Chasing Che (21 page)

The repairs would take a few days, so I walked the city with a guidebook, looking for signs of the past. The enormous presidential palace, La Moneda, was guarded by a legion of Chilean soldiers wearing gray uniforms with Nazi-style helmets. There were still bullet holes from the coup in a few side buildings, but the façade of the palace itself had been repaired.

Twenty-three years had passed, and just as the right tried to ignore or forget what it had done in Chile, so, in many ways, did the left. The reality of Salvador Allende’s martyrdom was somewhat more complicated than his sympathizers cared to recall. Allende only looked good when compared to Pinochet. A career politician and bombastic Marxist, he was elected president in 1970 in a three-way race with only 36 percent of the vote. Despite this minority backing he immediately launched a program of nationalizing banks and large sectors of the economy, aiming for a legalistic and nonviolent version of the Cuban revolution. Although he disagreed sharply with Castro on several points, Allende’s sympathies were clear. He liked to show off a copy of
Guerrilla Warfare
, autographed by the author to read, “To Salvador Allende, who is trying to obtain the same result by other means. Affectionately, Che.”

Much of the resistance to Allende was genuine, but not all of it. The United States waged a staggeringly large campaign of economic sabotage, intimidation, propaganda, and covert action to destabilize his administration. With U.S. economic control of copper and other assets threatened, CIA director Richard M. Helms took notes on what President Nixon told him to do in a White House meeting: “save Chile”; “not acceptable”; “ten million dollars”; “make the economy scream.” The CIA shipped submachine guns and ammunition to Chile, but the agency’s most effective tool was propaganda. The agency paid the country’s leading newspaper,
El Mercurio
, to report that Cuban submarines were circling offshore and that Marxists were feeding human flesh to Chilean families.
Time
magazine swallowed everything the CIA had to say in special “inside” briefings, and published a cover story virtually demanding an invasion of Chile. After the coup the propaganda mill announced that “one hundred thousand weapons” were seized from unionists and students, a pure fabrication that is nevertheless cited by rightists defending Pinochet to this day. (If Allende really had distributed a hundred thousand weapons the coup would never have succeeded and the tally of casualties would not have attained the lopsided margins of 128 to 3 that characterized places like Valdivia.)

When the military finally pounced, on the morning of September 11, 1973, Allende and his bodyguards made a brave stand in La Moneda, but they were surrounded and the air force’s Hawker fighter-bombers repeatedly strafed and rocketed the building, setting it afire. General Pinochet offered Allende safe passage out of the country, but the president wisely declined the offer. Tapes of radio conversations that day show that Pinochet planned to murder Allende after putting him on a plane to exile. (“Kill the bitch,” he said then, “and you eliminate the litter.”) Rather than surrender a one-hundred-and-fifty-year democratic tradition in Chile, Allende took his own life with a submachine gun bearing a gold plaque reading “To my good friend Salvador Allende from Fidel Castro.”

Both Allende and Pinochet were paradoxical men, one a duly elected revolutionary, the other a military dictator who bowed, in
1990, to an electoral verdict against him. Though Pinochet had stepped down from politics, he remained commander of the military through my visit to Santiago. When he finally retired from uniform the next year, to take up a self-designated position as an immunized “senator-for-life,” Pinochet praised the military as “the savior of democracy” in Chile and called himself “the defender of Western Christian civilization.” About twenty-five percent of the public—largely military families and the affluent—said they agreed.

I went to see a political scientist to fill in the blank spots in Chile’s history. If a quarter of the population agreed that Pinochet had saved Chile, what had he saved it from? Francisco Rojas, a think-tank analyst, stopped me halfway through my first question about the various guerrilla groups that had threatened Chile. “The armed left never had a significant effect as a force in Chile,” he said. I admitted some surprise at this claim: the military had always justified the coup as a necessary step to head off a civil war. There were Chilean Ches organizing guerrillas in the south, after all, and a great tidal wave of Marxism had been about to bury the country. Fidel Castro had personally presented a submachine gun to Salvador Allende, after all. Che Guevara pictures were everywhere, after all. Wasn’t Che’s doctrine of socialist revolution about to sweep over the land in 1973?

