Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  "Would a one-party state be good for Chile?" I asked him.

  And he answered, thoughtfully but surely, "No ... no, not right away. It will take a while."

  I saw him last, personally, several months before he became "the world's first elected Marxist president," in his attractive townhouse in Santiago. He had been ill, but he looked all right and was utterly convinced that he was going to win. Since the entire fight about Allende and his Marxists revolved around the question of whether they would in the end still observe democratic forms, again I posed what I considered to be "the" ideological question.

  "If you are elected, will there be elections again?" I asked him.

  He paused. "You must understand," he said, carefully but revealingly, "that by the next elections, everything will have changed."

  In that same interview, as a comfortable fire crackled in the fireplace of his study, Allende told me many things. "The whole thing is distinct from '64," he said. "The last time, the Right voted for Frei. Today it is different. We have different groups with us. Large groups of priests have clearly delineated a Christian-Marxist point of view. A large group feels that if you respect our belief, there is no problem. In '64, all the church was for the Christian Democrats."

  Then he went on to say, "We are going to win within the electoral system, but we'll build new institutions, make a new constitution. We are not going to live under the capitalist system." He smiled. "If we nationalize all this ... mess of American companies, if we control imports and exports and carry through a real agrarian reform, what other things can you do?"

  In his speeches he had said that this is "not an electoral fight but the definitive battle," that there would be a "change of regime and of system." That was exactly what he meant; he was always an honest and forthright man.

  But Salvador Allende, one of those fashionable Third World travelers in modish socialism who brought their peoples such unending and unfashionable misery, did not win the Chilean presidency that day in 1964. That day, Eduardo Frei, a tall, thin, dark man with a Catholic spiritual intensity that he applied to a love for democracy, was elected president. The country exploded in a massive outburst of relief and of obsessive joy. The importance of Chile was clear: In the age when everyone was seeking forms of development, Chile would show that rational democratic choosing and planning would win over Marxist totalitarian methods. Chile, a country with a long and revered constitutional heritage, was somehow chosen by history to show the way to a changing world -- we were convinced of it.

  Personally I was jubilant over the Frei victory, although I was meticulous in writing fairly and comprehensively about Allende. It would be difficult -- impossible -- to forget the night of Frei's election. With my colleagues I roamed about the city that night, and it was as if a whole people had gone mad with joy. The relief -- to be delivered from Marxism -- erupted in the streets. Open cars spewing confetti ... floats with young people throwing streamers, music, impromptu speeches ... the haunting music that land had so long composed to its special beauty .... It was heady stuff. We didn't know then that it would all die with the same terrible intensity.

  The next day Eduardo Frei gave a press conference for the Chilean press and for the hordes of foreign press. Never before or since have I witnessed the jaded, arrogant, egocentric, wonderful foreign correspondent corps spontaneously stand up and applaud a new president of anything! We were supposed to be tough and mean and immovable. That day our human side was clear.

  At that press conference, and for the next five years, we heard words we would not hear again in the Third World. Asked about the American "domination" that the Allende Socialists and his coalition Communists always railed at, Frei said simply, "We ought to have a word in the world because we have our own personality. We ought to be independent not only economically but spiritually. If we always look outside for our blame, that is in itself a form of dependence. We must look for our own blame to find our own personality."

  Here, in Chile in 1964, were displayed very simply the two options for Latin America: reform by totalitarian Left or rational reform by the democratic, Christian Left. And in the next happy years of Eduardo Frei's term I covered Chile regularly and came to know it intimately. I stayed always at the elegant, continental old Hotel Crillon, with its perfect satin bedspreads and its old windows that looked out on the gray Eastern Europe-style streets of Santiago. I made contacts on all sides, and then the Marxists were all too delighted to meet with American journalists. It was a refined conversation with them, and then they agreed on the rules of the game: then.

  The one I knew best was Augusto Olivares, then a newspaperman. A big, hearty man with laughing eyes and an enormous handlebar mustache, Olivares looked much like a Hungarian character actor whom no one could forget. We would go to lunch in one of the simple Chilean restaurants, with their reckless bottles of Chilean wine and excellent food, and talk and talk and talk until lunch blended into dinner and we had dissected the world and it was time for bed. One night at his beautiful home in the lush, British-style suburbs, I helped carve the magnificent fish he and his wife had brought. Later we sang and sang to the guitar of a friend of his. Those were lovely days, days too good, days that always and every where should warn you that the winter is coming. Augusto became President Allende's top adviser. He never spoke to any of us "democrats" after that. He shot himself that last day at the palace, immediately after Allende.

  But in those halcyon days of the sixties Chile gathered in every one: ideologues of all shapes and shades, journalists, pilgrims to the new Jerusalem, to the Fourth Rome, viewers of the modern ideological mind. I covered it on a regular and deliberately unimpassioned basis. I went back regularly, drawn to a future that was indeed working. I sought out people on all sides, in particular the thinkers, because that was what it was all about.

