Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  Three dolls were propped up in the living room. Neruda used to carry them into the bathroom every time he had a bath. When asked about this, he always said that he liked to bathe surrounded by beautiful women. The guide thought this was hilarious.

  The soldiers broke into La Chascona several days after the coup and ransacked the house. Shortly afterwards the poet died in hospital, and they brought his body to the broken glass of his home for the wake. When I left, I thought of the street during the wake, full of distraught and shell-shocked mourners and Pinochet’s hit squads.

  I was so near the San Cristóbal funicular that I decided to go up it. It was a big tourist attraction of the capital. At the top there was a massive statue of the virgin, erected in 1908. It was ghastly. Everything up there was ghastly, from the tack stalls – it wasn’t even particularly Chilean tack, it was the usual international toxic waste of famous shrines – to the smog-ridden view of the urban sprawl. The outline of the Andes was barely visible, as if the city had almost succeeded in obliterating them too.

  As I got to know Santiago I found a home at the marisquerías (seafood cafés or bars) of the central market, where I could linger anonymously at a gingham tablecloth after a bowl of shellfish and a glass of cloudy white wine, looking out onto wet fish counters piled with gleaming fish, exotically nameless in English, and heaps of prawn tails and bristly sea urchins. Men in black caps slammed machetes onto outsize chopping boards, and others pushed trolleys between the aisles, white boots meeting white rubber aprons. Itinerant guitarists played Violeta Parra folksongs to diners, and the waitress called me the South American equivalent of ‘pet’. A handful of suited executives came in and out, but the mercado was largely the territory of the old school, slicked-back hair, cardigans and string shopping bags. I even got used to spooning shellfish juice into my wine.

  One evening Rowena and Simon took me to an ex-pat party, and I met an English mining engineer. We stood on the neat lawn, attended by discreet waiters bearing trays of delicious morsels, and the engineer told me that he’d casually been asked to play cricket for Chile, as there weren’t enough Chileans to raise a team. Four Australians had agreed to make up the numbers. The team had been assembled only because Brazil had invited the non-existent Chilean squad over for an international; the engineer was leaving the next day for São Paulo.

  I spent several enjoyable evenings with Germáan Claro, the quixotic aristocrat who ran a hacienda hotel and whom I had met at the end of my first week in Chile. He was determined to get me to the places I wasn’t officially allowed to go, and through his machinations I was offered a private tour of La Moneda, the presidential palace in the heart of the city.

  ‘I like the way they usher in any foreigner whom they like the look of but don’t let us see it,’ said Pepe, who had also returned to Santiago. ‘Some of the most important pieces of our cultural heritage are in there – I’d like to have a look at them, for one.’

  This was a fair point, and I looked away in embarrassment. Then it occurred to me that I could just take him with me.

  ‘We could give you a bogus role,’ I said.

  ‘Photographer!’ he suggested enthusiastically.

  ‘Do you have a camera?’ I asked doubtfully.

  ‘Of course.’

  The camera, it emerged, was an East German instamatic, circa 1975. I tactfully wondered aloud if this was the kind of equipment to convince the authorities of his status as a professional photographer.

  ‘What about interpreter then?’

  ‘But you can’t speak English. What if they ask you to interpret?’

  We settled on the idea of a nebulous role as guide, and I was sure I could bluff it out.

  At the entrance to La Moneda I was met by a pack of khakisuited, rifle-wielding officers in knee-high black patent boots and white gloves with razor creases, all well over six feet tall. After questions, a frisk and a bomb-detection test, a man in a suit appeared asking for Mrs Wheeler. He shook my hand with typical Chilean vigour, crushing a couple of unimportant bones, and I introduced Pepe as my guide. The man looked puzzled.

  ‘Are you her interpreter?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes!’ panicked Pepe, and my courage faltered.

