The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet

Chapter 5. Elections and the Military

97 F I V E Elections and the Military I As Chile approached its first presidential election since Pinochet left office, the general mood was unmistakably optimistic, as if the country wanted to leave its polarized political past behind. An opinion poll published in March 1993 by the conservative Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP) showed that 68.5 percent of respondents thought the country was progressing and that just over half felt their own economic circumstances would be better or much better in the future. Out of a list of thirteen issues, crime, health, and poverty were listed as voters’ chief concerns, with human rights ranked sixth and terrorism, environmental issues, and corruption at the bottom of the list. The same poll showed respondents giving the Aylwin government 98 B u i l d i n g D e m o c r a c y an above-average approval rating of 4.8 on a 7-point scale, and Aylwin’s personal approval rating was 72.6 percent.1 The country’s economic growth was averaging 6 percent annually, and the number of those living in poverty, which had been 40 percent when Aylwin took office, had dropped to 33 percent, supported by the 36 percent increase in the minimum wage. Inflation had also been reduced from 26 percent in 1989 to 12.7 percent.2 The Concertación party’s candidate was Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, son of the former president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–79), a civil engineer and Christian Democrat who had won his party’s presidency after defeating several rival factions. Despite his parentage, the younger Frei was a relative newcomer to Chilean politics, only entering public life following his father’s death in early 1982. The circumstances of that death were suspicious: the seventy-one-year old former president had been a formidable Pinochet detractor whom the regime could not dismiss as a Marxist apologist. Frei had checked into one of Santiago’s best hospitals for a simple hernia operation, appeared to recover, but then suffered a relapse and returned to the hospital. Following a second operation, Frei died of septicemia. In 2004 a Chilean court ordered the exhumation of the former president ’s body, and forensic specialists took samples of tissue, which were sent to the United States for analysis by the FBI. The report that followed said it was unable to detect traces of any toxin such as those concocted in DINA and CNI laboratories. Two years later a doctor who had treated Frei said his death from septicemia was unexpected and that a “foreign chemical substance” was a likely cause of death. A subsequent judicial investigation discovered that the former president and his family had been under constant surveillance by the Pinochet regime’s security forces and that the medical team treating Frei had documented links to the DINA and CNI.3 Despite the aura of the Frei name, some left-wing Concertación politicians were arguing that it was now the turn of the socialists to lead the next government. They were backing the candidacy of Ricardo Lagos, a popular former education minister during the Aylwin government who had founded the Party for Democracy in 1988, attracting former commu- E l e c t i o n s a n d t h e M i l i t a r y 99 nists and other leftists as well as independent voters. There were understandable fears that Chile would not be ready for a left-wing presidential candidate and that a Lagos nomination might cause the breakup of the Concertación. But the coalition held itself together, agreed upon Frei as its candidate, and began another successful political campaign. Frei, buoyed by the Aylwin government’s economic successes, easily defeated the right-wing presidential candidate, Arturo Alessandri, a businessman who was the nephew of yet another former Chilean president , Jorge Alessandri (1958–64), Frei’s father’s predecessor.4 Frei received 58 percent of the vote to Alessandri’s 24 percent, with the remainder going to candidates from smaller political groups and a former Pinochet regime cabinet minister who ran as an independent. There was relatively little ideological debate during the campaign, despite the fact that Alessandri, who had somewhat belatedly agreed to be a candidate, was a staunch Pinochetista. He had even gone so far as to back the former dictator’s recent assertion that there...