MICHELLE BACHELET
From The New York Times - Nov 18By David Rieff
Bona fide examples of poetic justice in politics, where the innocent are vindicated and the wicked get their just deserts, are about as rare in real life as they have been commonplace in popular culture, dating at least as far back as “The Count of Monte Cristo.” And yet to the extent that such things do occur, the political triumph of Michelle Bachelet, the current president of Chile — and the first woman in South America who can be said to have earned the title on her own merits — has been just such an event. The woman who was, as a 23-year-old medical student, briefly imprisoned along with her mother by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and whose father, Air Force Gen. Alberto Bachelet, was tortured and died in military custody in 1974, is now Chile’s chief of state — while the dictator died, his reputation in tatters, shortly after she took office.
Of course, Bachelet is not a character in an adventure novel, and Chilean reality is far more complicated than a morality play. To the contrary, Bachelet, now two years into her presidency, is a prime example of the moral quandaries and emotional strains that still affect Chileans old enough to remember the Pinochet dictatorship. As many pointed out to me during a recent visit, Chile is not South Africa, and Bachelet’s ruling Concertación alliance — bringing together a number of center and center-left parties — is not the African National Congress. The transition to democratic rule in Chile was not, as in the case of South Africa, a case of a losing side and a winning side. After the democratic government of President Patricio Aylwin assumed power, Pinochet remained commander of the armed forces and senator for life. (He was stripped of senatorial immunity after his indictment for crimes against humanity by the Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón.) A result is that to this day, 17 years after the return of democracy, Chileans of all political persuasions still live in something of a state of contradiction.
Sometimes that is not easy. The writer Jorge Edwards, a supporter of Bachelet’s, told me that you need to remember how small the Chilean elite was in 1973. Edwards was a diplomat under Salvador Allende, the Socialist president whom the Chilean military overthrew that year, and he spent most of the Pinochet era in exile, “Today,” he said, “it is not uncommon for a person who was tortured to cross paths with the person who ordered his torture.” What usually happens then? “Usually, they pretend not to see each other,” Edwards replied and, sighing, added, “Perhaps it’s for the best.”
Bachelet certainly behaves as if she agrees and has governed accordingly. During our interview, Bachelet evinced no particular emotion about what happened to her either in jail or in exile. Chilean friends who know her told me this was typical. Only twice, in fact, did Bachelet seem to need to compose herself. The first time was when she was describing the circumstances of her father’s arrest, torture and death. The second moment surprised me; it came when I asked Bachelet whether as minister of defense — the post she occupied under her predecessor as president, Ricardo Lagos — she had been tempted to go after those who had killed her father. Even if she hadn’t known before who they were, she could certainly have found out.
She had not, she told me after a pause. She said this matter-of-factly, without preening. It was, she said, a personal choice, and she made a point of discussing it with her mother, making it clear that her mother should not feel herself bound by her daughter’s decision. Her mother also decided not to investigate further, and the family let the matter rest there.
In any case, Bachelet told me, “Many people who committed the worst abuses are in jail, including several of the people I have reason to believe were among my father’s torturers.” Then she added, “And you know my father died of a myocardial infarction after torture, whereas his torturers were in jail for far worse crimes.”
Whatever else you can say about Michelle Bachelet, there is not an ounce of self-pity in her. She herself says that she is “a world-historical optimist. And of course, when one is in jail, one discovers the real value of liberty. You come to appreciate what before you took for granted. What I was mostly interested in, what I remain committed to, is less dwelling on the past than creating a better future.”
There are limits to her optimism. As she puts it, “We Chileans may not be able to agree about what happened, but we can agree we have established the consensus that we have to resolve our problems democratically,” adding that “a strong consensus now exists in Chile that human rights must be sacrosanct.” But Bachelet is not naïve. She knows full well that many Chileans still believe the military’s coup against Allende was warranted, and while the country is far less divided than it used to be, important cleavages remain. Although she does not say this explicitly, I had the impression that she is not persuaded Chileans will ever reach a similar consensus about the past. Painful as it is for many, above all the victims of the Pinochet era, they may have to agree to disagree. Bachelet is careful not to claim too much. “I don’t use the phrase ‘reconciliation’ because it is a religious expression,” she told me. “Besides, reconciliation implies turning the page.”
Bachelet was saying, in effect, that there have to be limits to collective accountability even as the government tries its best to prosecute those guilty of individual crimes during the dictatorship. There can be judicial redress, but the chances of South African-style truth and reconciliation are slim. South Africa had clear winners and losers. In Chile, many of the leading figures within National Renewal, the center-right opposition, supported the dictatorship and even opposed the return to civilian rule in the plebiscite that Pinochet called in 1988 and that led to his stepping down.
In any case, for Bachelet, reconciliation is a problematic concept for reasons other than its practical applicability. “In my view,” she told me, “it does a disservice to the memories of the thousands of victims of the Pinochet regime, to the many thousands more who were tortured and to their families — many of whom still do not know what actually happened to their relatives, spouses, friends.”
Bachelet’s refusal to speak of reconciliation has been welcomed by the associations representing the families of the disappeared. One of their leaders, Lorena Pizarro, told me that she and her colleagues felt that Bachelet was more open to their concerns than her predecessors were. “The president understands in a visceral way, a way I feel that none of her predecessors have, how imperative it is for us to know what happened, what anguish it is not to know, even after all these years. Perhaps it is because she suffered herself.”
David Rieff, a contributing writer, covered
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