Chilean upheaval

After an earthquake, homeowners have to decide whether the spidery ruptures in the walls are cosmetic or structural. Do they plaster them over, dust them off and get back to life as usual after carting away a few bucketfuls of debris?

Or is the structure irreparably cracked and damaged to the core? Do the nasty fissures mean that the whole thing is ruined and has to be pulled down, like my friend Alberto’s house in Curicó [above]?

The four-party Concertación that had ruled Chile for two decades until losing the March elections is asking itself precisely those questions this week in a hastily-organized conclave. The meeting was announced as an opportunity to exercise ‘self-criticism’ and examine what caused them to get blown off by voters who chose the right-wing opposition instead, led by finance, media and transportation mogul Sebastián Piñera, the richest man in the country.

Oh goody, self-criticism, intoned the nation’s shocked Socialists, Radicals and vaguely generic ‘Democrats’—can’t wait! The Christian Democrats, the fourth Concertación partner, promptly announced that they wouldn’t go to any damn losers’ meeting. This despite their prominent role in causing the debacle by insisting on re-running as their presidential candidate the geriatric war-horse Eduardo Frei Junior, who already had bored the entire country to death for six interminable years back in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, Frei lost.

The Concertación originally emerged from the fight against the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and took shape as a governing coalition of all democratic forces except the Communist Party, which the army insisted be kept out as a condition of the negotiated transfer of power. The coalition divvied up the patronage and held the fractious civilian forces together as Pinochet (who remained as commander-in-chief) and the armed forces tried to hang on to their privileges and political role.

But now that the democratic rules are largely restored, albeit in a perverted shape, it is not clear what holds the Concertación together today. During my recent visit, I heard endless tales of how it had warped into a system of closed, favor-trading clans, impenetrable to anyone not enrolled in one of the party rosters. The four parties had long since jettisoned the popular movements that ousted Pinochet and had ignored their grassroots. Instead, the only palpable presence in the country’s vast popular sectors today are the marginalized Communists and the unapologetic pinochetista brigades of the Democratic Independent Union (UDI), a highly resilient party of corporatist, ultra-Catholic reactionaries created by the military dictatorship to channel its favors to the poor.

I lived through 14 years of Concertación government, the first few as a journalist, and recall hearing one of its top political operatives describe how useful it was to have Pinochet still around, hovering over the civilian regime like a bad dream. ‘You keep the old guy in a cage like a lion at the circus’, he explained, ‘and every once in a while you take him out and parade him around’.

The idea was that a frightening figure like Pinochet would keep people from demanding too much of the new civilian government. It was a revealing comment on how comfortable the incoming ‘democrats’ were with the thugs and their apologists who had slaughtered thousands of Chileans in cold blood and tortured an estimated 100,000 people in the preceding 15 years. On the other hand, the Concertación’s fear of populist or left-wing challenges to their incipient rule was very real.

This demobilization strategy was quite successful: the Concertación did things its way for two decades, and today millions of voting-age youth refuse to register or go near the polls.

Piñera, who so far has governed more like a moderate Republican in the Eisenhower mold (remember them?) than an admirer of Mussolini, could be envisioning a new political paradigm in the country, which has been neatly divided into three thirds for nearly a century: right, left and center. If he can peel off enough Christian Democrats and other middle-of-the-roaders, he could forge a sizable centrist force that would appeal to the largely depoliticized population.

To do so, he needs to purge his ranks of any remnants of the old repressive structure and govern pragmatically. The Concertación’s greatest fear should be the possibility that Piñera will make prudent decisions, clean up or at least reduce the rampant corruption that plagued his predecessors and improve management of the state apparatus—especially important given the country’s huge post-earthquake reconstruction needs.

If Piñera manages a program of this sort, he could fairly well launder the right-wing parties’ bloody shirt of association with the historic crimes of the dictatorship, which after all enabled them to get obscenely rich. He could pull the younger generations who don’t remember the slaughter of the 1970s and ’80s into a new consensus on laissez-faire capitalism, stripped of any challenge to the country’s grotesquely unfair class divisions.

Meanwhile, the four parties of the Concertación will have to consult their political architects to see whether they can resuscitate a movement that purported to represent the middle and lower classes but in the end saw and treated them as passive observer/recipients of a paternalistic state—much like the Democrats here at home.