Between the sword and the wall

23/7/2010

Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido.

Pablo Neruda

When Sebastian Piñera won Chile’s Presidential election this past November, the collective nervousness was palpable. And as if to highlight that apprehension, a devastating earthquake rattled the Chilean psyche in a way rarely seen since September 11, 1973.

Everyone was waiting for the slightest sign of regression or treachery, ready at any moment to label President Piñera a fascist. Because, in the same way German anxiety becomes insufferable at the briefest mention of a contemporary neo-Nazi group, Chile—for all its recent successes, is paralyzed by the mere mention of the name Pinochet.

If you go to the National History Museum in Santiago, you can still see the front pages of many of the international dailies from September 11, 1973. They’re eerie to read. Eerie because they force you, if only temporarily, to consider what might have been had Salvador Allende remained President.

Chile is a tangible Latin American success story. There’s no need to scour macroeconomic data to prove it. Travel around the country and the visceral feeling of optimism is overwhelming—and not in a rationalized or patronizing sense, but in the persistent impression you get they’re closer and closer to looking every single one of their fellow OECD members in the eye.

And yet that optimism is tempered by a dour guilt-complex that manifests in an inability to stop asking whether it was all worth it.

As any neo-liberal blowhard will tell you, Chile wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys. Furthermore, they say, it was liberalization that paved the way back to democracy. In other words, nothing is free. The reign of Pinochet should be thought of as revolutionary period during which unfortunate atrocities took place, but without which the country would still be mired in a socialist legacy of negative growth, non-existent foreign investment, and high unemployment.

For the relatives of the thousands who disappeared, that’s pretty callous and insensitive— regardless of whether or not it’s accurate. And for the first non-Concertación President since Pinochet, for the first right of centre President of the country since the General, the reckoning could only be delayed for so long.

This weekend the billionaire President, the Harvard Ph.D. recognized as the man who brought credit cards to the country, is between a rock and a hard place, or as the expression goes in Spanish—the sword and the wall. He’s facing a Church proposal to pardon members of the military involved in human rights abuses during the period.

On the face of it, the decision is simple. The Catholic Church and representatives from several evangelical Churches are claiming they want a nuanced, case-by-case evaluation—not to exonerate the guilty, but to forgive the innocent and heal the country.

The widespread opposition disagrees.

To even consider these proposals would be to renege on his earlier somewhat surprising criticism of Pinochet; an outright rejection would appear reactionary and contrived.

Forgiveness is a slow process. And though we like to imagine it’s organic and spontaneous, it’s often rooted in bold cataclysmic decisions and solutions like Truth and Reconciliation Commissions—solutions that more often than not reveal, despite how public sensationalism can make them—the intrinsically personal nature of the words, “I forgive you.”

I don’t envy President Piñera’s dilemma. For one person to forgive and move on can often seem like an insurmountable task. When that decision affects the lives of millions, the burden is more than I can imagine.