The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet

Chapter 9. The Dictator’s Last Bow

181 N I N E The Dictator’s Last Bow I Augusto Pinochet Ugarte arrived home in Chile to find that a man he had once imprisoned was about to become president. Ricardo Lagos, a Socialist, had defeated Christian Democrat Andrés Zaldivar to become the Concertación’s candidate in the December 1999 presidential election. His opponent was Joaquín Lavín of the Union Democrática Independiente (UDI). Both men had graduate degrees from American universities. Lavín had a master’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago and once held a midlevel administrative post on the Pinochet regime’s economic team. He was a popular mayor of Las Condes, an upper-income municipality in eastern Santiago, but presented himself as a technocrat 182 C o n s o l i d a t i n g D e m o c r a c y with vaguely populist leanings. If elected, he promised that he would spend at least three months of the year governing from regions outside Santiago and proposed ending military conscription, making the Chilean army an all-volunteer institution. He said he would set up a free, direct telephone line for citizens to leave messages for the president. He also said he favored ending the designated senator seats in congress and indicated he was open to more constitutional reforms.1 Lavín was also a conservative Catholic traditionalist, a father of seven, and a member of Opus Dei. Lagos held a PhD from Duke University and had been a professor at the University of North Carolina before working for the United Nations in Chile and Argentina. In the mid-1980s he joined political groups opposing Pinochet and was arrested and held prisoner for several days in wake of the 1986 assassination attempt on Pinochet. “I recall when I was prisoner I was interrogated by a military prosecutor, who had a thick dossier on me,” he said. “I noticed that the top page bore an old address of mine, one I hadn’t used for fifteen years. I also recall some death threats used to arrive at this old address—pictures of gravestones, that sort of thing.”2 Whatever their errors in intelligence gathering, Pinochet regime officials viewed Lagos as a threat. His name was on a list compiled by the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) of people to be eliminated as a reprisal for the attack on Pinochet, and the fact that he was arrested and taken into custody beforehand by Chile’s civilian detective police that night may have saved his life.3 Two years later, during the “no” campaign against Pinochet’s reelection , Lagos once again made headlines when he appeared on a panel discussion on Chile’s Universidad Católica television channel. Looking straight into the camera, he accused Pinochet of deliberately misleading the country. “I will remind you, General Pinochet, that on the day of the 1980 plebiscite you said that President Pinochet would not be a candidate in 1989,” he said, holding up a copy of El Mercurio with the relevant headline and jabbing the air with his index finger. “And now, you promise the country another eight years of tortures, murders and human rights violations . . . you intend to stay in power for 25 years.”4 No one had ever so openly challenged Pinochet in public, and many Chileans wondered T h e D i c t a t o r ’s L a s t B o w 183 whether Lagos would live to see the plebiscite vote. He and other opposition leaders felt it necessary to take precautions with their own and their families’ safety during this period. Lagos stayed at his son’s house the day of the vote and recalled that when he left that morning, he wondered whether he would be returning that night. But he said it was important to project a sense of confidence. Lagos joined Aylwin’s cabinet and found that even then he had to deal with the former dictator. During Chile’s 1992 independence celebrations, Aylwin asked those members who had not yet attended the annual military parade to accompany him, which would mean greeting Pinochet in his role as army commander. The encounter was mercifully brief; Lagos and other the other cabinet officials were presented to Pinochet “as some of the ministers.”5 The 1999 election marked the second time the Concertación candidate...