  The palace was built in the eighteenth century as a mint, designed by an Italian architect called Joaquín Toesca who had worked on the royal palace in Spain. He was dispatched to the New World (new to the Spaniards, that is) by the king, first of all to build a cathedral in Santiago. This mint became the seat of the Chilean presidency in 1850, under Manuel Bulnes. From the outside it was austere; if it were in Paris it would be a military library on one of Haussmann’s boulevards. The colour didn’t help: it was dark, steely grey. The facade said, ‘Don’t come in here’.

  Inside it lost its harsh edges – it was pure, beautiful neoclassicism. George Vancouver called it ‘the best building in all the Spanish colonies’, and Maria Graham, a lively Englishwoman who lived in Chile in the 1820s, wondered in her journal (later published) if it weren’t ‘too magnificent for Chile’. Two layers of high-ceilinged rooms concealed behind arches, columns and external staircases were arranged around large courtyards stalked by presidential staff, from snappily dressed civil servants to three men in blue hats carrying a basket of watermelons. Off the first courtyard we visited the frugally decorated presidential chapel.

  The guide pointed to an oyster-coloured velvet seat, and said something unintelligible about the Pope. (Despite John Paul’s attempts to make one or two anti-regime gestures during his last visit, Pinochet had the forthcoming plebiscite in mind, and he had engineered a propaganda coup by getting photographed kneeling with the First Lady while the Pope blessed the chapel.) When he saw that I didn’t understand, the guide tried out his English.

  ‘The Pope,’ he said, ‘naked here when he wisit Chile in 1987.’

  ‘Naked?’ I questioned.

  ‘Naked?’ the guide looked at interpreter Pepe for confirmation.

  ‘Naked,’ repeated Pepe authoritatively.

  ‘I see,’ I said gravely. I never found out what they meant.

  In the salons, echoing with our footsteps like a museum after closing-time, the guide told us about Chilean oils, French chandeliers and Napoleon III bronze clocks, and from the famous Yellow Room, properly called the Salon Carrera, where the President receives heads of state, we entered the Cabinet Room. It was long, green and stygian, the style dislocated by unwieldy and old-fashioned Philips microphone boxes and thick net curtains redolent of Eastern Europe.

  In the Orange Tree Courtyard the guide waved his arms around enthusiastically, demonstrating the position of the canopies when the President entertains guests under the trees. Pepe inspected the fruit trees. ‘Those trees,’ he told me later, looking serious, ‘were diseased. They have an aphid. The oranges of the Republic are rotten.’

  Until 11 September 1973, when Salvador Allende died in office in the Moneda, the presidential headquarters were off this Orange Courtyard. The orchestrators of the military coup ordered an aerial bombardment of the palace. Allende almost certainly shot himself with a sub-machine gun Castro had presented to him when he visited Chile, though the far left still insist that he was gunned down, a story promulgated, ironically, by Castro himself. There will always be a doubt, and Allende’s death has acquired the status of modern myth. In the troubled weeks before the coup he had said this to an opposition leader: ‘You are looking for a military dictatorship. I do not believe there is anything after death, but still, if there is, I shall look down on you all when you have your dictatorship and find you all together, casting about for ways to get out of power the military man you replace me with … Because it won’t cost you much to get him in. But by heaven, it will cost you something to get him out.’

  We loitered in the first courtyard. ‘Take a picture of me in front of the arch,’ hissed Pepe. I tried to do it while the guide wasn’t looking. He was talking to a stocky man in a dark suit. I recognized this man from newspaper pictures as a
controversial and unpopular minister – and rather a stupid one. During the next few seconds I realized that the guide was going to introduce me to this man. Yes, he was turning now …

  ‘Señor, can I introduce our distinguished British guest?’

  I caught the contempt on Pepe’s face as he stared at the politician.

  ‘Señora, are there are questions you would like to ask the minister?’

  I grasped for suitably anodyne topics. I thought of John Cleese pretending to faint in Fawlty Towers when he was introducing an important guest and forgot the man’s name. But it was all right. An aide rushed up and absorbed the minister, and the moment passed.

  We strolled on. I asked where the bombs fell. The guide looked shifty.

