My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile

by Isabel Allende

  The right, which controls the press in Chile, organized a campaign of terror that included posters with Soviet soldiers ripping babies from their mothers’ arms to be taken to the gulags. On Election Day, when it was apparent that Allende had triumphed, people came out in force to celebrate: never had there been such a huge popular demonstration. The rightists had ended up believing their own propaganda, and barricaded themselves in their houses, convinced that inflamed rotos were coming to commit unimaginable atrocities. The euphoria of the common people was extraordinary—signs, banners, embraces—but there were no excesses and at dawn the celebrators retired to their homes, hoarse from singing. The next day there were long lines in front of the banks and travel agencies in the upper-class barrio: many people withdrew their money and bought tickets to flee abroad, convinced that the country was going down the same road as Cuba.

  Fidel Castro arrived to show his support for the Unidad Popular and that exacerbated the opposition’s panic, especially when it saw the reception given the controversial Comandante. Organized by labor and professional unions, schools, political parties, and others, people lined up along the highway from the airport to the center of Santiago; there were banners and standards and marching bands, in addition to a huge anonymous crowd that went to watch the spectacle out of curiosity, with the same enthusiasm that years later they would lavish on the pope. The visit of the bearded Comandante lasted too long: twenty-eight endless days, during which he traveled the country from north to south, accompanied by Allende. I believe we all gave a sigh of relief when he left, but it can’t be denied that his retinue left the air filled with music and laughter. Cubans are enchanting; twenty years later I came to know some exiled Cubans in Miami, and found that they are as pleasant as the islanders. We Chileans, always so serious and solemn, were shaken by the whole experience: we didn’t know that life and revolution could be lived with such joy.

  The Unidad Popular was popular, but it wasn’t united. The parties in the coalition fought like cats and dogs for every morsel of power, and Allende had to confront not only the opposition on the right but also critics in his own ranks who demanded swifter and more radical action. Workers took over factories and farms, weary of waiting for the nationalization of private enterprise and the expansion of agrarian reform. Sabotage by the right, North American intervention, and errors on the part of Allende’s government provoked a grave economic, political, and social crisis. Inflation rose officially to 360 percent a year, although the opposition claimed it was more than 1000 percent, which meant that a housewife woke up every morning not knowing how much bread would cost that day. The government fixed the prices of basic products, and many industries and agribusinesses failed. The shortages were so severe that people spent hours waiting to buy a scrawny chicken or a cup of cooking oil, but those who could pay bought anything they wanted on the black market. With their modest way of talking and behaving, Chileans referred to a queue as la colita, “the mini-line,” even when it was three blocks long, and sometimes stood in them without knowing what was being sold, just out of habit. Soon there was a psychosis of shortages, and as soon as three or more people were together, they automatically started a queue. That was how I once bought cigarettes, though I’ve never smoked, and another time ended up with eleven tins of colorless shoe wax and a gallon of soy extract I can’t imagine a use for. There were professional line-standers who got tips for holding a place; I understand that my own children rounded out their allowance that way.

  Despite the problems and the climate of permanent confrontation, ordinary people were excited because for the first time they felt they had some control over their destinies. A true renaissance took place in the arts, folklore, and popular and student movements. Masses of volunteers went out to eradicate illiteracy in every corner of Chile; books were published at the price of a newspaper, so there was a library in every house. For their part, the economic right, the upper class, and a sector of the middle class—particularly housewives, who suffered the problems of shortages and loss of order—detested Allende and feared that he would be perpetuated in government as Fidel Castro had been in Cuba.

  Salvador Allende was my father’s cousin and the only person in the Allende family who kept in contact with my mother after my father left. He was a good friend of my stepfather, so I had several opportunities to be with him during his presidency. Although I didn’t take part in his government, those three years of the Unidad Popular were surely the most interesting in my life. I have never felt so alive, nor have I ever again participated so closely in a community or in the life of a nation.

