Democracy Dies in a Day

18:27There were military barriers on the corners, people with automatic weapons behind sandbags. The military imposed a curfew. During that period, we're listening to the radio, there's no information going on. On a regular basis, we would hear gunshots. John and his roommates hunkered down for the night, waiting to see what would happen. Coming up, dawn breaks on a new reality for Chile.

19:07Hi, this is Jules from Toledo, Ohio. I love listening to ThruLine on my drive and on my run and really anytime. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 2. Las dos caras de la dictadura. The two faces of dictatorship. When you are in prison, the most dangerous enemy is the sense of time. If you lose the sense of time, you lose your mind. This is Sergio Bitar again. In the hours and days that followed the bombing of La Moneda, Sergio's whole life was turned upside down. He was detained and he was taken by Pinochet's forces to the very southern tip of South America, to a prison on Dawson Island.

20:25every morning. Like the Navy hymn. The military anthem of each branch.

20:37Day and night, Sergio and the other prisoners were under the watchful eye of Pinochet's armed forces. We felt that they had some sort of manual with orders on how to deal with the prisoners. Or how to break the prisoners. And the way to do it is to feel that the other one is an animal. You are not a human being. That's part of the logic. Sergio and the others did hard physical labor for 10 plus hours a day with little to no food. Many were tortured, kept in isolation with glaring lights in their eyes. It was hard to understand where you were, who you were, what was happening. The mind is not able to recognize, it's not conscious about what is surrounding you.

21:37What would happen to my wife, to my children, to the earth? At that time, your body reacts in a different way. What happens at the moment is survive.

21:54In the days and months after the coup, Chile descended into chaos as the Pinochet regime took control of all facets of Chilean life. The democracy was over. They dissolved Congress. They rewrote the Constitution. They raided all of the universities and took over them by force. This is John Dingus again. As an American reporter in Santiago, he was on the ground trying to figure out what was actually happening in real time. It was obvious that they were arresting people because of their sympathy with the Allende government. People were detained across the city. They were raiding the poor people's areas and the factories.

22:3820 ,000 people were held in the national stadium, which overnight transformed from a soccer pitch to an open-air prison. Some of the people who were sent there never returned. We had vague reports of a lot of violence going on in the countryside. And in fact, a lot of the deaths were owners of farms telling the police to kill certain peasants because they had been leading the political movements.

23:12And still, amid this violence and chaos... Life was still going on. Many people were still going to work, to school, and to buy groceries. In some sense, it's easier because the economic chaos that was happening right before the coup, where there were food shortages, there was a black market, there were protests all over the place, all of that ended, and it was on the surface, more peaceful. A veneer of civility and normalcy seemed to return to Chile. Countries like the United States quickly recognized and legitimized the military government, also known as the Junta. The immediate violence calms down by the end of 1973.

24:01The patrols, the constant raiding of houses, all of that had died down. They emptied the national stadium and the other stadiums. The junta played up the idea that rule of law had returned to Chile. In the poor, working-class neighborhoods, that narrative was a hard pill to swallow. There, the number of people who had lost their jobs, the number of people that had been taken to prison or had been forced into exile. They had seen the violence of the military coup with their own eyes. It was their family members that were gone, dead, or simply disappeared. The environment of fear was much, much stronger.

24:41In 1974, some prisoners began to be released, including Sergio Bitar, who immediately left the country. John and others took it as a sign that the violence had finally come to an end. So we thought that things were returning to normal. And for some Chileans, life wasn't just returning to normal. It was better than ever. There was the rich neighborhood, the Providencia and Las Condes neighborhoods, and they were overjoyed. I mean, they broke out the champagne on September 11. For them, this was heavenly. This was what they had always dreamed of, that Chile would go back to the time when they were in charge, and basically things were arranged in line with their privilege.

