El Compañero Presidente

EL COMPAÑERO PRESIDENTE / Carolyne Wright I WASN'T IN CHILE during the coup. I had left the country some months before, escaping from Santiago in the midst of one of the by-then daily demonstrations that jammed the downtown area—one day for President Allende, the next day against—which made getting a taxi to the airport a miracle of logistics and luck. I had no political reason to leave; my fellowship year had ended and I was enroute to Bolivia and Peru before returning to the U.S. and graduate school in the fall. But I knew, as did everyone else in Chile, that something terrible was going to happen. It was in the air—like tear gas fumes lingering in the narrow streets after the marches, the ever-longer lines outside bakeries and grocery stores, as food staples and consumer goods became more and more difficult to obtain. It was evident in the strikes and school closures—students let out of school and workers leaving their jobs to express their political views (or those of their teachers or bosses). In unguarded moments, people's faces went haggard, their shoulders hunched; and Santiago itself, its older districts gray and genteelly shabby as an Eastern European city's, grew grayer and more claustrophobic . In the paralysis of tension that took hold of people, any sweeping action could have seemed a relief. For the growing numbers of Allende's enemies, that relief came as the red-alert sirens sounded on the morning of September 11, 1973, and the jets began their bombardment of the Moneda, the presidential offices downtown. The Chile that has come into being since then is not the turbulent, polarized republic in the midst of a courageous but doomed political experiment that I knew. That Chile is gone; the coup stands as an impassable barrier between it and the ongoing world. That Chile is like a scene from a movie stopped in freeze-frame, a country presided over by a dignified but unprepossessing man with clipped, graying hair and thick glass frames—not the bearded, fiery-mouthed orator or rifletoting , cartridge-belted revolutionary of U. S. stereotypes, but the staid doctor in the three-piece suit, whose speciality in medical school had been, ironically enough, pathology. A leader whose image seemed to be everywhere: on weathered campaign posters in working-class neighborhoods , on magazine and book covers in the kiosks, on the brightlycolored wall murals painted by the young graffitti artists of the Ramona Parra Brigade. There were homely, down-to-earth pictures cut out of magazines and tacked on the walls of neighborhood mothers' centers, above the kitchen tables in fruit vendors' and copper miners' houses, often beside photos of John F. Kennedy or the Pope. For all his conservative dress and lack of charismatic fire, Allende's was an image 28 · The Missouri Review to which the common people responded, upon which their hopes for a better life could focus. He was called the friend, the comrade or associate of the people—el compañero presidente. This nickname was not propaganda or media hype; Allende was a sincere man, determined to carry out his program of reforms no matter how the opposition tried to destroy his efforts. I had hardly arrived in Chile when I heard paraphrases of his grimly premonitory statement: if anything happened during his term, they would have to carry him dead out of Moneda. Many of his opponents had taken this declaration to mean that he would not be dislodged once he was in office, that he would alter or nullify the Chilean Constitution to get rid of elections and stay in power. But Allende never made such moves; it remained for his successor— with his perpetual states of military emergency, and the aid and cooperation of the CIA—to suspend elections and impose a police state. In the Chile I knew, Allende probably had very little real power, but his image was benignly ever-present. The hysteria and hatred his government provoked—all out of proportion to whatever threat his weakening Popular Unity coalition really posed—and the military violence unleashed to overthrow him, left Santiago a bombed-out, corpse...