Rojas looked at me with pity. I had things backward, he explained: the rise of Marxism in Chile had been the
defeat
of Che Guevara’s influence and doctrines. “Allende’s electoral triumph was the triumph of a thesis opposed to Guevarism,” Rojas said. “It proved that it was possible to a have a socialist government derived from elections, not from force. The weight of the Chilean democratic tradition was greater than the weight of Guevarism.”

Stock in this violent Guevarism plummeted when Allende came to office. The usefulness of Che’s image to folksingers and strike organizers exceeded his true influence by a vast measure. Most of the guerrilla groups in Chile were phantoms of collective imagination, a cooperative dream between a few delusional leftists and the repressive machinery of the state, which needed them to justify its own actions. A group called the Frente Armada Manuel Rodríguez took a
few terrorist actions, but it really believed in “popular insurrection; that is, having the mass of people on its side, as opposed to Guevara’s idea of five guerrillas on a mountain,” Rojas said. (That said, the Frente did occasionally exploit the guerrilla-friendly mountains of Chile. In 1986 the group staged a spectacular ambush of Pinochet’s motorcade in a tight mountain pass, killing many of his guards but narrowly missing the dictator.)

Although leftist Chileans revered El Che then and now, they tended to reject his doctrines, even in the hardest years of the dictatorship. “The idea of the New Man, the idea of a socialist utopia, was generally part of the thinking of the early 1970s,” Rojas said. “After that, Guevarism disappeared as a school of thought. Today Cuba has no influence on South America. The other way around, in fact. Cuba only had importance in a bipolar world, during the Cold War.”

Since Kooky was in the hands of the presidential guard I took a taxi back to my hotel. The traffic was awful. It was the last day of summer vacation for many Chileans; eighty thousand cars had returned to the city that week, according to the radio. A brown smog enveloped us, and there was no wind. The cabdriver explained that from April to November, when pollution is at its worst, you had to leave your car at home one day a week by law (unless you had the catalytic converter and elaborate pollution controls that Don Don had been complaining about). There were special “pollution emergencies” sometimes, when you couldn’t drive for two days.

It was hard to see the gleam of the skyscrapers for all the smog. Pollution was one sign of Chile’s bustling economy. General Pinochet had been an early proponent of American-style capitalism—his economists were known as “
los
Chicago boys” because they studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago—and had reduced import tariffs, liberalized investment rules, and created some innovative programs like private pension funds that let Chilean workers choose where to invest their savings. It was easy to see—on nonsmoggy days—what Americans find so miraculous about Chile: shopping malls that take credit cards, pleasant vineyards, and a deregulated stock market go a long way with Americans. This was a
swept corner of an unswept continent. But the results of this new economic deal were as obvious as they were mixed. Of course there was a Chilean miracle—Pinochet had flooded the country with consumer electronics and the new cars that were choking everything—but there was also a Chilean despair. One of the fuels for the new economy was easy credit; shop windows in Santiago were covered with flyers advertising the price of shoes in twelve easy payments of four dollars each. Personal debt was the new national curse, and although the investment dollars were flowing in, the profits were mostly flowing out. Personal income in Chile had still not recovered to the levels of 1972—when a Marxist was supposedly ruining the country. Chile had just now, after twenty years of free-market economics, tied the basic social indicators (literacy, longevity, nutrition, and inoculation rates) of Cuba, another supposedly failed Marxist regime. It seemed strange to pay for shoes four dollars at a time and call it a miracle.

Some Chileans did. On February 26 a group of upper-class women calling themselves the Friends of the Armed Forces assembled outside the Ministry of Defense with a boom box. In Argentina, the mothers of the disappeared paraded their grief; these Chilean matrons sang Mexican folk songs dedicated to General Pinochet’s continued well-being. His birthday was marked with a set of parties around the country, all linked by live satellite feed.