25:32So basically, it depends on where you, from where are you looking the dictatorship and who is suffering the dictatorship. This is Camila Vergara, a lecturer in political theory at the University of Essex. She grew up in Chile during the 1980s. Her family, like many middle class and wealthy families, supported Pinochet. I am like, you know, a daughter of privilege. I come from a family of landowner in the South. The way her grandfather saw it, Allende and his communist cronies had threatened to destroy everything he had worked for by redistributing farmland to poor farmers. My grandfather says, these communists, we need to kill them all.

26:13We need to just, like, get rid of them in a way. This was the narrative of the regime. And frankly, as a child from a wealthy family, Camila had no real conception of the regime's violence. If you are really in the richest 10%, which means that you are dressed a certain way, you have a car, you have all these other things that insulate you from the repression. Because when you're on the top, you're not really suffering, you are profiting from, right? After the coup, Pinochet undid Allende's efforts to bring Chile's land and resources back under national control. They returned more than 300 businesses into private hands and foreign investors.

26:55and with help from a group of Chilean economists educated in the U.S. called the Chicago Boys, transformed Chile's economy into a laboratory of neoliberal capitalism. They drafted a manifesto of this new society in which it was based on the individual rational consumer in a way. And it was basically the Bible of neoliberal economics. And this Bible then became the program of the Pinochet regime. The idea was simple. The government had little role to play in the economy. State-run services were largely privatized. Price controls were lifted. No big labor unions. The economy ran best when there was ample competition and very little to no regulation.

27:41Only the best would rise to the top. The change was a shock. Almost immediately, the price of common goods shot up. The price of sugar, for instance, went up 500%. This was great for profit margins and sugar CEOs like Camilla's mom. And in theory, these riches were supposed to trickle down. In reality, that's not how it played out. The system is created for the rich to get richer in a way and the poor to get stuck.

28:16John Dingus saw these disparities firsthand. And it wasn't long before he realized that nothing had actually returned to normal. Hundreds of people were being arrested and put in secret prisons. In other words, people that had been arrested and after months had gone by were not appearing. And this then is the phenomenon that is known as disappearance. Over the course of Pinochet's regime, more than a thousand people disappeared without a trace. 3 ,000 were killed and 40 ,000 were tortured or imprisoned. As a reporter for Time magazine and The Washington Post, John's stories made U.S. readers face what was happening in Chile.

29:03And ironically enough, even though the U.S. welcomed Pinochet and helped establish the conditions that led to Allende's overthrow, some of the loudest voices against Pinochet's regime were coming from the Chilean diaspora in the United States.

29:22I would say that something that was really very impressive was the capacity of human beings to resist.

29:32Orlando Letelier, the former ambassador to the U.S. under the Allende government, emerged as one of the leaders of Chile's exile community. When Orlando Letelier came, he had access to ambassadors, even to ministers. And we decided, of course, that he was appointed as the head of the exiles in the U.S. This is Juan Gabriel Valdez. He's Chile's current ambassador to the U.S. At the time of the coup, he was a student in the U.S. studying abroad. After Pinochet took power, he decided to stay in the United States and become Letelier's assistant. to fight for Chile from afar. Orlando Letelier, he was very effective communicating from a moderate point of view what we wanted to do, which was to recuperate democracy.

30:21Letelier had been imprisoned at Dawson Island at the same time as Sergio Bitar, and he wasn't afraid to tell people what he had seen firsthand, including the press. In 1975, he told NPR this. There were, I would say, At least 60 or 70 minors, people, boys from 15 to 16, 17 years old, all of them were Churchill, all of them. As Letelier's calls against Pinochet gained more and more attention, Juan Gabriel remembers being afraid that something would happen to his friend and mentor. The Chilean dictatorship didn't eliminate just its enemies inside the country, but also outside the country. And that fear proved to be well-founded.

