Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos provides a fascinating glimpse inside his country's meteoric rise on the world stage. A leader in the underground resistance movement against Augusto Pinochet and his Dirty War, Ricardo Lagos burst onto the national stage in 1988 when he gave a speech denouncing the dictator, the first of its kind. Revolution soon followed, as Chileans took to the streets to oust a criminal despot and pave the way for democracy. In The Southern Tiger, Lagos chronicles Chile's journey from terror and repression to a thriving open society, and from crushing poverty to one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America. His thrilling stories of surviving Chile's political prisons, standing up to President George W. Bush over the war in Iraq, and rebuilding Chile's education system demonstrate why President Obama recently called Chile 'a model for the region and the world.' As citizens across the globe rise up to demand more from their governments, The Southern Tiger is an inspiring story of political and economic rebirth in the wake of fear.
Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos provides a fascinating glimpse inside his country's meteoric rise on the world stage. A leader in the underground resistance movement against Augusto Pinochet and his Dirty War, Ricardo Lagos burst onto the national stage in 1988 when he gave a speech denouncing the dictator, the first of its kind. Revolution soon followed, as Chileans took to the streets to oust a criminal despot and pave the way for democracy. In The Southern Tiger, Lagos chronicles Chile's journey from terror and repression to a thriving open society, and from crushing poverty to one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America. His thrilling stories of surviving Chile's political prisons, standing up to President George W. Bush over the war in Iraq, and rebuilding Chile's education system demonstrate why President Obama recently called Chile 'a model for the region and the world.' As citizens across the globe rise up to demand more from their governments, The Southern Tiger is an inspiring story of political and economic rebirth in the wake of fear.
The Southern Tiger: Chile's Fight for a Democratic and Prosperous Future
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Overview
Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos provides a fascinating glimpse inside his country's meteoric rise on the world stage. A leader in the underground resistance movement against Augusto Pinochet and his Dirty War, Ricardo Lagos burst onto the national stage in 1988 when he gave a speech denouncing the dictator, the first of its kind. Revolution soon followed, as Chileans took to the streets to oust a criminal despot and pave the way for democracy. In The Southern Tiger, Lagos chronicles Chile's journey from terror and repression to a thriving open society, and from crushing poverty to one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America. His thrilling stories of surviving Chile's political prisons, standing up to President George W. Bush over the war in Iraq, and rebuilding Chile's education system demonstrate why President Obama recently called Chile 'a model for the region and the world.' As citizens across the globe rise up to demand more from their governments, The Southern Tiger is an inspiring story of political and economic rebirth in the wake of fear.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781137000200 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/03/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 524 KB |
About the Author
Ricardo Lagos was president of Chile from 2000 to 2006, and the former UN special envoy for climate change. He has been profiled in media worldwide, including the BBC and The New York Times, and he has lectured at Harvard University, Yale University, Berkeley University (honored with Medal), Vanderbilt University, the London School of Economics, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. He is the former cochair of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington and an editorial board member of Americas Quarterly. Currently a professor at large at Brown University, he lives in Santiago, Chile where he is Chairman of Fundación Democracia y Desarrollo.
Blake Hounshell and Elizabeth Dickinsonare the managing editors of Foreign Policy magazine. They live in New York City.
Ricardo Lagos was president of Chile from 2000 to 2006, and the former UN special envoy for climate change. He is the co-author of The Southern Tiger. He has been profiled in media worldwide, including the BBC and The New York Times, and he has lectured at Harvard University, Yale University, Berkeley University (honored with Medal), Vanderbilt University, the London School of Economics, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. He is the former cochair of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington and an editorial board member of Americas Quarterly. Currently a professor at large at Brown University, he lives in Santiago, Chile where he is Chairman of Fundación Democracia y Desarrollo.
Blake Hounshell is the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and is the co-author of The Southern Tiger. He lives in New York City.
Elizabeth Dickinson is the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. She is the co-author of The Southern Tiger and lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
The Southern Tiger
Chile's Fight for a Democratic and Prosperous Future
By Ricardo Lagos, Blake Hounshell, Elizabeth Dickinson
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2012 Ricardo LagosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-137-00020-0
CHAPTER 1
THE FINGER
On the cool night of April 25, 1988, General Augusto Pinochet sat in the basement of his home, a low-slung bungalow set back from a quiet street in a wealthy part of Santiago, where he resided as president of the ruling junta in Chile. He was watching a television program on the giant screen that adorned his wall. That evening, Raquel Correa, an incisive journalist of slim but commanding stature, was set to interview various officials from Chile's registered political parties. Correa had an aura about her that seemed to emanate impartiality, and her weekly interviews in El Mercurio, Chile's biggest newspaper, were extremely popular. She was the only one who dared to ask tough questions of the generals who ruled us.