  From a contemporary perspective, we can agree that Marxism as an economic project is dead, but I think that some of Salvador Allende’s principles are still attractive, particularly his search for justice and equality. He was trying to establish a system that would give the same opportunities to everyone and create “the new man,” who would act for the common good, not personal gain. We believed that it was possible to change people through indoctrination; we refused to see that in other countries, even where they had tried to impose a system with an iron hand, the results were very doubtful. The sudden breakdown of the Soviet system was still in the future. The premise that human nature is susceptible to such a radical change now seems ingenuous, but then, for many of us, it was the ultimate goal. This ideal blazed like a bonfire in Chile. Typical Chilean characteristics, such as sobriety, a horror of ostentation, of standing out over others or attracting attention, generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, resignation to bureaucracy, enthusiasm for political argument, and many others, found their perfect home in the Unidad Popular. Even fashion was affected. During those three years, models in women’s magazines were dressed in rough workman’s textiles and clunky proletarian shoes, and bleached flour-sacking was used to make blouses. I was responsible for the home decorating section of the magazine where I worked, and my challenge was to produce photographs of attractive and pleasing décors achieved with minimal cost: lamps made from large tins, rugs woven of hemp, pine furniture darkened with stain and burned with a blowtorch to look antique. We called it the “monastery mode,” and the idea was that anyone could knock out these pieces at home with four boards and a saw. It was the golden age for the DFL2 Act, which allowed buyers to acquire houses of a maximum of one hundred and forty square meters at low cost and with tax breaks. Most houses and apartments were the size of a two-car garage; ours had ninety square meters and we thought it was a palace. My mother, who was in charge of the cooking section of Paula, had to invent inexpensive recipes that didn’t call for scarce ingredients; however, bearing in mind that everything was scarce, her creativity was rather restricted. One Peruvian artist who arrived for a visit during that period asked, amazed, why Chilean women dressed like lepers, lived in doghouses, and ate like fakirs.

  Despite the many problems the population faced during that time, from those multiple shortages to political violence, three years later in the parliamentary elections of March 1973, the Unidad Popular increased its margin of votes. Efforts to derail the government through sabotage and propaganda had not had the hoped-for results. That was when the opposition moved into the last phase of the conspiracy and incited a military coup. We Chileans had no idea what that entailed, because we had a long and solid democratic tradition and we were proud of being different from other countries of the continent, which we scornfully referred to as “banana republics,” where every other day some caudillo took over the government by force. No, that would never happen to us, we proclaimed, because in Chile even the soldiers believed in democracy, no one would dare violate our Constitution. That was pure ignorance; if we had looked back over our history, we would have been better acquainted with the military mentality.

  When I did the research for my novel Portrait in Sepia, published in English in 2001, I learned that in the nineteenth century our armed forces waged several wars, giving evidence of as much crue
lty as courage. One of the most famous moments of our history was the capture of the Arica promontory in June 1880, during the War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia. That stronghold was an impregnable cliff with a two-hundred-meter drop straight to the sea; there large numbers of Peruvian troops equipped with heavy artillery were defended by three kilometers of sand bags and a surrounding mine field. The Chilean soldiers launched their attack with curved knives between their teeth and bayonets bared. Many fell beneath enemy fire or were blown to bits by exploding mines, but nothing stopped their remaining comrades, who climbed up to the fortifications and over them, thirsty for blood. They gutted Peruvians with knife and bayonet and took the headland, an incredible feat that lasted only fifty-five minutes. Then they killed the conquered, finished off the wounded, and sacked the city of Arica. One of the Peruvian commanders jumped into the sea rather than fall into the hands of the Chileans. The figure of the dashing officer and his black steed with its legendary gold horseshoes leaping from the cliff is part of the legend of that ferocious episode. The war was decided later with Chile’s triumph at the battle of Lima—which Peruvians remember as a massacre, even though Chilean history books claim that our troops occupied the city in an orderly fashion.

