Chile After Pinochet: Democracy Restored

Late last year, while socialist governments throughout Eastern Europe crumbled under the weight of failing state-run economies, the voters of Chile decisively defeated the official presidential candidate of the country's 16-year-old military regime-a man who had presided over one of the boldest and most successful experiments in free market economics anywhere in the Third World. In the December 14 election, Hernán Büchi, the wunderkind minister of finance under General Augusto Pinochet, received only 29 percent of the vote. Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, the candidate of a broad coalition of 17 center-left parties that had vehemently opposed the Pinochet regime's orthodox economic policies and authoritarian practices, was easily elected president with 55 percent. A third aspirant, maverick businessman Francisco Javier Erráizuriz, came in third with 15 percent of the vote.

Aylwin, a 71-year-old veteran politician widely respected for his diplomatic skills and measured views, pledged to lead a government of reconciliation and moderation after taking office on March 11. His coalition also won 72 of 120 contests for the Chamber of Deputies and 22 of 38 Senate seats, despite an electoral law and districting system that were heavily skewed in favor of proregime candidates. Voters rejected candidates from both ideological extremes and chose most new legislators from center-right, Christian Democratic, and moderate socialist parties, signifying an overwhelming popular desire to return to the politics of compromise and accommodation that for much of the past century and a half had made Chile one of the world's most successful constitutional democracies.

The opposition victory came a year after Pinochet himself had lost a national plebiscite designed to give him eight additional years at the helm of the nation. Relying on the overwhelming advantage of incumbency and the resources of a powerful military state, basking in the success of his economic policies, and determined to put to rest any doubts at home and abroad about his regime's legitimacy, the general had agreed to a scrupulously fair count of the plebiscite results.

But like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua two years later, Pinochet was forced to admit defeat when the electorate rejected his carefully laid transition plans by a 55 to 43 percent margin. The strong tradition of legalism among the Chilean military, forcefully articulated by the other service commanders on the night of the plebiscite, deterred any thought on the part of Pinochet loyalists of trying to tamper with the results.

Following the regime's second loss in the December 1989 elections, Pinochet vowed to respect the will of the people and peacefully transfer power to Aylwin. Indeed, he and his government attempted to portray the peaceful transition to civilian rule as the successful outcome of a 16-year military "mission accomplished"-even though they had warned up until election day that chaos and communism would be waiting in the wings of an opposition victory.

Nevertheless, a number of Pinochet's actions before and after the election have made it clear that the 74-year-old general-who may legally remain as commander-in-chief of the army until 1997-does not intend to fade away and let the civilian politicians, whom he excoriated for years as venal and incompetent, dismantle the institutions built by his regime over a decade and a half. Through last-minute appointments and legislation, his government created a number of authoritarian enclaves that will not be easy for the new civilian rulers to control. Today, Pinochet himself remains the most serious obstacle to a full transition back to democracy.

At the same time, the new government will face twin challenges from the civilian constituencies and political groups that helped bring it to power. It must respond to the frustrated political and social demands of a country that has lacked basic representative institutions for 16 years, and that may now harbor unrealistic expectations of what democracy can deliver. It must also try to keep a disparate coalition of governing parties together even after the common enemy of dictatorship fades and the natural competitiveness of democratic politics reasserts itself.

Yet there are...