By LARRY ROHTER
Published: March 12, 2010
After the Earthquake, a Military Chile Can Love Again
At Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s funeral, one of his grandsons, an Army captain also named Augusto Pinochet, gave a eulogy so defiant and aggressive that he was cashiered the next day. Earlier, as the general lay in state in his dress uniform and Chileans filed by his casket to pay their last respects, the grandson of another general, assassinated by Pinochet’s secret police, spat on the former dictator’s cadaver full in the face.
That was barely three years ago, and it suggested that the ghost of General Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and continued as army commander until 1998, would be hard to exorcise. But the scenes of Chileans’ embracing soldiers who aided in rescue and reconstruction efforts after the huge earthquake last month make all that divisiveness seem an eternity ago.
“This disaster was so immense that what people are seeking above all now is stability,” said Gregory B. Weeks, author of “The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile” and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “This is the first real troop presence since the end of the dictatorship, and obviously raises a certain amount of nervousness. But it marks a return to a normal civil-military relationship.”
The euphoria is such that Chileans seem willing to overlook serious lapses in the performance of the other military services. Instead, public dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response has been transferred to Michelle Bachelet, who began her term as president four years ago as a symbol of reconciliation. Still, Ms. Bachelet, the daughter of a general and herself a former defense minister who was jailed, tortured and exiled, stepped down Thursday with an 84 percent approval rating.
“Ironically, by hesitating to send the troops out sooner, she transferred some of her own political capital to the military,” said Patricio Navia, a Chilean political scientist who teaches at New York University and Diego Portales University in Santiago. “It was poetic justice of a sort” because “her links with the military had helped her become president” in the first place.
Traditionally, Chileans are said to have had a cordial relationship with their military, at least in comparison with some other Latin American societies. That explains in part why the bloody coup that brought General Pinochet to power in 1973, and the extensive human rights violations that followed, were so traumatic for Chile.
Even during my first reporting trip to Chile, in 1979, I heard older Chileans talk fondly of childhood trips to Valparaiso to see the Esmeralda, the four-masted Navy training ship that was the pride of the fleet but became a floating torture center in the Pinochet era. The annual Sept. 19 military parade in Santiago always drew huge crowds, and for decades mothers aspired to marry their daughters off to dashing young officers in uniforms.
Other Latin American societies also put their armed forces on a pedestal; the attraction of all things military is one plot line in the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa’s play “La Señorita de Tacna.” But Chile was always considered especially conservative in valuing order and stability. Even the Socialist Salvador Allende, whom General Pinochet overthrew, had military officers in his cabinet and staff; Ms. Bachelet’s father was one.
“The Chileans are a very history-minded people, with a reverence for their past,” said Frederick M. Nunn, author of “The Time of the Generals.” “Even in the 1970s, people still accepted the army, though they might not have accepted what the army had done.”
Claudio Fuentes is an expert on the military who now teaches at Diego Portales University. In 1991 and again in 2007, he and others conducted polls to measure attitudes toward the military, and found that suspicions had declined significantly. Over those 16 years, the segment of the population that believed that the armed forces might be willing to carry out another coup fell from nearly half of those questioned to only a quarter. “There is strong support for the military as an institution, which is perceived as efficient, professional and obedient to authority,” Mr. Fuentes said. “But citizens also believe that the military should be out of politics.”
Now, how quickly the rehabilitation of the armed forces proceeds depends in large part on the country’s new president, Sebastián Piñera, a conservative who took office Thursday.
Rather than turn to someone in his own camp who might be tainted by associations with General Pinochet, he reached beyond his own base for his defense minister and chose Jaime Ravinet, a Christian Democrat who succeeded Ms. Bachelet in the post in 2004. “It’s like Obama choosing to have Gates stay on,” said Brian Loveman, author of “For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America.” “Ravinet is not associated with any kind of internal repression or overseas activities. In that job, you want somebody who can get along with the military, knows the people in the armed forces and can take their concerns to Congress. Ravinet has already proved he can do that.”
One additional problem Mr. Piñera might want to keep in mind is the prickliness that Latin American countries show about anything that might be seen as questioning their sovereignty or competence. That sentiment, shared by left and right, military and civilians, was on display in Mexico after a devastating quake there in 1985, and appears also to have been a factor in Chile’s response to its Feb. 27 disaster.
In January, Chile became the first South American country to join the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, also known as “the rich countries club.” But that opportunity to project an image of modernity and prosperity was undermined last week when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, visiting Santiago, handed out 25 satellite phones, including one to Ms. Bachelet.
“Chile wanted to be compared to Japan, not Haiti,” Mr. Navia said. “For a country that wants to prove it’s a developed country, accepting aid is complicated. It was the first response, and it was a mistaken response.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14rohter.html?ref=world
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