On a clear Saturday afternoon in Santiago, one can see the cordilleras rising above the city. Their high, snowcapped peaks seem to be within a mear few blocks' walk. Yesterday, the sky was clear and the mountains felt close enough to touch. Meanwhile, in front of the Hospital Militar as men in red shirts raised a plaster bust of Augusto Pinochet over their heads and older women waved the Chilean flag defiantly in the faces of camera clicking reporters, it was the past that seemed to sneak up closer than expected.There's quite a bit to report from Chile.
Has this made international news? It's certainly a big deal in Chile. On Thursday night, all of the Pinochet family, as well as many close associates of the former dictator, were arrested for stealing millions of dollars out of public funds. 23 people in all are set to go to trial for embsconding (and transfering into American bank accounts) 20 million dollars of public funds. Lucia Hiriart, Pinochet's widow and , had some sort of heart attack upon hearing the news and was admitted to Hospital Militar in Providencia (i.e. my neighborhood, and a few blocks away from the Stanford center!).
In the two days that Hiriart has been in the hospital, there have been a handfull of small Pinochet rallies. Friday on the news there was footage of two teenage girls getting into a fistfight outside Hospital Militar. One a Pinochetista, the other a, presumably, more left leaning byclists. Byclists said something scathing about the former Supreme Commander whiling pedaling by, Pinochetista was not pleased, pretty soon the two found themselves clawing at the face of their political opposition in the first spot of the nightly news and on the front page of the majority of national Chilean newspapers.
Oh yeah, Friday was also the anniversary of the 1989 plebiscite/"No vote," in which a plurality of the Chilean population voted Pinochet out of power.
Naturally, Friday night I went back to La Casa en el Aire (my socialist bar from last week), to listen to some classic, Chilean, political folk rock and sip pisco under the stern but idealistic gazes of Allende and Che portraits. (went with two Stanford kids, so it was a little less fun than last time, although the guy performing stopped at one point and asked why we were speaking Gringo and where we from, he then preceded to play an incredible acoustic version of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall," the three of us rocked out while the rest of the Chilean filled bar stared blankly with their half smoked cigarettes wondering "¿What is this shit (que es esta mierda)?")
Saturday, in light of sleeping late and eating a huge lunch I decided to go for a walk around Providencia...i.e. walk to the Hospital Militar and gawk at any potential action. (When I have time, I´ll tell you about Fabia, my program's main organizer and Stanford´s risk management representative, but she would have been freaking out if she knew my afternoon plans) Sure enough, my political voyeurism paid off. When I got to the hospital there was already a horde of reporters, camera men, and news vans waiting outside the front gate. I watched from across the street, occasionally masking my intentions by standing at the bus stop but mostly just blantantly gawking. After a solid fifteen minutes of waiting, the press seemed to come to life and they began to hurry and cluster around the front gate as a small silver car tried to pull out into the street. From across the street, I could see the passenger in the back seat. It was a woman with brown hair and huge black sunglasses. I would later learn that this was one of the Pinochet daughters, I think it might have been Jacqueline, the youngest. All five of the children were released from jail on Saturday and went to visit their mother in the hospital. They go to trial tomorrow.
Not long after the first car pulled out of the hospital´s lot, the Pinochetistas arrived. The first wave were a group of four middle aged to elderly women carrying a large Chilean flag. As they approached the grassy lawn in front of the hospital they sang loudly in boisterous Spanish. The few words I caught: "liberty..something, something...PINOCHET!" Soon the group grew larger when a few men arrived, they carried small flags and the aforementioned Pinochet bust. After a few minutes of hugging, kissing, and back slapping, they grouped together to wave their flags and and hold up the Pinochet bust pointed up at the hospital. They were joined by another group of women who pulled right up front in a green pickup truck, blasting music and grooving out in their seats to the tunes of Pinochet Pop. One women propped a home made sign up onto a bus like a sort of mission statement: Mientras Chile Exista Habran Pinochetistas. As long as Chile exists there will be Pinochetistas.
From my post across the street I was mostly alone, save for two middle aged women in cardigans and spectacles who watched on with serious faces. I assumed they too were spectators, until from the green pick up trunk across the street the music blasted: "¡Dame (give me)...Pinochet! ¡Dame...Pînochet! Dame...." And suddenly a few feet to my right, I heard a passionate response of "¡Pinochet!" I now saw that this nice looking Chilean lady was gripping onto a small blue bumper sticker bearing the name of Chile´s former dictator.
As the Pinochet supporters chanted and the reporters waited for more of the Pinochet family to leave the hospital, lots of people passed by. The scene would provoke a short glimpse from passerby, and sometimes the occasional car slowing down to look. But for the most part people would just shrug and walk on, they had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon. My hostfamily, who I have discovered is mostly apolitical, watches the news about the Pinochets as if it´s a spinoff of an old telenovela. They make comments at footage of the Pinochet children like: "Oh, she´s gotten so ugly," or "Wow, he´s lost a lot of hair." Even at the socialist bar on Friday night, there was less celebration than I thought. It was just a regular Friday night. Turth be told, I could only count about 10 Pinochet supporters in all.I have this sense, that a large majority of Chileans just want to move on. Chile´s come along way in the past 19 years. When you´re in Santiago you can feel the urge to progress to continue to update and build new high rise apartment complexes and invest in the arts and keep the streets clean and tolerate gay couples and divorce and a woman president.
As an hour wore on four more cars came out of the parking lot which caused the reporters to scramble around pointing their zoom lenses into the back seat and the Pinochetistas to cheer. I assumed that these were the remainig Pinochet children. The sun was getting low, and I was getting hungry. In the late afternoon sun the snow on the cordilleras turns a faint pink that seems close enough to touch.