On the other side of Santiago, in the television studio, I was preparing intensely. I had been rehearsing this appearance for weeks. I had sought advice about what to wear, how to look, and how to speak on camera. Now it was show time. I was tense but focused as I sat down at the long oval table that separated me and the other three guests from the journalists questioning us. As the show began, I guessed — I was almost certain, in fact — that Pinochet would be watching. And I was planning to speak directly to him.
Everything had to go perfectly that night. It was the first chance for my party, the Party for Democracy (PPD is the acronym in Spanish), to persuade a mass television audience to set aside its fears and vote. At that time, Chile was still a wounded nation. Since military rule had been forced upon the country 15 years earlier, we had seen too many horrors to count. The 1973 coup had been our September 11, as Pinochet and the other members of what became the military junta besieged and bombed the presidential palace, La Moneda, violently ousting the previous Socialist government. Thousands were rounded up that day and brought to Santiago's main stadium, where most were tortured and many killed. Many of them were my close friends. The military regime that followed built an internal intelligence service so sinister that after it assassinated dissidents, it used helicopters to dump their bodies into the sea. The state was accountable to no one but Pinochet. Its reach extended to every corner of Chile, and even beyond. Pinochet targeted a handful of exiled enemies in terrorist attacks — a sniper in Rome, a car bomb in Argentina, and another in Washington, D.C.
By 1988, the junta was no longer murdering dissidents. It didn't have to. To live in Chile at that time was to live in fear — not abject terror, but the low-lying, constant stress of peril that puts a person always on edge. If you were a young man in Santiago, you could be grabbed by the military at any time and asked to prove that you were loyal to the regime. As a businessman or an intellectual, your work could be monitored, and strangers seemed to know a bit too much about you for comfort. There were rumors of cameras in the voting booth, watching to see which box you ticked. What was true or not about the regime's presence in Chileans' lives was almost irrelevant; fear made everyone a believer.
That night was our best chance to change the dynamic. After 15 years, we finally had a window to defeat the dictatorship nonviolently, and Pinochet himself had given it to us. Eight years earlier, in 1980, the general had forced through a constitution calling for a plebiscite, the results of which would decide whether the junta's candidate (whom everyone knew would be Pinochet) would remain in office for another eight years. Pinochet assumed he'd be able to win the plebiscite easily — the confidence of a man accustomed to having things his way. But those of us in the opposition wanted to make a real contest of it. Our task was to convince Chileans to register to vote, so that when the plebiscite took place, Chile would reject another eight years of dictatorship.
First, however, we had to conquer the fears of an entire country. And that's where Correa's television program came in. We had to persuade the nation that change was actually possible after the years of stagnant military rule since Pinochet had ousted Salvador Allende 15 years earlier. The political situation was far from a rosy "transition to democracy," as Pinochet had dubbed his last eight years. Still, we could use the opening he had given us, however small, to win. Unlike the previous plebiscite, which ushered in Pinochet's 1980 constitution, this one would be fair. Why? Because we were going to ensure that each polling station was packed with our observers. We would watch to guarantee a free and secret vote, the results of which we could tally independently and transmit to our central computer system. And, unlike in 1980, there was going to be an electoral register; we were going to get people to sign up en masse. We calculated that to win beyond any shadow of a doubt, we would need 8 million registered voters to mark their ballots "No" across the country's 35,000 polling stations. To get them to do that, first we would need to prove to Chileans that their votes would matter.
This was a tall order for a program meant to last just 45 minutes (plus 15 minutes of commercials) — and the interview would not just be us in the PPD. Correa and her colleagues were playing host to all the country's registered political parties. And while that included our fellow reformers in the Christian Democratic Party, represented by its president, Patricio Aylwin, it meant that the conservative National Renewal Party and the National Vanguard, the pro-government parties, were also there. Each party would be represented by four officials and would respond to the questions posed by three journalists.
