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PARTISAN REVIEW
hell, the demonstrators with raised fists marching through the streets,
the insolent slogans, the police sirens, and the explosion of tear gas
bombs all passed before their eyes. Upholders of family order, these
women wanted the military to stay forever. They had even developed a
taste for parades and impeccable uniforms, which after September of
1973 seemed newer and cleaner than ever. But in the outer chambers of
an opposition lawyer, I also saw the women with worn-out faces,
sunken eyes, and a dark, hard look who wander in search of their
desaparecidos:
vanished husbands, brothers, and children. These two
groups of women lived in irreconcilable worlds. And yet, in spite of
everything, I surmised that Chile was beginning to emerge from its
absolute polarization. In spite of everything, critical, lucid people who
had known the concentration camps were putting their bitterness
behind them; members of the old parliamentary Right were thinking
about the need to return
to
a political democracy.
The closer you get to the mountains, the more the city loses its
sooty, smoky, dusty color and becomes pleasant, transparent, with
streets vaulted by the leafy crowns of trees and with the snow of the
mountains almost at arm's length. In these sections of the city it seems
that nothing has happened-ever. In some there is even the feeling of a
clean and prosperous city in the provincial U.S.: lighted signs, new
supermarkets, an ice-skating rink, a large bowling alley. In contrast to
Prague's, the style of Santiago'S normalization depends visibly on a
different economic and political world. "The Stores carry everything
now," the men from the outskirts of town near the slopes say, happy
with life: British cookies, French delicacies, Brazilian, Argentine,
Scotch, Canadian whiskey. Who buys all this, I asked myself, when the
salary of a public employee scarcely stretches far enough for food, and
that's not saying anything about blue collar salaries, or counting the
fifteen to twenty percent unemployment rate. But new faces have
appeared in these neighborhoods, new people: men wearing flashy silk
shirts, sporting big Japanese watches, driving long cars, and these
people, I imagine, form the clientele for those establishme'nts. This is
the "American way of life" in its peripheral version, and Dr. Milton
Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics as well as leader of the so–
called Chicago School, has stated that he does not approve of the
Junta's political methods, but that its economic orientation is correct.
Those industries not on a competitive basis with respect
to
the rest of
the world will disappear and Chile, through free exchange, will be
integrated into the economic system of the West, into the kingdom of
the product, will be converted, I imagine, into a second-class consumer
society.