  Because Chile was indeed something new in Third World development. It was democratic but it was revolutionary. It was changing, but without destroying people in the process, and it was rationally redistributing wealth while building wealth. It was a combination of devout Roman Catholic reformism, of communitarian enterprise (capital and labor co-representation in management), land reform, redistribution of income, and nationalization of mineral wealth. It was as totally and spontaneously an open society as I have ever seen, as Christian Democrats sat with Marxists of every stripe long into the night, discussing, arguing, dreaming, raging.

  On the Catholic side one of the most fascinating characters was the brilliant, arrogant Jesuit Father Roger Vekemans. The Belgian-born son of a Marxist father, he had come from Europe and set up DESAL , which was the Christian Democrats' social arm aimed at promoting "intermediate organizations."

  Vekemans was tall and imposing and so quick that his words and concepts had a kind of metallic brittleness. He strode about Santiago with his long cigarette holder and his bemused mien -- a kind of Douglas MacArthur of the Church -- and made a lot of enemies. But I greatly appreciated him.

  "In classic Latin American society," he told me one day, explaining what the whole fight for the decent development of peoples was about, "you find the dichotomy between the state and the atomized dust, and nothing in between; nothing in between the state and the individual. The individual takes no real part in decisions, for he is living only in a formal democracy. We want our people to live in an authentic democracy where all the decisions are participated in by them. A country like Chile is changing from a hierarchical society to an open society, from a closed society which prefers passive responses to an open society which demands active ones."

  On behalf of the Christian Democrats and their ideology, he was out to establish the pressure groups that provide the give-and-take of any democracy. Self-help was a holy concept, in sharp contrast to the power-from-above ideas of the Marxists. "Nothing should be donated," Vekemans used to say to me, "no charity at all. In our thinking, charity is worse than communism."

  But Vekemans and his social ideas were not the only ones deve
loping in the now churning caldron of the once-static and oligarchical Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. There was the new "Theology of Liberation" in the Church -- and I believe I was the first to write about it. Suddenly there were all these young priests talking about "liberation," not only in spiritual terms but in temporal terms. What this eventually came to mean, in a practice that came into its own in the eighties in Central America, was the guerrilla-priest -- priests who naively eschewed thinking about any differences between Marxism and Catholicism.

  Of these priests unquestionably the most important then and certainly the one to become the most famous was the young Colombian, Father Camilo Torres. I interviewed him one Sunday at 7:00 a.m. just before he rushed to the airport. A medium-sized, well-built man, he had an ethereal smile and curly brown hair. "The perfect leader," I wrote at the time, "especially for Latin American women: handsome, sensuous and a priest."

  Even then Camilo was rejecting the traditional idea that the Church should not involve itself in socioeconomic measures. As we sat in his little apartment in Bogota that Sunday, he told me, "I consider the work of a priest is to take a person to God, to work toward the love of one's brother. I consider there are circumstances that do not permit a man to offer himself to God. A priest must fight those circumstances, and for me they are political.... Decisions are now produced by the minorities and not the majorities. Because of this, the majority must produce pressure groups; it must take political power."

  "Pressure groups": these were the same words that Vekemans used. But the intent of the two men and their view of the outcome were totally different. Camilo crossed over. He became a Marxist priest. He was defrocked. I wrote of him in my book The New Latins:

  He tried for a while to work with his mass movement idea. Then, impatient and driven by whatever devils or saints inhabited him (his friends insist there were quite enough of both), he joined the Marxist guerrillas. On February 15, 1966, the government announced that Father Camilo Torres had been killed in an encounter with Colombian troops.

  I don't know consciously just why I pursued this type of Church- Marxist spirits-in-torment story so doggedly. But later -- much later -- this story was to erupt with fury: Jesuits in El Salvador smuggling arms to the Marxists; priests proclaiming the right to be "Christian Marxists"; my Maryknoll friend, Father Miguel D'Escoto, riding to power with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and becoming their first foreign minister; the beautiful, rational Cardinal Oscar Romero being shot to death as he offered mass in the chapel in San Salvador. But, in 1964 and in 1966, these men and these extraordinary events were still shadows in the wings.

  ***

  Perhaps I was watching these developments with such singular fascination -- and perhaps I was feeling them so much more deeply than most of the men correspondents -- because I, too, was deeply involved in these questions of independence and dependence. A woman's whole life, inner and outer, is if anything a complex of trying to learn how to deal with the inherent contradictions and demands of dependence versus independence.

  As I observed these developing nations and peoples, I understood their complexes; I felt with them in their traumas; I comprehended their absurdities. The revolution within me and within women had many of the same components of the revolution that they were going through. This also gave me a kind of freedom and perhaps special empathy in reporting. For I treated these people with respect, yet I did not feel I had to pamper them because, in truth, I was one of them.

