Return of the pinochetistas

Chileans are still trying to absorb what it means to have elected a new government led by the right-wing parties that cheered and profited from the vicious military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s led by the notorious Augusto Pinochet. Incoming president Sebastian Pinera is often compared to Italy’s national embarrassment, Silvio Berlusconi, as both are billionaire businessmen and media moguls turned politicians.

I find the comparison too facile at least so far, and the early signs emanating from Pinera’s administration are generally not disturbing or suggestive of a return to the bad old days of secret police impunity. The government is struggling with the effects of the devastating Feb. 27 earthquake, whose impact remains overshadowed by the Haitian experience and secondarily by the outgoing administration’s knee-jerk attempt to downplay the chaos out of a misguided need to look competent, modern and not—perish the thought—“underdeveloped”.

Pinera has even called for a temporary tax increase on businesses to build up funds for national reconstruction—hardly the posture of a typical rightist ideologue—and is taking heat from his own camp over it.

However, a current case is generating painful reminders of past abuses and the decades of collusion in them provided by the parties now in the majority acting as Pinochet’s claques. Pinera named a retired general of the national police, Ivan Andrusco, to head the country’s prison system, and human rights groups raised holy hell over it.

Andrusco was investigated but never charged in one of the country’s most shocking cases, the degollados murders, in which three opposition intellectuals were kidnapped off the streets—in one case at the entrance to a schoolyard where the man was dropping off his daughter—and later found with their throats cut. Andrusco worked for a special unit of the Carabineros, the national police force, that was later discovered to have committed the crime, and several top officials eventually went to prison for life. Andrusco claimed he was only a driver and escaped indictment.

Opposition legislators are indignant that Andrusco could have decision-making powers over the prison conditions of his former colleagues and have demanded that the nomination be withdrawn. Pinera’s ministers have told them to piss off, but the issue shows no signs of going away.

The case is an excellent example of the loss of the moral high ground by the Concertacion, the outgoing four-party coalition that governed Chile for two decades since the end of the dictatorship in 1990. As Pinera’s justice minister delights in pointing out, Andrusco was regularly promoted by the previous government and even participated in an official delegation to report to the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in 2004.

The Concertacion was so eager to “look to the future, not the past”, as Barack Obama might put it, that it regularly turned a blind eye to the dubious records of many intermediate functionaries in the military and police services. Now these pragmatists or opportunists (choose one) find themselves denouncing the new government for boosting the careers of pinochetista collaborators whom they refused to marginalize when they had a chance. The howls of outrage are ringing rather hollow.