  The victors write history in their own way. Every country presents its soldiers in the most favorable light, hides their mistakes and downplays their atrocities, and after the battle is won everyone is a hero. Since we grew up with the idea that the Chilean armed forces were composed of obedient soldiers under the command of irreproachable officers, we were in for a tremendous surprise that Tuesday, September 11, 1973, when we saw them in action. Their savagery was so extreme that it’s believed they were drugged, just as the men who took the Arica promontory were intoxicated with chupilca del diablo, an explosive mix of liquor and gunpowder. In 1973, the army surrounded the Palacio de la Moneda, the seat of government and symbol of our democracy, with tanks, and then its planes bombed it from the air. Allende died inside the palace; the official version is that he committed suicide. There were hundreds of dead and so many thousands of prisoners that the sports stadiums and even some schools were turned into jails, torture centers, and concentration camps. Using the pretext of liberating the country from a hypothetical Communist dictatorship that might occur in the future, democracy was replaced by a regimen of terror that was to last sixteen years, and leave its consequences for a quarter of a century.

  I remember fear as a permanent metallic taste in my mouth.

  GUNPOWDER AND BLOOD

  To give an idea of what the military coup was like, you have to imagine how a citizen of the United States or Great Britain would feel if the army rolled up in full battle gear to attack the White House or Buckingham Palace, and in the process caused the deaths of thousands of citizens, among them the president of the United States or the queen and the prime minister of Great Britain, then indefinitely suspended Congress or Parliament, disbanded the Supreme Court, abrogated individual liberties and political parties, declared absolute censorship of the media, and finally, over time, strove mercilessly to extinguish every dissident voice. Now imagine that these same military men, possessed with messianic fanaticism, installed themselves in power for years, prepared to root out every last ideological adversary. That is what happened in Chile.

  The socialist adventure ended tragically. The military junta, presided over by General Augusto Pinochet, applied the doctrine of “savage capitalism” as the neoliberal experiment has been called, but refused to acknowledge that to function smoothly it requires a labor force free to exercise its rights. Brutal repression was used to destroy the last seed of leftist thought and implant a heartless capitalism. Chile was not an isolated case, the long night of dictatorships darkened the continent for more than a decade. In 1975, half of Latin America’s citizens lived under some kind of repressive government, most of which were backed by the United States, which has a shameful record of overthrowing legally elected governments and of supporting tyrannies that would never be tolerated in its own territory: Papa Doc in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, and many others.

  I realize as I write these lines that my view is subjective. I should report events dispassionately, but that would be to betray my convictions and sentiments. This book is not intended to be a political or historical chronicle, only a series of recollections, which always are selective and tinted by one’s own experience and ideology.

  The first stage of my life ended that September 11, 1973. I won’t expand on that here since I have already recounted it in the final chapters of my first novel and in my memoir Paula. The Allende family—that is, those who didn’t die—were taken prisoner, went into hiding, or left the country. My brothers, who were out of the country, did not return. My parents, who were in the embassy in Argentina, remained in Buenos Aires for a while, until they received death threats and had to escape. Most of my mother’s family, on the other hand, were bitterly opposed to the Unidad Popular, and many of them celebrated the military coup with champagne. My grandfather detested socialism and eagerly awaited the end of Allende’s government, but he never wanted it to be at the cost of democracy. He was horrified to see the government in the hands of the military, whom he despised, and he ordered me not to get involved. It was impossible, however, for me to stay on the edges of what was happening. This fine old man spent months observing me and asking tricky questions; I think he suspected that his granddaughter would vanish at any moment. How much did he know about what was happening around him? He lived an isolated life, he almost never went out of the house, and his contact with reality came through the press, which suppressed the truth and overtly lied. I may have been the one person who gave him the other side of the picture. At first I tried to keep him informed because in my role as a journalist I had access to the underground network that replaced serious sources of information during that period, but eventually I stopped bringing him bad news because I didn’t want to frighten or depress him. Friends and acquaintances began to disappear; some returned after weeks of absence, with the eyes of madmen and signs of torture. Many sought refuge in other countries. In the beginning, Mexico, Germany, France, Canada, Spain, and other countries took them in, but after a while they had to call a halt because thousands of other Latin American exiles were being added to the waves of Chileans.

