The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet

Chapter 6. Politics and Free Speech

119 S I X Politics and Free Speech I Valparaíso is a port city on Chile’s central coast with steep hills, few skyscrapers, and an eclectic bohemian architecture that earned it a designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.1 It is also the location of the country’s new congress and senate complex, a project the Pinochet regime considered one of its proudest public works. Constructed at a cost of $40 million, its brutalist, geometric design makes it an imposing landmark. From its rooftop patio, lawmakers and their staff can enjoy a panoramic vista of the city and the coast, although the complex blocks the view of the Pacific Ocean for residents of the hillside neighborhood to the east. Prior to the 1973 military coup, the Chilean congress had been con- 120 B u i l d i n g D e m o c r a c y sidered the most effective legislature in Latin America and was based in Santiago, along with the rest of the central government’s institutions. The regime used the original congress building, a neoclassical structure with Corinthian columns, to house its justice ministry. Pinochet and his advisors grudgingly acknowledged that Chile would again someday have a legislature and no doubt believed that locating it eighty-five miles outside the capital would weaken its influence and preserve the executive branch’s political power. Construction began slowly, was still underway when Chile’s new senators and deputies took their seats in March of 1990, and was not complete until more than another year had passed. The new congress and senate complex provided lawmakers with more than three times the space of the old congress, with fourteen floors of offices plus a longer, lower building containing meeting rooms and an extensive library. Valparaíso city officials hoped that the presence of the new congress might provide a much-needed economic stimulus to a port whose fortunes had slowly declined since the opening of the Panama Canal. There was speculation that a new high-speed rail link might eventually connect Valparaíso with Santiago, but for now, the only way to travel between the two cities is a ninety-minute journey along a highway that passes through two mountain tunnels. The regime’s constitution also sought to curb the congress’s power by providing for nine nonelected senate seats, with one of these to go to Pinochet when he left the army. Any reform of the constitution itself would require a three-fifths majority in both the senate and chamber of deputies, and there was a clever provision for preventing this from happening: a binominal system for electing members of congress that ensured that the political Right would almost always receive more than its share of seats and that smaller political parties, such as the Communists , would almost never gain any seats. The binominal system worked by diluting voter support for any political coalition. Each congressional district elected two representatives to each house, although each voter may cast only one vote for one congressional and one senatorial candidate. Political coalitions such as the Concertación or the rightist Alianza por Chile would present two candidates for each office in every voting district. The candidate receiving P o l i t i c s a n d F r e e S p e e c h 121 the highest number of votes would win one of the two seats in a given district. But the second congressional seat would not go automatically to the candidate receiving the second-highest number of votes. If this candidate belonged to the same political coalition as top vote-getting candidate , their combined votes would have to total more than two-thirds of the ballots cast in their district for both candidates to win both seats. If this did not happen, the second seat would go to the most successful candidate run by the other political coalition. The unfairness of this system was evident from the start: during the 1989 elections Christian Democrat Andrés Zaldívar won 29.8 percent of the votes in one Santiago senate race, followed by Ricardo Lagos, a moderate Socialist who won 29.2 percent. But since the two Concertación candidates’ combined votes fell short of the two-thirds-plus-one requirement stipulated in the Pinochet regime’s constitution, the district’s second senate seat went not to...