31:19I was with my children at home, and suddenly I received a call from Orlando's secretary. and Orlando's secretary said to me, something happened, there was an accident apparently and everybody's left the institute and they are running there. Orlando was so careless when he drove and it's raining and probably he had an accident. And then this woman called me and said, are you going home to see the FBI or are you going to the hospital? And I said, what does the FBI has to do with an accident? An accident, it was a bomb. And I couldn't believe it. The Chilean government denied involvement in the car bombing that killed Orlando Letelier and a young American colleague.

32:12Did you ever buy that story? Or did you kind of know? Yeah, you knew it was Pinochet. I was absolutely sure it was Pinochet. Decades later, in 2015, newly declassified U.S. intelligence documents concluded what Juan Gabriel and others already suspected. General Pinochet had personally ordered the killing of Letelier on U.S. soil. At the time, the junta denied involvement, but the opposition was getting louder and louder. The long tentacles of the dictatorship were starting to create cracks in the facade. And soon, they would split wide open. That's coming up. Hi, this is Lea Marjolet from Paris Rance.

33:00I'm a teacher and I love ThruLine. And you are listening to ThruLine from NPR.

33:10Part 3. El Camino Patras. The Road Back. I must have been around, you know, nine years old or eight years old. It was the 1980s, and Camila Vergara was excited to spend the day with her mom. My mom was the CEO of the sugar industry, which was a state industry, and I would never see her. Camila was usually at home. Very isolated from the real world. But on this day, her mom surprised her and said, Oh, let's do something together. I will take you to a ballet in central Santiago. So Camila put on her leotard, her tutu and slippers, and then they drove into the city. When they arrived at the Teatro Municipal, a towering white stone theater, Camila and her mom eagerly walked up to the gates.

34:04And it was closed. Her mom was confused. Had they gotten the date wrong? Were they too early? Too late? Where was everyone? And suddenly...

34:19Thousands of people come flooding down the street. The crowd's chants mixed with the loud barking of police dogs. We were caught in the middle of the protest. My mom immediately started trying to cover me. And the police repressing the people who protested, beating up people. Tear gas. everywhere. So for the first time in my life, I was exposed to the glimpse of what is happening.

34:54The protests had begun in May 1983. Copper miners took to the streets first. They demanded an end to government repression, disappearances, mass arrests, police violence, censorship of the press. And an end to a catastrophic economic crisis the country had been plunged into a year earlier, largely a result of the Chicago boys' experimental policies. Unemployment was over 25 percent. Wages had dropped more than 30 percent for those who still did have a job. Almost half the population was living in poverty. It was a tinderbox waiting to erupt. And when the copper miners took to the streets, the fuse was lit.

35:39Before long, hundreds of thousands of others joined them. and Jornadas de Protesta Nacional, a series of massive national protests. It was more than an awakening. It's like the kind of slivers of truth coming in.

35:58And for Chileans living in exile, these protests were a kind of invitation to return home and attempt to take down Pinochet.

36:09We went to Mendoza, the city that is close to the mountains from the side of the Argentinians, and we go across the border. Sergio Bitar understood the risks of crossing that border. He could be arrested, imprisoned again. So it looks a little bit crazy, but it was something he felt he had to do. To be in my country and to fight against the dictatorship. Some people believe that security is more important than freedom. And they will discover after some time that when freedom is lost, it is not security anymore. Juan Gabriel Valdez also returned to Chile around this time with his family. And he says almost from the moment they got there, they knew the government was keeping a close eye on them.

37:05Four days or five days after I came back, my wife and myself, we were invited by friends. The person who was in charge of our children called us at 10 at night saying, there are two people here who entered. I had to allow them to come into the house and they are looking at your pictures. They are taking some of the pictures in your albums. These kind of things began to happen very often. Both Sergio and Juan Gabriel got involved in the growing opposition movement. The so-called Democratic Alliance. Disagreements quickly arose. What were their goals? Who was allowed in? What kind of resistance was off-limits?