Several weeks earlier, we in the party had decided on the three colleagues who would join me in the interview. First would be one of our vice presidents, Armando Jaramillo, a conservative man with an imposing voice that made his every comment sound like a fatherly instruction. He was a well-heeled land owner, and one of the few people in our party who could truly claim to be from the old aristocracy. He certainly looked the part, wearing his finest three-piece suit and sporting a particularly gaudy ring with a large stone in the center, of which he was quite fond. (I asked him to take it off for the interview — a suggestion he declined.) But he was also an avid believer in human rights. His strength was precisely in that balance; many conservatives supported Pinochet, but few had, like Armando, retained their democratic convictions.
From the other side of the spectrum came our secretary-general, Jorge Schaulsohn, a thin man who was just out of the university. A radical, Jorge had distinguished himself as a student leader who fought mercilessly against the dictatorship. At 37, he was still young and filled with fire. The fourth party member at the television table was Carolina Tohá, a slim university student who looked more comfortable in her usual bohemian wardrobe than in the pressed white shirt that she wore that day. Carolina was the daughter of José Tohá, who had been minister of the interior in Allende's government. She knew more intimately than any of us what it meant to live under Pinochet; her father had been sent to a brutal prison camp after the coup and later "committed suicide" in police custody. But Carolina wasn't angry; she just wanted things to change.
That night, as we sat closely packed together under the high ceilings of the television studio, we were all in agreement about what we needed to do.
Traveling through Chile in the dry southern summer was no pleasure tour. When we arrived in the northern town of La Serena on December 18, 1987, months before the television show, we were tired amid a whirlwind of speeches, frustrations, jubilation, and hope. The town of 150,000 people, more than 300 miles north of the capital, bustled with the low-key intensity of a mid-sized rural hub. By the end of 1987, my colleagues — Aylwin, of the Christian Democratic Party, and Luis Fernando Luengo, a representative of other forces on the left — and I had trod across the region, our suits coated with dry dust and our throats parched from speaking. We had been on the road for months in the heat of summer, visiting every city and town in the dry zone where it almost never rained, even in the winter. La Serena was our stop on the way to the even smaller town of Ovalle, after which we would conclude our journey in Illapel, traveling on bumpy, unpaved roads.
But calling Chileans to register for the upcoming vote wasn't just grueling because of the sun beating down on our faces. Most were skeptical; many more were fearful; and some were downright hostile, claiming that participating in the vote would be equivalent to playing by the dictator's rules. Those in the latter camp had adopted the slogan "Registration is treason." Even Luengo doubted that registration would work, but he joined us to show solidarity against Pinochet.
The venue waiting for us in La Serena was modest, a movie theater holding about 300 people. Around 20 or 30 of them were shouting at us, calling us traitors for registering voters for Pinochet's democratic charade. They didn't need to scream for us to get the message; La Serena was, like much of Chile, a hard sell. Nevertheless, we set up to speak on an elevated wood stage framed by red velvet curtains. The microphone was troublesome, being a handheld, so we couldn't use notes. It was a warm day outside, but the cool shade inside the theater meant that I was not uncomfortable in my necktie.
As I was preparing to begin, a woman from the press handed me a cable, already taken from the envelope. The all-capital letters on the white paper, pasted onto a yellow backing, read: "Arica, urgent." It was from Pinochet; he had given a speech in Arica, a city in the extreme north of the country, threatening us for making "little waves" against his government. "There is some 'Lagos' somewhere," he had said. "We know all your steps."
It was the first time Pinochet had ever referred to me in person, and it was exhilarating. So unusual was it that a dictator would address you by name that I knew I had to have done something to get his attention. I felt no fear. Rather, it was rewarding, during a difficult time, to know that at least my opponent had noticed I was fighting.
Many of my colleagues suspected that Pinochet had mentioned me because he found it useful to have a leftist adversary like myself, a long-time member of the Socialist Party, on whom he could blame unrest or discontent. But I had another theory. For months, I had been speaking on the radio, calling for people to register to vote. A year earlier, at a time when the press was under siege, I was asked to interview for a short spot on television. I knew, however, that they would edit my response if I said what I wanted to. They would use only a small clip of my longer answer, choosing my least confrontational words. So I asked the reporter how much time I had to answer; I would give her a quote of exactly the correct length so that she would have no choice but to use it in its entirety. Nervously, she consulted with other members of the television station and finally agreed to give me 30 seconds — on the condition that I not name names (nor utter the words "dictator" or "dictatorship").
I knew how to get around it. For Chileans, there was only one "Captain General" — Bernardo O'Higgins, who fought for Chile's independence from Spain — but Pinochet had recently given himself the same title. That's how I would refer to him. Speaking of the junta leader sarcastically as the Captain General would remind my countrymen that Pinochet had co-opted Chile's once-democratic history in every way — even in name.
