“Have you heard about Pinochet?”
Oh, my God. Not him again. Not Pinochet. Not this early in the morning. Not ever. Pinochet? Pinochet? I was sick of Pinochet.
“Pinochet?”
I couldn’ t stop myself. I pronounced those dreaded syllables. Maybe Victoria Sanford—a graduate student who had volunteered to come and pick me up at my Berkeley hotel so I could catch a predawn plane on that October 17 of 1998—would not add yet another hideous bit of news to the dismal string of tidings always associated with that name, the sort I had been receiving for the last twenty-five years.
Instead, Victoria shocked me with something absolutely unexpected: “He’ s been arrested in London,” she said. “Last night. Scotland Yard, acting on an order from a Spanish judge.”
I thought to myself, my mind automatically switching into the Spanish I bizarrely shared with General Pinochet: Esto tiene que ser un sueño. This has to be a dream. Which had been Victoria’ s reaction when she awoke that morning, she told me as we headed across the bay to the San Francisco airport—the detention of the former Chilean dictator could not possibly be true. But the radio had repeated the news again, as if the announcer himself wasn’t able to believe it: last night the police had, in fact, surrounded the London clinic where Pinochet was recovering from a back operation and then a squad had gone in to inform him he was being detained to await extradition hearings by order of Judge Baltasar Garzón—on charges of genocide, no less.
One hour later, as my plane took off, I still knew no more than those meager details. I was up in the air—in more than one sense. I recalled something that had happened to a friend, a Chilean like me, on the afternoon of September 11, 1973. He was in Paris and had just boarded a train for Rome—the Palatino, an express that made no stops on the way—and, as the doors shut, he had caught a glimpse of the latest edition of Le Monde in someone’ s hands, there, down on the platform. COUP D’ ETAT AU CHILI. “Military takeover in Chile,” the headlines screamed at him. And kept screaming at him and within him for the infinite hours of the night it took the train to cross Europe, without my friend being able to descend or find out what had happened to his country, his family, his friends, his president. Trapped inside the news. Who was alive, who was dead, what will happen to us? Not knowing that at about the time the doors were hissing together in France, on the other side of the planet, way down in the Southern Hemisphere, in our country that hugs the Pacific Ocean like a dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica, as Kissinger once said-how could my friend guess that I was asking myself those same questions along with millions of our compatriots, huddled in front of a radio listening to a voice we would come to identify in the days and months and years to come, the gruff, nasal, twanging bark of General Augusto Pinochet announcing the first decree of the military junta: whoever was caught on the streets during curfew would immediately be shot.
Most Chileans had never before heard the voice that would henceforth accompany every moment of their private and public lives.
I’d been less fortunate: I had already been in contact with that man, had exchanged a few words with him some weeks before the coup. It was an afternoon in late August of 1973. Those were the tense, waning days of Chile’s experiment in creating socialism through peaceful means, and our democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, was fighting a losing battle against the forces that would soon overthrow him. As an unofficial advisor to Fernando Flores, Allende’s chief of staff, I spent all my days and many of my nights at La Moneda, the colonial building in the capital of Santiago that houses the executive branch. On that day in August, the phone rang and, on the other end of the line, I heard the rasping growl of “El General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte,” as he impatiently identified himself, the soldier who was supposed to be the most loyal of all the military to the democratic regime. I rapidly passed him on to Flores—deaf to what that voice of Pinochet was hiding, the betrayal he was devising, the coup that had already happened in his mind.
That was it: no more than a fleeting phone conversation. But I spent the years that followed brooding over the other phone calls the General must have made in the days that were to come: the call ordering the air force to bomb the presidential palace, where Allende died; the call disbanding the Chilean Congress; the call to arrest Orlando Letelier and the call to mutilate and execute Enrique París and the call to disappear Carlos Berger and the call to cut the throat of José Manuel Parada and the call to burn Carmen Gloria Quintana alive.