37:46There was a guerrilla movement putting bombs everywhere. So we had, you know, outages of power that were due to the guerrilla people. But many in the movement disagreed with that approach. We cannot fight a dictatorship through the armed resistance or violence. Sergio says their weapons would never compare to what the government had. So instead of fighting fire with fire... We had to do it through rules, within the rules. And they realized they needed to make the umbrella bigger, to bring more people into the movement. Conservatives, trade unions, democratic socialists. They couldn't afford to box people out if they didn't agree on everything.

38:29The main thing they all needed to agree on was that democracy was the way forward for Chile, not Pinochet. The rest they could figure out later. No one of us can get democracy back alone. So we have to start building actions together and to define a strategy. They figured their best shot at ousting Pinochet. would be in October 1988, when something called a plebiscite was scheduled to take place. Basically, the plebiscite would be an election in which Chileans would vote yes or no to keeping Pinochet as president for another eight years. It was a footnote that Pinochet had included in the new constitution he passed in 1980 to give the world the illusion of term limits and fair elections.

39:19I remember my best friends at the time in Spain telling me you are getting into a very difficult situation. A plebiscite design that the dictators, they will count the votes. Are you crazy? It's impossible. Impossible, but kind of their only chance of ousting Pinochet while playing by the rules. So we said, let's create a big mass of people to vote. Convincing people to vote would be an uphill climb. The central key issue is to combat fear. The dictatorship uses fear as a control of the mind and the people. And people were afraid. If I go, if I say, if they say me, they can kill me, they can take me, they can clean my job.

40:10It was risky. They needed people to buy into the idea that it was worth that risk to get out and vote no to another term for Pinochet. So they turned to the most powerful tool they had, television.

40:33On channels across the country, including Televisión Nacional de Chile, Chile's PBS. I was called to be the leader of the television campaign, which was allowed by the dictatorship and was the first time in which the opposition would show itself on TV. You might be wondering why a dictator would give an opposition movement that's trying to oust him any TV time. Chileans were surprised, too, when the junta passed a law that allowed yes and no sides to both have free time for their own political commercials. It was meant to give the whole process a veneer of credibility. So in the month leading up to the election day, the opposition was given 15 minutes of airtime on national television every day.

41:19Pinochet and his crew were sure it wouldn't make any difference, that the yes side would dominate. And they figured it would appease the international community, especially the U.S., which had long since soured on Pinochet. The no campaign was given a late-night time slot. The government considered that a program at 11 o 'clock at night would be considered irrelevant by the majority of the population, and they wouldn't see it. But Juan Gabriel was determined to make the most of those 15 minutes every night. He hired an army of admen. People working in publicity, filmmaking, sociologists, and political analysts.

41:58And they set out to sell democracy. It's not just complaining for what we suffered. If we do that, you never win. In order to win, you have to propose something better than what you are living now. In other words, give the people hope.

42:26The whole campaign was, la alegría ya viene. Happiness is coming.

42:43These ads were high quality, optimistic. The young people singing. With lyrics like, whatever they say, I'm free to think, because it's time to win freedom. And the colors. The campaign had a rainbow logo. The feeling of community. They avoided heavy ideological language and instead emphasized. How you can eat better food, have your kid go to school, have some place where to go if you are ill. Let's say no.

43:18Each night, more and more people tuned in to those 15 minutes, and support for the No campaign, which would vote out Pinochet, grew. Step by step, step by step, step by step.

43:34On the eve of Election Day, no one had any idea what would happen. The United States has heard reports that the Chilean government plans to cancel the referendum or nullify its results. And on the morning of October 5th, 1988, when the polls opened. The fear was that people would not come out and would not vote. I went out to visit all the voting places, and it was impressive because it was very hot, I remember. And the lines were long, long, long all the day. So that gave us the hope that we would win. By 10 o 'clock this morning, there were lines six blocks long in many voting places here in Santiago.

