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On September 11, 1973, with the tacit approval of several centrist and right-wing parties, not to mention the covert support of the United States, Augusto Pinochet, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, bombarded the Chilean presidential palace. Instead of surrendering, Allende went on the radio and declared that he was going to die for his ideals with the confidence that "sooner or later, the great avenues will again be opened, through which free men will pass to construct a better society." Shortly thereafter, he shot himself with a gun given to him as a present by Fidel Castro.
Next to the corpse were Allende's trademark black glasses, the frames split and the lenses shattered. During his life, these deceptively benign glasses had masked a resolute and audacious politician; and now, thirty-five years after his death, they have come to symbolize the hope and disappointment of Allende's political project. Posted on nearly every streetlamp around Santiago were fliers showing an image of intact black glasses against a white background with the headline, "One Hundred Years, One Thousand Dreams." At the centennial ceremony, a life-size sculpture of a broken frame, its lens cracked and smudged gray with smoke, was situated next to the main stage, an uneasy reminder of death during a celebration of birth.
But it was, after all, Allende's martyred suicide, along with his alluring and somewhat unstable blend of idealism and pragmatism, revolution and democracy, that has rendered him a near mystical figure, one that can represent many different things to many different people, thus sparking inevitable battles over who the "real Allende" was, what he represented, what sort of legacy he left behind, and which political parties have remained true to his supposed ideals. These battles, of course, may never be resolved.
Moreover, just as Allende had transformed Chile into a laboratory for revolutionary democracy, Pinochet set up a laboratory of his own, aided by American neoclassical economists, experimenting with radical free-market economic reforms. He privatized many state-run industries, outlawed trade unions, and drastically reduced the social welfare role of the state. This new neoliberal program was, in many ways, the exact opposite of Salvador Allende's democratic route to socialism.
In 1980, Pinochet drafted a new Constitution that extended his presidency until 1988, during which time he would call a plebiscite to determine whether his regime would continue in power for eight more years. The year before the plebiscite, which permitted only a Si or No vote on Pinochet as the sole candidate, political parties from the left and center rallied together and ultimately defeated the regime at the ballot box. With Pinochet agreeing to step down, declaring that he had sufficiently "saved" the nation from Marxism, many of these centrist and leftist parties, including the Socialist Party but not the Communist Party, united to form the Concertación coalition, which would win all four subsequent post-dictatorial presidential elections.
While the Concertación has promised sweeping changes, they've had their hands tied by many of the undemocratic measures of Pinochet's Constitution. Twenty percent of the Senate consisted of unelected, Pinochet-appointed representatives, while the judiciary was stuffed with appointees from the Pinochet administration. And until his 1998 arrest in London for international human rights violations, Pinochet himself remained an influential political player, first as the head of the Chilean Army and then as a self-appointed "senator for life." Moreover, the binomial electoral system more or less guaranteed that the two largest coalitions?-the Concertación and the right-wing Alianza?-would split each district's two elective seats, thus thwarting the Communist Party and other leftist groups from gaining legislative representation. This system ensured that Chile's reestablished democracy would be characterized by endless compromise, limited citizen participation, and closed-door negotiations between party elites.
Pinochet has been dead for over a year. His apologists have dwindled, his legacy has been tarnished. Allende's stature, however, has risen over the years, with each successive Concertación government making a point to pay homage to him. But it is not Allende's legacy that defines contemporary Chile. It is Pinochet's. His 1980 Constitution, even with recent reformations, continues to neuter the Left and give undue legislative weight to the Right; his neoliberal economic model is considered practically irreversible. His fingerprints remain all over the country.
Allende, then, may have won the symbolic battle, his image, to many, having become synonymous with social justice and economic equality. But it is the disgraced and disowned Pinochet who is winning the war.
http://www.nplusonemag.com/node/494/print
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