  Other difficulties of being a woman in this profession took an amusing turn on one Chilean assignment. While traveling in the south of Chile with then-president Frei, I was working with (correspondents almost always just naturally teamed up) Newsweek's Milan Kubic. I found him to be an exceptional journalist and a pleasant colleague. Our bevy of Latin and North American journal lists had come down in a separate press plane, and the plane was not returning to Santiago for another day. That presented a problem, for none of us wanted or needed to stay another day in the remote southland.

  During one of the rallies that took place near a large forest, while hundreds upon hundreds of people roved about us, while children ran and shrieked and while Frei himself was speaking over a loud speaker, I stood for about twenty minutes talking with the minister of finance, a cultured gentleman named Santa Maria. He was a pleasant, gray-haired, elderly man, and we talked mostly about how they were trying to transform Chile through the economy. For some reason I mentioned to him my one problem: getting back to Santiago. To my surprise and then delight he responded at once.

  "You can have my seat in the president's plane," he said pleasantly. "I am staying down here to visit with family. Just be at the bottom of the steps to the plane well before takeoff time -- I will personally put you on."

  I was delighted with my good luck, for getting about is one of the great problems of journalists. So there I was at the appointed time. Minister Santa Maria duly wished me well and put me onto a plane that was two thirds empty. I arrived quickly back in Santiago while the rest of the press corps waited it out in the South.

  I did catch a glimpse of Milan, whom I had informed of this, standing well behind the stairs to the plane. It seemed to me, even at that distance, that he had a peculiar, petulant look about him.

  I did not give this episode another thought until, as I continued to make my way around the world, I kept running into Milan's account of this little event.

  First I heard about it in Vietnam, from astonished male colleagues. Then I heard about it in Latin America, again from the same sort of group. But it was the last time I heard about it that it really irked me. In the winter of 1969 I was driving from Beirut to Damascus for an interview with Yasser Arafat. When our car stopped at the always-troubled border, our group had a jovial reunion with a group of journalistic colleagues in the car just ahead of us, among them the Los Angeles Times's Bill Touhy and Milan Kubic. It seemed to me that we had had a particularly jolly few minutes.

  In Damascus and later in Beirut, however, the men in the first car asked me in various versions, "What is the matter with Kubic?" In effect, as soon as they had reboarded their car, Kubic went into a diatribe about me: that day in Chile I had taken "his" seat on Frei's plane; I had gotten it by "sleeping" with Santa Maria; that was the way that "blondes" operated in this field, in which women should be kept out, etc., etc. It was exactly the same story that he had been telling all over the world, and which had come back to me through close male friends in the profession.

  At first I was angry. Then I grew more and more amused. Finally, one night in a madcap mood, I wrote Milan a tongue-in-cheek letter. I noted that, since this story had become so much a part of his life and was obviously so important to his well-being, I should and would help him spread it around. However, I felt it only fair that he include with it a "minority report": my side of the story. First I wanted to know: "Which seat was it that was really yours, since two thirds of the plane was empty?" I thanked him for the compliment -- it was indeed hard and even tiring being a beautiful blonde and having to seduce every man, even for a plane seat, and even harder to seduce Santa Maria while standing in the forest with hundreds of people around.

  A month later I ran into Milan, whom I really liked and certainly admired, in the lobby of the Nile Hilton in Cairo. I walked right over and greeted him heartily. He took one look at me and quite literally fled out of the lobby.

  But in one way he was right. It is very different being a woman in this business.

  ***

  As I watched, Chile proceeded along its hazardous, hopeful path, as the Catholic Church and the Marxists fought it out over ideologies as different as olive oil and Perrier water, I was learning more and more about being a journalist. I was learning how to psych out a society, to find out where the weak points were, to discover who would talk, who had something to say, and where he or she hung out. Putting the intricate puzzle together: that was my great joy.

  In everyday working terms I would come into the country a
nd check into my favorite hotel and then spend perhaps most of the first day sitting on my bed and making call after call after call. From there I went on to interview after interview, and soon learned who were the interesting people. Usually these were not the leaders but the people just behind them. I kept notebooks (and have kept them still); they are the palpable representation of my innermost thoughts and, of course, of the work.

  I also found ways of making myself "one" with a new place -- rather like a puppy or a cat scratching into his bed. I would never, for instance, check into a hotel and go to sleep, no matter what the hour, without first walking all around the hotel and environs. In that way I made the place mine, I integrated it into myself; and I virtually never felt out of place or lonely. I was creating a reality out of pieces -- and it, of course, was creating me.

  And I learned how to pack. I always find it curious that people are so interested in how I pack, so ... I take three light, washable dresses of different styles and for different needs; a heavy sweater with fur collar; a handsome raincoat; one long dress; a bathing suit; a nightgown and light robe; and one kind of crazy thing so I don't get bored with myself. With this I can usually go from the Arctic to the tropics. My biggest problem is carrying along all the papers, files, and books I need.