Burying the Dead, Not the Past

On the eve of my departure from my semester abroad in Chile, Augusto Pinochet, the country’s ex-dictator, died. My host sister called it the best farewell the country could have given me.

I stumbled into the celebrations, first learning of the death from jubilant honks, then from radios at the fería where I had gone to start and finish a semester’s worth of Christmas shopping. Champagne and confetti curtailed my walk to the metro.

Pinochet’s death made the air electric, gave every stranger something to talk about. For the next four hours, a crowd assembled spontaneously in the blazing sun, hugging, waving flags, and jumping ("el que no salta es Pinochet") to the chants of "se siente, se siente, Allende está presente." Half a metro line uptown, nearly as many people were in mourning for their "friend" and "father," the ex-general.

It has been more than a decade since Chile’s much-vaunted transition to democracy, but the presence—now the specter—of a man I had begun to think of as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named still haunts the country, perpetuating its bi-polar economic, political, and social environment. And despite the outpouring last Sunday, it is unlikely that his death will change anything.

As I left the peaceful celebrations, the crowd begun its march to Chile’s seat of government, La Moneda. I returned home to TV coverage of tear gas and water-shooting tanks. The cops had been called out to protect La Moneda, the target of Pinochet’s bombs in 1973 and a Molotov cocktail on the anniversary of his coup last September. But despite descriptions in the Chilean media of the demonstrations as "massive," in a city of approximately six million people, TV stations estimated that less than 1,000 had gathered at La Moneda. The idea that a crowd smaller than an undergraduate class at Harvard could have posed a serious threat to anything was ridiculous.

Violence like this seems to accompany any public display in Chile. But it is a symptom, not a cause, of civil unease. It represents an inability to achieve a functional public dialogue about Chile’s recent past.

One reason democracy works in the United States is that we have a consensus about fundamental political values (equal rights for all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). They are based on a shared understanding—accurate or not— of our history.

In Chile, there is no such agreement what happened in the past, let alone what it means for the future. My host grandfather denies that Pinochet’s regime tortured anyone unjustly; his daughter likes to tell the tale of how her ex-husband was detained and tortured three days before their wedding. A trial of the former dictator, which might have forced the two sides to talk to one another to find common ground, never happened, and now, never will. The emphasis is on moving forward.

Such a focus poses a threat to Chilean stability and democracy in the long run. Though it might be tempting to think of Pinochet’s death as symbolizing the end of an era for military dictatorships in Latin America (after all, Castro is on his way out, too), the region has yet to wrestle with its past. Only after doing so will it be able to bury its dictators for good.

Natalie I. Sherman ’08, a Crimson news editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.