinquish the Church’s role as a champion of human rights,’ said the director I had spoken to when I telephoned him from London to ask about the closure. ‘In 1973 the poor didn’t know what human rights were; they certainly didn’t know that they had any. It’s imperative that we continue to educate, so that if it happens again …’

Germán Claro, now Mr Fixit, invited me down to his hacienda, suggesting that it was well placed for the first night of my trek southwards, and it was this which finally propelled me into action. He decided to get out of town for a few days and come with me, and I was glad.

He told me we would be leaving at eight in the morning, so I got up early, packed and said a grateful goodbye to Rowena and Simon over breakfast. Our departure was delayed by ten-and-a-half hours – a modest discrepancy, in South American chronology. In the late afternoon I wondered if we were going to leave at all, as one of the main reasons for the delay was a convivial lunch which showed no sign of reaching its natural end. We got away at six when Germán’s father telephoned the restaurant to say he was about to drive to the hacienda, and did we want a lift.

‘You can do the talking,’ said Germán as he got into the back of the car, where he immediately lay down and went to sleep. Germán
père
was a charming, suave and very handsome man who had enjoyed a career as a captain of industry before devoting himself to his equally handsome hacienda. His family had owned it since the King of Spain bestowed a vast tract of the central valley upon a mayor of Santiago in the
sixteenth century. They were distant cousins of the British Queen. I was moderately anxious about what we might find to talk about; whether the shameful quantity of champagne we had drunk at lunch increased my anxiety or decreased it I cannot say, but it was all right, as far as I can remember, and by the time we were out of the inner city I was feeling comfortable. Don Germán had a twinkle in his eye but an otherwise inscrutable manner.

We passed Rancagua, capital of the Sixth Region, at about eighty miles an hour. It was the site of the largest underground copper mine in the world, owned by Don Germán’s family until the late nineteenth century. The rest of the landscape resembled an enormous market garden. Several mighty US fruit producers had built outposts of their empire along the highway, impressive white constructions fronting acres of healthy, well-watered crops extending to the foothills. If it weren’t for the height of the Andes it could have been a
Provençal
scene, painted in dusty greens and purples and washed in evening sunshine.

Germán the younger woke up when we stopped at a crowded diner which served (claimed father and son) the best hot sandwiches between Santiago and Tierra del Fuego, and anyway they had always stopped there, since Germán Arturo (as my friend was called to avoid confusion) was a little boy; it was a family tradition. The two of them looked alike, but they were very different, in temperament and style, and their relationship was measured. I kept quiet, as I did not want to disturb its equilibrium.

The hacienda was called Los Lingues, after a type of tree. It was almost dark when we arrived. A servant showed me to my room, which was furnished with eighteenth-century prints, old lace bedspreads, heavy chests of drawers and antique silver. I opened the shutters, and looked out onto a veranda and a shadowy flowerbed smelling of roses. A second flunkey
arrived with a silver tray which he placed on my dressing-table. On it were a bottle of Campari, a jug of freshly squeezed orange juice, a bowl of ice, a tall glass and a single yellow rose.

I poured myself a drink and sat in a velvet armchair facing the veranda. I had apparently arrived at the Chilean equivalent of a Bavarian schloss, half-spun out of fairy tales. Taking a handful more ice from the bowl, a fine bone china antique from France, I wondered how many times over the next months I would try to recapture this delicious luxuriance in a cold, wet tent.

The breath of Chilean colonialism filled the
salons
; there was no mistaking it. Germán Arturo and I ate alone in the seventeenth-century dining room at the candlelit mahogany table which could have sat thirty. He wore a tuxedo and I wore a cocktail dress borrowed from Rowena. The family coat of arms hung on the wall, and the table was laid with old French crystal, hand-printed plates and crested silver salvers. White-gloved waiters serving delectable food and a selection of wines from the 4000-odd bottles in the cellar remained inscrutable in front of an expansive Germán, still on a roll from lunch.

When I opened my bedroom door the following morning a table in the courtyard in front of it had been laid for breakfast, a small urn of flowers in the middle. Doña Marie Elena, wife and mother of the Germáns, was already sitting down, and she waved me to join her. She was a charming, forthright and extremely Catholic woman whom I liked very much, and she had already adopted me as a kind of protégée, which meant that she frequently felt obliged to grip my arm and deliver some ruthless truth. (Once, she stated plainly that I was too fat.) She always had staff flitting around her. There were several hundred staff, as the hacienda operated as a fruit-producer, a horse-breeding centre and an exclusive country
house hotel, and there was always something going on, though it tended to do so quietly. Only the peacocks and Mr Fixit disturbed the peace.