I would register it all from exile, from Buenos Aires and Paris, from Amster-dam and Washington, carefully, almost perversely, almost as if I were punishing myself for not having recognized what the future was brewing for us, for my ineffectiveness at predicting what the hands that had dialed that number at La Moneda had in store for me and my adopted homeland. Yes, he was the one. Even if I knew that there were so many others to blame, that these crimes could only have been committed with thousands of others helping and millions standing by indifferently. It was Pinochet, always Pinochet. When I read in a human rights report that 180,000 people had been summarily detained in the first year of the dictatorship, an estimated 90 percent of them tortured. And when I greeted my friend Oscar Castro in France, expelled from Chile after a two-year term in a prison camp for having staged a play about the captain of a sinking ship who whispers to his crew to stay alive and continue the struggle, when I had to console him for his mother’ s disappearance at the hands of the secret police. And when I read in one paper and another that 27 percent of Chile’s population was receiving 3.3 percent of the country’ s income and would try to conjure from these dry statistics the faces of the poor, the families I had worked with for years in the Santiago shantytowns and how they had to eat cats in order to survive. And when a letter informed me of the child prostitutes that now beggared the city. It was Pinochet, ese hijo de puta Pinochet, who was responsible, always Pinochet who stood between me and the land I was not allowed to return to, between all of us and the normal lives we could no longer live while he was in power. And yet, for all the satanic dimensions I attributed to his hands and his voice, at the same time he remained, for me, strangely ethereal, almost disembodied.
I scanned his past to discover traces of the man who controlled Chile—the man who could offhandedly remark that not a leaf fell anywhere in the country without his knowing about it. I looked for clues and found next to nothing, hardly an anticipation. As I pored over his autobiography—his carefree childhood in the 1920s at the port of Valparaíso, his pranks as a military cadet in the 1930s, his three undistinguished books on geopolitics where not a controversial statement or political position of any sort could be garnered, his lumbering, nondescript military career—I could not dispel the sense that he was hiding, that he had been hiding perhaps even from his own self all his life, learning from an early age not to tell anybody who he really was, perhaps not even revealing to his own mirror or wife the person he could someday become.
There was, in the entire haystack of his past, only one intriguing incident. Back in 1946, President Gabriel González Videla, already choosing the side of the United States in the burgeoning Cold War, had expelled from his government the Communists who, as part of the Popular Front Coalition, had helped to elect him. González Videla rounded up thousands of his former allies and dispatched them to a concentration camp opened in the northern desert region, just outside the isolated, run-down port of Pisagua. In charge of this facility was the man who, almost thirty years later, would reopen Pisagua yet one more time to ship his own enemies there: Captain Augusto Pinochet. And it was in Pisagua, on a day in 1947, that Pinochet was to have his first encounter with another man from Valparaíso, Salvador Allende, who, as a diputado (member of Congress) from the Socialist Party, was heading a congressional delegation that had come to investigate the conditions under which the prisoners were being held. When Allende, stopped by the military, had announced that he would complete his visit with or without permission, Pinochet had answered with threats to shoot him if he tried. According to Pinochet’ s memoir, the man who was someday to become president of Chile had backed down.
Later on, the General was to worry that this violent confrontation would come back to haunt him, but Allende never again alluded to it, and certainly did not remember it when he designated Pinochet Commander in Chief of the Army on August 23, 1973, just nineteen days before the coup. So crafty Pinochet had fooled the savvy President and just about everybody else, swearing in a letter to Allende-written at about the time I had picked up the phone and initially heard his gruff voice-that he would give his life to defend the president and the constitution. And Pinochet had not, in fact, joined the conspiracy to overthrow the man who had named him to his post until the last moment, but once he had taken the plunge, el General went about systematically eliminating or subordinating every rival and ally. This seemed to be his central characteristic: an unceasing, often lethal ability to dupe his enemies. Deep cunning cloaked under a mantle of gray invisibility. Cazurro is the word we use in Spanish. Hiding all his life and still hiding as I tried so many years later to pin him down from my banishment. Slipping away. Only corporeal for me in those three brief, innocent seconds when I had registered his voice over the phone. Pinochet was everything in my life. And yet, he was also nothing.