44:2597 % of the country's registered voters came out to vote, including Pinochet himself, dressed not as a general, but in civilian clothes. The question was simple. Should Augusto Pinochet continue on as president for another eight years? Yes or no? The first results that were announced showed the no vote winning. There was a moment that day which created an enormous alarm. The Ministry of the Interior that is in charge of giving the results of the election and the plebiscite stopped giving the results around 3 o 'clock or 4 o 'clock in the afternoon. The no vote was expanding its lead by this point.

45:09Pinochet called the commander-in-chief at 1 in the morning to his office. So I said, what? What's going to happen here? Some people thought that the military would not recognize the result. I remember very vividly because there were phone calls being made and Pinochet didn't want to step down. But his generals and the U.S. government had told Pinochet, we're done. We're not going to support the dictatorship anymore. You need to move on. And that night, the government came back to the television and said, I recognize and accept the majority verdict expressed in the day of yesterday by the citizens.

45:47Then no one. And from that point on, the mood in the headquarters of the No Command was joyful. And I think we danced and we cried and we sang until 4 in the morning, 5. It's a feeling of expansion, of big feeling of joy. It means that we are, we exist, we have rights. Chile today could be on its way back to democracy. Probably the most unforgettable day in my life. A moment that my life started again.

46:36Nearly 56 % of Chileans voted no, which was a majority, a win. But not a resounding majority. even after years of torture, censorship, and repression. Camila Vergara says it wasn't simply a vote on democracy versus dictatorship. Imagine the fear. Everybody was afraid of the military coming back out. Would a no vote lead to chaos, violence, another economic recession? By 1988, the economy was in much better shape and a new middle class was emerging. Some saw that as Pinochet's free market model working. So it was complicated. Still, Pinochet's reign as president finally came to an end.

47:28The idea of defeating the dictatorship with a pen and pencil, that was kind of the narrative. But in reality, defeating the dictatorship didn't automatically mean democracy was restored. We knew that it was not just a matter of replacing Pinochet with somebody else. It was a much more complicated thing, and we had to make concession. Of course, we negotiated with the military. The first democratic government, Pinochet was the leader of the armed forces. Yes. The police, basically, was the same police. There was no purge. And then Pinochet, after stepping down from the military, became senator for life in the Senate.

48:09and therefore with full immunity. So basically he insulated himself and his people and not only insulated himself, he was an active voter in the Senate, vetoing reform. Almost, you know, a decade of Pinochet in some kind of position of power during the young democracy. In 1998, Pinochet was arrested in London on charges of genocide, torture and kidnapping. He was ultimately found unfit to stand trial and was released back to Chile, where he died in 2006. Today, Chile is in the middle of a close presidential race. The current election just went into a runoff. The next vote is scheduled for December 14th, 37 years after the plebiscite vote.

48:58There is still a big gap between the hopes and dreams of those TV ads and the reality of people's lives. For Sergio Bitar, that doesn't mean they've failed. It simply means there's more work to do. It's a work in progress, and it's a cultural progress also. The idea of negotiations is part of democracy. The guys in power have the big responsibility of behaving in the way they want the society to become. You can try to build a democracy with aggression. If you are a corrupt guy and winning lots of money, well, you cannot have a democracy under these conditions. Camila Vergara, who is now a lecturer in political theory at the University of Essex, says this isn't just a problem Chile is facing today.

49:48What we have today in the so-called free world is an oligarchy that keeps benefiting. Every year, it doesn't matter who wins the election, they are the ones who are increasing their wealth. So basically is a system that formally looks like what we call democracy, separation of powers, universal suffrage, freedom of speech. But the people on the top, the wealthy few, the powerful few, are the ones really calling the shots, controlling everything, passing law to benefit themselves more than others. And that we see through the growing inequality of the system.

50:35That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. And I'm Ramtin Adab-Louis. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Ana Sofia Vera, Peter Kornblue, Micah Ratner, Maisha Galiba, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Durge, Bette Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keeley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

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