One Carrot, Many Sticks

Pinochet brings out his troops to grapple with rising dissent

It was the fourth, and bloodiest by far, in a series of monthly protests that had already led to nine deaths. Attempting to enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew last Thursday, 18,000 troops and police battled hundreds of angry Chilean youths in the streets, while thousands of householders leaned from their windows banging pots and pans in a now familiar ritual of protest against the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. When the fighting ceased, 26 civilians, including three children, were dead, more than 100 were wounded by gunfire and an estimated 1,000 were arrested. In the aftermath, Major General Osvaldo Hernandez claimed his troops had been attacked by "subversives."

Not so, said Air Force Commander-in-Chief General Fernando Matthei. In what looked like a possible crack in the military monolith supporting Pinochet, Matthei claimed that "at no moment were there clashes in the neighborhoods that I visited." Almost simultaneously, retired Army General Roberto Viaux Marambio, a right-winger and hitherto firm supporter of Pinochet, issued an open protest against the government crackdown. "I do not want to keep silent lest it imply complicity," said Viaux. "The armed forces have been employed to repress the call of national protest." The signs of dissension in the military came after a week of mounting civilian pressure on Pinochet to resign.

The previous Saturday, at Santiago's Circulo Espanol, the city's largest club, an overflow crowd of 1,500 gathered, ostensibly to honor Christian Democratic Party President Gabriel Valdes. A former Foreign Minister under President Eduardo Frei, Valdes, 63, used the occasion to unveil a new coalition of Chile's five main parties, excluding the Communists. Calling itself the Democratic Alliance, the group demanded that Pinochet give way to a provisional government leading to elections within 18 months.

The mere fact that 1,500 politicians and their supporters had assembled safely in the same room was an event in itself. Officially, political parties are still banned; until a few months ago, such a meeting would have been unthinkable. In uniting the usually fractious opposition, Valdes hoped to convince Pinochet that the alliance offered a valid alternative to a nation staggered with debt and unemployment and locked in an often brutal cycle of protest and repression.

With Valdes calling for dialogue, the stage was now set for the government's response. It came four days later, when Pinochet, 67, stood wearily at attention in La Moneda Palace to the recorded strains of Chile's national anthem. The stocky, graying dictator stared impassively at the ceiling as the names of seven new Cabinet ministers were announced. The ceremony at first appeared depressingly familiar: it was the fifth Cabinet shuffle within 16 months, the 33rd in the decade since Pinochet seized power.

But the change this time had special meaning. Missing was the Interior Minister, Air Force General Enrique Montero Marx. He had served in the Ministry of Interior ever since Pinochet seized power ten years ago, when hundreds of leftists died in prison and thousands more were jailed, tortured and exiled. Significantly, his replacement was not another military man but Sergio Onofre Jarpa, a diplomat and one of the founders of the rightist Partido Nacional. Jarpa shares Pinochet's fervent antiCommunism, but he also favors amnesty for all but the most radical of 30,000 Chilean exiles, and he advocates congressional elections well before 1989, the year Pinochet has said he might step down. Still, by week's end, Valdes and his supporters knew they could only look forward to a prolonged and perhaps bloody campaign. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.