Memories and mementos
By Mike Yuen
of a dictator’s brutal reignVALPARAISO, Chile -- A smiling Gen. Augusto Pinochet was sworn in Wednesday as a senator for life -- an event that prompted protests in the streets here and in several other cities and in the Chilean Senate, where angry colleagues displayed photos of dissidents killed during Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship.
Thirteen years ago, just two days after he extended a state-of-siege decree to contain demonstrations against his iron-fisted rule, I dined with Chile's dictator. I was then the Houston Post's Latin America correspondent, and I was among 12 U.S. journalists invited to La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, for lunch and an interview with Pinochet.
In his remarks, the unrepentent Pin-ochet was annoyed, but hardly troubled, by criticism from the Reagan administration of his then recent human-rights violations that included banishing hundreds of opposition leaders to internal exile.
"In Chile, with an authoritarian government, having moved from 'open democracy' to 'protected democracy,' we live in peace," Pinochet asserted. "Any problems are minor."
During that three-hour meeting, I also got a personal taste of how power was arbitrarily used. One of Pinochet's aides ordered me and another correspondent to turn off our tape recorders but did not issue a similar directive to the others. Rolling our eyes, we compiled, knowing that our colleagues would later lend us their tapes.
In other reporting trips to Chile, I would be tear-gassed and sprayed by water cannons using foul-smelling water. I was fortunate to elude baton-wielding police.
Chile, it turned out, became a defining part of my life. It was there, during the late 1980s, that I discovered how fragile democracy and civil liberties can be. I also witnessed and learned about acts of courage in places such as "Baby Doc's" Haiti, Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, Noriega's Panama and post-Dirty War Argentina, but Chile touched me more deeply.
On one level, it was the realization that despite Chile's long history of democracy, it was so easily undermined. While "Baby Doc" Duvalier and Gen. Manuel Noriega are gone from their respective countries, Pinochet is still a divisive and influential figure. He still casts a shadow nearly 25 years after his bloody coup in which -- according to the official count -- more than 3,000 people were killed or "disappeared" and eight years after he handed over the presidency to a civilian. It was Pinochet's rewriting of the Chilean constitution that now allows him to be senator for life.
On another level, I was touched by the spunk of working-class grandmothers in Santiago's shantytowns such as La Victoria. They banged on pots and pans in protest but were no match for the armed troops and police who forcibly quelled their demonstrations.
Unforgettable was the idealism of university students. In one instance, hundreds at the University of Santiago defied the general who was their "chancellor." They watched fellow students play soccer on the quadrangle outside the general's office, ignoring his directive prohibiting any campus gathering. They gathered, knowing they would be tear-gassed and clubbed.
In 1987, I covered the address by Pope John Paul II to Chilean youth at the National Stadium in Santiago. Fourteen years earlier, Pinochet had turned the stadium into a concentration camp and torture chamber for the thousands suspected of being sympathetic to toppled Marxist President Salvador Allende, who was elected democratically.
There, in the stadium, I made a promise that took 10 years to fulfill. On a brisk autumn afternoon four months ago, I visited the Brooklyn cemetery where Charles Horman, one of the two Americans killed during the coup, is buried. Both the book and movie titled "Missing" are based on Horman's disappearance and the contention that U.S. officials were involved in the coup and Horman's death.
My journey also took me to Horman's mother, Elizabeth Horman, who lives in Manhattan. She spoke fondly of her son, and of the long fight she and her late husband's waged to determine the truth behind their son's death.
Of Pinochet, she said, "He's the rotten head of a rotten system."
I still have Pinochet's business card and his book justifying the imposition of military rule, "The Crucial Day," that he gave me in 1985.
But among my most cherished possessions are three small wooden peace doves from the Vicaria de la Solidaridad, where Roman Catholic priests and nuns and social workers and human-rights lawyers aided victims of Pinochet's dictatorship.
And there are letters from a Chilean psychologist whom I met when she was a student activist. In one missive, mailed after Pinochet stepped down as president, she wrote, "I think I'm beginning a new phase in which I try to make this a better place to live in through my work as a therapist." The message on the letter's stamps: "Democracia en Chile."
Mike Yuen is chief of the Star-Bulletin's Capitol Bureau.
My Turn is a periodic column written by Star-Bulletin staff writers.