  ‘Well, the first rocket struck over there, on the left of the entrance to the first courtyard.’ He paused. ‘There was a lot of damage. We restored it exactly as it was. We hope now that we can restore its … symbolic associations too. For many people, and I must say this is unfortunate, the Moneda represents 1973.’

  Twentieth-century Chilean history reveals a traditional electoral model referred to as the tres tercios (three thirds): one-third of the electorate on the left, one-third on the right and the rest in the middle. During the 1960s, a period of increasing social unrest, the reformist legislation of Eduardo Frei’s Christian Democrat government managed to alienate both right and left, ultimately and crucially leading to a collapse of support for the political middle ground. Salvador Allende, a Marxist and leader of the Socialist Party and of the leftist Popular Unity coalition, was elected in 1970 within the context of this polarization.

  Popular Unity had emerged out of the Popular Action Front, another left-wing coalition, and it was committed to a ‘peaceful road to socialism’, christened ‘la vía chilena’ (the Chilean way) by some theorists. The country it inherited was experiencing severe economic and social disorder. Allende didn’t win a majority, he won a plurality, and he only took office after the Christian Democrats voted for him in Congress. They soon decided they had made a mistake, and began to undermine him. The Christian Democrats constituted the largest single party in the two houses throughout Allende’s term of office, and he was consistently hamstrung by the legislature.

  Chile was at that time – and for many years – perceived as an important Cold War battlefield, and the CIA had it exceptionally well covered. Washington reacted hysterically to the prospect and then the reality of a Marxist President in the Moneda: just as after Cuba it had been Chile, so after Chile it would be the whole of Latin America. The journalist Seymour M. Hersh, in his book Kissinger: the Price of Power, quotes Roger Morris, a member of National Security Council staff at the time who said, ‘I don’t think anybody in the government understood how ideological Kissinger was about Chile. I don’t think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro.’

  A leftist government was seen to be a danger to US commercial interests. The powerful International Telegraph and Telephone Corporation owned 70 per cent of the Chilean Telephone Company, and even before Allende had been sworn in it had set out an elaborate strategy to ensure that he failed. This included the following advice and instruction: ‘1. Banks should not renew credits or should delay in doing so. 2. Companies should drag their feet in sending money, making deliveries, in shipping spare parts, etc … 4. We should withdraw all technical help … ’

  Washington’s policy was to take advantage of the existing polarization and push the disenchanted politicians and voters of the ‘middle third’–the Christian Democrats – away from Allende. It was a successful strategy. Many Christian Democrats supported the coup in 1973 and believed that Pinochet would clean out the left and return the country to them.

  Congressional hearings in Washington later revealed that Nixon, Kissinger and numerous others were directly involved in manipulation of the Chilean economy and political machinery, largely through the CIA. Kissinger made his now famous remark, ‘I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,’ and Nixon informed CIA Director Richard Helms that an Allende regime in Chile ‘would not be acceptable to the US’.

  The White House and the CIA were so conspiratorial that they didn’t tell their ambassador to Chile about their plans to ensure Allende didn’t take his seat. Hersh compares White House behaviour regarding Chile with its conduct during Watergate: cover-up payments for CIA crimes, the destruction of records and the distortion of documents, perjured evidence to Congressional investigating committees and liaisons with violent, unscrupulous men. Was Washington so afraid because of its two top-secret National Security Agency facilities operating on offshore Chilean territory and monitoring Soviet submarines, among other things? Both sites were evacuated overnight when Allende came to power. No, it wasn’t undercover security facilities which set White House passions alight. The reaction was more visceral – a white-hot scream of hatred. Nixon had developed a pathological antipathy towards Chile; David Frost records in his memoirs that it was the subject Nixon’s aides warned him off before he interviewed the President. This high-level animosity was duly translated into policy and cultural indoctrination and funded by millions of dollars, right down to the distribution of comics on the streets of Chilean towns and villages reinforcing the ‘good’ US image over the ‘evil’ of Communism.

  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 a
imed 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.