On my last day in Santiago the fax machine at the hotel sputtered and ground out the article that Pilar had written about me in
El Diario Austral
. I was as nervous as Ernesto had been flipping through the pages of the paper forty-four years before. The photo made me look bald (then again, I am), and under a banner headline (
ON THE TRAIL OF CHE
) the piece described some guy who was traveling South America in search of “the spirit of Che.” It was amazing how much my Spanish had improved under Pilar’s hand. There were verbs in some of my quotes that I’d never conjugated in my life. I carefully preserved the shiny paper in one of my saddlebags. I liked the piece, and it had me crossing a lot of mountains and doing other heroic-sounding things, but it also frightened me. Before, it had been only a
promise to myself that pushed me up the road each morning, heading for some final accounting. Now my fate was as plain as the thermofax paper.

“For Symmes,” the piece concluded,

T
he desert could be put off for a moment more. The road north jogged west, and I followed Big and Little Che down from Santiago to the port city of Valparaíso in search of a bar called La Gioconda.

From now on, our experiences of the road could only grow more different. Kooky emerged from Santiago with a change of oil, a valve job, clutch and throttle cables adjusted, and, the sergeant from the presidential guard claimed, a problem with the alternator’s ground now fixed. La Poderosa did not emerge from Santiago at all. Wrapped in a tarp, the ruined Norton resembled “a cadaver,” Granado wrote. They waited four hours for their first hitchhiking lift, and in the end the short trip to Valparaíso, on the coast—just over an hour for me on the bike—took them until well after nightfall.

Up to now, the pair had been “gentlemen of the road. We’d belonged to a time-honored aristocracy of wayfarers,” Ernesto wrote. Now they were dismounted, “just two tramps with packs on our backs, and the grime of the road encrusted in our overalls, shadows of our former aristocratic selves.” He noted how those packs—the converted cloth saddlebags from the bike—weighed heavily on them as they finally marched down into Valparaíso late that night.

Seeking rest and refuge, they boys stumbled into La Gioconda, a seedy café that would be their home for several days. The owner was unaccountably generous and fed the Argentines lunch and dinner
for three days without charging them a penny. They spent some time in a futile effort to arrange a trip to Easter Island, where they were supposedly going to do medical research (in fact, they simply wanted to see the South Pacific, eat lobster, and seduce maidens, as Ernesto emphasized in his diary).

The atmosphere of La Gioconda seemed to awake something in Ernesto. He befriended other customers, and through them was introduced to the lower orders of life in Valparaíso. In place of the natural beauty of the south, there was now the horror of modern urban poverty to gaze on:

One afternoon Ernesto went alone to see a customer of the café, an old woman suffering from the asthma that he knew only too well. After recounting the fetid conditions in her humble house, he noted the emotional costs of poverty and illness, the way they alienate the sick from the healthy, the hungry from the fed. This was, he said, making a leap from the emotional to the political, the result of an unjust economic system and an “absurd” social order. In the first explicitly political declaration in the diary, he wrote that governments should spend more money—“much more money”—on social programs.

In retrospect, this was a tepid statement from the man who would later imagine worldwide guerrilla warfare as the solution to social problems. In La Gioconda, Ernesto still had confidence in the system.

I pulled into town only for a few hours. The descriptions of the café were vague—it was next to a truck stop and on a road leading down into the city. I circled the steep hills, which were fitted with little funicular railways to carry pedestrians up to their homes, for a while. After a half hour I found a place that looked suspiciously possible—a
dank little café just uphill from a big gas station. It was just called Bar
y
Restaurant and had the permanent special painted on the window (fried fish and a side dish, 950 pesos). Five people were inside eating soup, but when I sat down at the five-foot-long bar and asked for food, a fat woman told me there was none. I waited a while, watching the others eat the nonexistent soup.