But someday…someday this would change, I told myself, we all told ourselves, inside and outside Chile. Someday, I would return victoriously to my homeland and we would be given the satisfaction of watching Pinochet tried for his crimes, hearing that voice imploring forgiveness, we would witness those hands humiliated and handcuffed. Though it turned out that I was the one who, in 1983, had to return with my hands behind my back to a country where Pinochet was still very much in control. Nor did my return bring him any closer. The General lived behind an imposing wall of security, at a distance from Chile. Nobody I knew had ever caught more than a glimpse of him. Even in Santiago, he continued to be everything and nothing.
It was one evening during that first visit home after exile, as I was returning to uptown Santiago from one of the city’ s miserable suburbs, that I finally saw General Pinochet for the first time—or at least saw part of him. I had spent most of the afternoon with a group of destitute youngsters who spoke of their addiction to benzene fumes, the cheapest, quickest escape from an infernal reality. They told me of brutal police raids and the lack of jobs in a zone where the unemployment rate was, according to a priest who ministered to the boys and their families, verging on 70 percent.
My then brother-in-law, the filmmaker Nacho Agüero, had driven me to that slum, and on our way back, at the exact intersection of Antonio Varas and Eleodoro Yáñez, our car was brought to a halt by a screeching siren and a hive of braking motorcycles. “It’s Pinochet, it’s Pinochet,” Nacho murmured anxiously. A caravan of black cars raced by, and just as it passed us, a white-gloved hand darted out of one of the windows and waved, in the typical gesticulation of dignitaries acknowledging a cheering crowd. It was absurd: there was nobody there except us.
And then he was gone. An apparition.
Pinochet, of course, had no idea that I was watching him. And yet I felt that the General was mocking me—that his ghostly hand in the dusk was gesturing defiantly: I am here to stay, this is as near as you and your kind will ever get to me, this is the only farewell you will ever see from me. I am as far from justice as I am from your hungry eyes.
That incident turned out to be, in some vexing way, prophetic of what was to come. He was protected, I came to feel, by those phantasmagoric gloves, dismissively eluding even the idea that he could be judged. Insulated from any possible accountability, those hands of his had signed into law an amnesty for himself and his men in 1978, and even after he lost a plebiscite ten years later and was forced out of office in 1990, that voice I had first heard so many years earlier kept on threatening another coup if anybody in the new democratic Chile dared touch him, in fact staging two revolts to make sure that not one of his officers would ever be so much as called to testify—though he had also extracted from the authorities a promise that they would quash an investigation into the corrupt business deals that had turned Pinochet’s oafish son into a multimillionaire. No idle threats from the former dictator—who for the first eight years of the return to democracy stayed on as Commander in Chief of the Army. And when he left the army in March of 1998, arrogant as ever, and became Senator for Life, he continued to dictate policy and warn his enemies not to move against him or his associates, while the Supreme Court packed with his own designated judges refused to consider any accusations of human rights violations. As all this happened, I told myself—now from afar, an expatriate who had decided not to return to Chile—that he would mock us forever, that we would never be rid of his person or his legacy. Those hands shrouded in white would go to the grave without once having had to confront what they had done, what they had made other hands do.
And yet, it now seemed that history had other plans for the wrists and fingers of General Pinochet. Other hands, the hands of English policemen, had stormed into his life and ours; the hands of a Spanish judge had the tyrant cornered.
Perhaps my fractured visions of him through these years—the disembodied voice, those faded newspaper clippings, the fragments of a life in hiding, the white, white glove—were, after all, prescient, intimations of a possible farewell. Was I finally going to get the chance, was my country about to be allowed, to wave goodbye to General Augusto Pinochet?
Ariel Dorfman is the author of Death and the Maiden, Heading South, Looking North, and many other widely translated works. His piece in this issue is excerpted from Exorcising Terror: the Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet.
