Alan Angell on Pinochet and Chilean Politics

Tell me about your first book, The Pinochet Regime, by Carlos Huneeus.

Basically, there are a number of ways of defending the Pinochet regime. You can say that it was necessary to deal with the turmoil of the Allende years. You can say that Pinochet ran the economy well and so on. What this book does is seek to destroy all these kinds of justifications.

Running through the whole book is a sustained attack on the legitimacy of Pinochet’s regime and its attempts to portray itself as a genuine reformer in Chile. There is a lot on the human rights episodes. So it is a very effective demolition of any kind of attempt to justify what went on in those years.

It is extraordinary well documented and impeccable academically. And it is also very good on how clever Pinochet was at managing to stay in power during all those years. He was the commander-in-chief of the army and nothing happened without his say-so. He could have vetoed the whole operation if he had wanted to.

One of his main opponents was General Lee, the air force general. He was very important in the whole regime. He wanted to maintain a nationalist stance and was very unhappy when Pinochet began to adopt the free market economic model. But Pinochet was able to get rid of him without much difficulty and that removed the one person in the junta who might have been able to be a focal point of opposition to Pinochet.

With your next book, Steve Stern’s Battling for Heart and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, is there this idea that people’s memories at the time were manipulated?

Absolutely. This is an extraordinarily moving book. It tells the story of people who, in the most appalling circumstances, tried to defend liberty. Not people who were necessarily very much on the left, but just ordinary decent democrats. And what he does very well is to say that both sides are trying to construct a memory. So you have these two ideologies in conflict and people remember what’s appropriate to their set of ideas rather than having an objective view of what was going on.

He focuses on key episodes, like the assassination attempt on Pinochet in 1986 and what that meant. There is a great deal on the church. Although the church in Chile is a very conservative institution now, it had a strong line on human rights, and the opposition in Chile for ten years was the church. They were very important, not just because they protected individuals but also because they stood up and said what Pinochet did could not be justified. Stern writes about the church lawyers who struggled to keep the human rights issues central and became the core of what the opposition stood for in the Pinochet regime.

Your next book, Patricia Politzer’s Fear in Chile: Lives under Pinochet, looks at the individual stories of people right across Chile during the regime.

Yes, there was a new version published in 2001, but Patricia actually wrote it in 1985 towards the end of Pinochet’s regime. So it’s a courageous book, because to publish books in Chile which might be seen to contain critical material was not an easy decision to make. What she does is to look at a whole spectrum of people: from powerful people with money on the right, to the poorest of the poor peasants. Through their stories she reconstructed their lives and beliefs.

I found it an extraordinarily moving book. The last chapter deals with the case of José Tohá, one of Allende’s ministers who was starved to death in a military hospital. His widow, because they were friends of the family, goes to Pinochet to try to find out what happened. I was actually moved to tears in this chapter because it is this woman’s attempt to come to terms with the dreadful things that have happened to her husband at the hands of someone they thought of as a friend.

And how did Pinochet react to her visit?

Oh brutally – he just more or less said, that’s tough, that’s life, that’s how things are. That really offended her; that someone they knew quite well could actually behave like that. He was a very cruel man. I don’t think he cared a damn about the kinds of things he did.

You are very much a specialist in this field; you have written numerous books on the subject and lived in Chile. So what do you think it is about Pinochet that makes him stand out as one dictator that everyone remembers from South America?

I think it’s because Chile had a very high international profile. People could identify with the socialist experiment in Chile. And then it was destroyed. They said if it could happen to Chile it could happen to us. At least that was the view of the French Communist Party and the left in many countries in the world. So there was enormous sympathy for Chile.

Also, I think what was important in Chile was the role of television. This was one of the first televised coups. There were images of him in his dark glasses and the bombing of the parliamentary building, La Moneda, and books being burnt in the streets.