Chile Hanging Tough

Their faces daubed with menacing black paint, soldiers fanned out through the busy streets of downtown Santiago. As armored vehicles and water cannons took up positions at strategic intersections, khaki-clad recruits with automatic weapons sealed off a 2-sq.-mi. area of shops, theaters and office buildings. Puzzled laborers on their way home from work looked on as angry students and union members materialized, taunting the military with their ritual battle cry, "He is going to fall!"--a reference to Chile's authoritarian leader, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. But then paramilitary police lobbed tear gas into the crowd, and within two hours police had carted off 121 demonstrators in vans.

That show of force last week, ostensibly to discourage a planned union protest, was the latest step in a month-old campaign by Pinochet to intimidate his burgeoning opposition, which now ranges from Communists to the Roman Catholic Church to members of his own junta. Yet far from smoothing the ! transition to democracy, Pinochet seems intent on proving at whatever cost that the lessons of the Philippines do not apply to Chile. In the process, critics charge, he is further polarizing Chilean society. Says Gabriel Valdes, leader of the moderate Christian Democratic Party: "Pinochet is a good machine for producing Communists."

Army units have rounded up an estimated 100,000 men in Santiago's vast slums and taken them at gunpoint to nearby assembly points to have their identities checked. Detainees are released after their hands have been stamped with black ink to indicate that they have been inspected. Only about 100 have been arrested and jailed. Says Valdes: "It is barbarous, exactly the same as what went on in the Warsaw Ghetto."

The government says that the purpose of the raids is to "find common delinquents and subversives" and claims that the sweeps have turned up weapons and explosives. Meanwhile, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, a guerrilla group thought to be linked with the Communist Party, last week blew up three power pylons south of Santiago, plunging the capital and other towns housing more than half of Chile's 12 million people into darkness for 90 minutes.

Pinochet, who came to power in a 1973 coup, has insisted on labeling his political opponents as Marxists or Marxist influenced. A poll released last week by the Santiago-based Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences disclosed that only 13% of Chileans questioned consider themselves "leftists," but fully 73% agree there should be "radical changes" in Chile's government. Such changes are unlikely until at least 1989, when Pinochet's 1980 constitution calls for the four-man military junta to choose a candidate for President, subject to public approval in a yes-or-no referendum. The current unrest, however, may tempt Pinochet to scrap even that small step toward democracy. "In the next weeks," predicts Orlando Saenz, a Chilean industrialist, "Pinochet could well declare that present conditions make 1989 impossible." If that happens, the tense standoff between the government and the opposition may turn ugly.