Whatever the reason for Pinochet's warning, in La Serena it had none of the intended effects. I turned directly from the cable to Aylwin, asking, "Let me speak first to calm the people." He agreed, and I was introduced to the small but fierce crowd, which had begun shouting the moment I told them they should register to vote.
"I beg you," I said. "Be silent. I am going to read you a cable that has just arrived, to which I must respond." A brief measure of calm allowed me to re-count what Pinochet had said.
In that impassioned moment, it occurred to me to speak directly to Pinochet, as if he could hear me from that distant post. "I am speaking to you, General Pinochet," my voice raged. "All the way from La Serena, I am replying. We will continue our fight to defeat you in the plebiscite!"
The crowd leapt to its feet in applause. I was as surprised as anyone. When I addressed Pinochet directly by name, the effect was tremendous. That wasn't something you did in Chile in 1987, and the same people who had angrily shouted, "Registration is treason!" were now suddenly swept up in the moment.
It was a formula I repeated, to the same result each time, in every town and countryside stop we visited. Of course, the people watching us in those visits were very few. They were the true believers, some of whom had been there 15 years ago when the Socialist Party I then represented was ousted. But they were hardly militants, and they were still afraid. Speaking directly to Pinochet helped them see a way forward. If only the Captain General had known what an inspiration his threatening cable would become.
Just a week before the television program in April, one of Pinochet's supporters asked me what I would do when I spoke on Correa's show. We were gathered at a radio station, one of the few, rare forums left where one could express views of every political stripe. "I will tell Correa some of the same things that are said here," I replied to the man, alluding to the need for democracy and an electoral transition. A good friend turned to us and grinned. "I know what you are going to do, Ricardo," he said. "You will look at the camera and speak directly to General Pinochet."
We all laughed. But in fact, that is precisely what I was planning to do. For the two weeks before the program, my three colleagues and I had been planning and practicing our approach. In a small, haphazard studio close to where we lived and worked in the old neighborhood of Providencia, we had re-created the entire set of the program — from the oval table that would separate ourselves from the journalists to the layout of the chairs and cameras. We arranged for three well-known journalists, two women and one man, from opposition newspapers to play the role of the interviewers, and they proved far tougher interrogators than the real television journalists would be. With each run-through, we four sat across the table, imagining that it was the night of the program. Getting it perfect was the least we could do for the thousands of Chileans who had already taken the risk to register and the many more we hoped would do so. We needed to allay the fears of millions, explaining why we were so confident that our path of nonviolence could defeat a dictator. And we had to do it in a way that everyone in Chile would understand.
The interview would be divided into three parts: first a discussion of our general party platform, then our economic position, and lastly, the referendum. The segment on the referendum was critical, but the first two were also extremely important; we would have to convince the audience that we had a plan to rebuild Chile. After a decade and a half under Pinochet's rule, many had a difficult time imagining anything else. How, they wondered, could a country so accustomed to dictatorship, so beaten down by inequality and economic stagnation, become a vibrant democracy once again?
The trick was to appeal to Chilean tradition. Chile, a country far from the center of global power and surrounded by the Andes mountains, didn't have the same natural wealth — the gold or silver — of other countries in the Spanish empire in Latin America. But we had always had at least a semblance of democracy. We achieved independence with only minor instability, and we were able to consolidate the institutions necessary to peacefully elect president after president. We wanted to remind Chileans that Pinochet was an aberration, a black mark on their proud, democratic history.
I always compared our situation to the devastation of Europe following World War II, when countries needed to simultaneously reconstruct their infrastructure and their very souls. Coalition governments, like those of General Charles De Gaulle in France and Alcide De Gasperi in Italy, would need to integrate everyone from the far right to the communists under one roof. These examples of national unity seemed like a good model for Chile, we told the viewers, whom we knew held among them vastly different opinions about how to govern the country.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Southern Tiger by Ricardo Lagos, Blake Hounshell, Elizabeth Dickinson. Copyright © 2012 Ricardo Lagos. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by President Bill Clinton,Acknowledgments,
ONE The Finger,
TWO After the Coup,
THREE Fall of the Chicago Boys,
FOUR Prisoner of the State,
FIVE Interregnum,
SIX The Morning After,
SEVEN Pinochet's Ghost,
EIGHT The Chilean Way,
NINE Bush, Saddam, and Me,
Epilogue,
Index,