  In Chile, where friendship and family are very important, something happened that can be explained only by the effect fear has on the soul of a society. Betrayal and denunciation snuffed out many lives; all it took was an anonymous voice over the telephone for the badly named intelligence services to sink their claws into the accused, and in many cases nothing was ever heard of that person again. People were divided between those who backed the military government and those who opposed it; hatred, distrust, and fear poisoned relationships. Democracy was restored more than a decade ago, but that division can still be felt, even in the heart of many families. Chileans learned not to speak out, not to hear, and not to see, because as long as they were not aware of events, they didn’t feel they were accomplices. I know people for whom Allende’s government represented the most unstable and dangerous state of affairs that could befall a country. For them, individuals who pride themselves on leading their lives in accord with strict Christian principles, the need to destroy that rule was so imperative that they didn’t question the methods. Not even when a desperate father, Sebastián Acevedo, poured gasoline over himself and set himself on fire in Concepción Plaza, immolating himself like a Buddhist monk to protest the torture of his children. Ways were found to ignore—or pretend to ignore—violations of human rights for many years, and, to my surprise, I still find some who deny those crimes occurred, despite all the evidence. I can understand them because they are as adamant regarding their beliefs as I am mine. Their opinion of Allende’s government is nearly identical to mine of the dictatorship of Pinochet, with the difference that in my view the end does not justify the means. Crimes perpetrated in
shadows during those years have, inevitably, been coming to light. Airing the truth is the beginning of reconciliation, although the wounds will take a long time to heal because those responsible for the repression have not admitted their guilt and are not disposed to ask forgiveness. The acts of the military regime will go unpunished, but they can no longer be hidden or ignored. Many, especially young people who grew up without political dialogue or without a critical spirit, believe that there’s been enough digging through the past, that we must look to the future, but victims and their families cannot forget. It’s possible that we will have to wait until the last witness to those times dies before we can close that chapter of our history.

  The military who took power were not models of culture. Seen from the perspective of the passage of years, the things they said are laughable; at the moment they were spoken they were quite terrifying. Exaltation of the nation, of “Western Christian values,” and of militarism reached ridiculous levels. The country was run like a barracks. For years I had written a humor column in a magazine and anchored a lighthearted program on television, but nothing like that could work in that atmosphere because in truth there was nothing to laugh about—except those who were governing, which would have cost you your life. The one sliver of humor may have been Tuesdays with Merino. One of the high-ranking members of the junta, Admiral José Toribio Merino, met weekly with the press to offer opinions on assorted topics. The journalists eagerly awaited these pearls of mental clarity and acumen. For example, in regard to the 1980 change in the Constitution that was intended to legalize the military’s assault on power, he stated with the greatest seriousness that “The first transcendence I see in it is that it is transcendent.” And then he immediately explained, so everyone would understand: “There were two criteria in the creation of this Constitution: the political criterion, let us say, Platonic-Aristotelian in the classic Greek sense, and the second, the absolutely military criterion, which comes from Descartes, which we shall call Cartesian. In Cartesianism, the Constitution meets all that, the kind of definitions that are extraordinarily positive, which look for truth without alternatives, in which one plus two cannot be more than three, and where there is no alternative but three.” It soaked in at this point that the press had lost the thread of his discourse, so Merino clarified: “And the truth falls in that form before Aristotelian truth, or the classical truth, let’s say, that gave certain shadings to the search for it; it has enormous importance in a country like ours that is searching for new paths, looking for new ways to live.”