On September 8--a Sunday evening--a small, heavily guarded motorcade was speeding through the semirural outskirts of Santiago, the Chilean capital. A few moments later, the lead car was demolished by an explosion and half a dozen bodyguards and drivers lay dead. The principal target of the attack--General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who has ruled Chile with an iron hand since 1973--escaped thanks to the skill of his driver, a miscalculation by the assailants, and the extraordinary luck that is his political hallmark.
Visibly shaken by the event, Pinochet immediately placed the country under a state of siege, closed four opposition magazines and two European news agencies, and ordered the arrest of dozens of political opponents, most of them from the moderate center, rather than the communist-dominated Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Brigade, which later took credit for the attempt.
The attempted assassination of Chile's president came on the heels of two dramatic incidents in July and August--first, the torching, apparently by an army patrol, of two young people during a protest demonstration, one of whom died from burns that covered most of his body, and the discovery of two huge arms caches in the barren Chilean north, evidently of Cuban and Soviet provenance.
All of these events underlined the gathering political crisis in Chile--13 years after the armed forces, with wide popular support, overthrew Marxist President Salvador Allende. That crisis consists of three parts--the approach of 1989, when Pinochet's government will face a plebiscite that most observers believe it cannot win; the evident growth of political disaffection, even on the part of elements that supported and even participated in the military government during its first few years; and the emergence of a violent Left, which bids to preempt the large but divided political center.
The United States, which welcomed the fall of Allende and the expulsion of hundreds of Cuban and East-bloc operatives from one of South American's most strategically located nations, now fears that increasing polarization could eventually lead to a new Nicaragua. But it is torn between what it wants and the instruments available to achieve it, egged on in one direction by Chilean and American critics and drawn in another by the growing evidence of Cuban and Soviet involvement in Chilean events.
Pinochet's Expiring Mandate
Perhaps the best way to understand the current crisis of legitimacy in Chile is to go back to the coup that brought the Pinochet regime to power in 1973. For decades, the Chilean armed forces had the reputation of being the most apolitical in Latin America, and indeed, as late as 1970 had resisted attempts by the U.S. government and the business community to prevent Allende's assumption of power in the first place. Between 1970 and 1973, however, Chilean society became so polarized by Allende's economic and social policies that both sides attempted to use the armed forces to break political stalemates. Allende himself assiduously cultivated high-ranking officers, raised military pay and allowances, and eventually invited flag officers to become members of his cabinet. When it became apparent that his Communist-Socialist alliance had no desire to seriously discuss its differences with what by 1972 was a clear majority of the country's political forces, the
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