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Foreign Policy
La travesía del desierto
(A Necessary Leader)
By Andrés Allamand
Reviewed by Mark Falcoff
Thanks to the ongoing struggle to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s return to democracy after a near civil war and 16 years of one of the harshest military dictatorships in Latin American history (1973-89) is a familiar theme for readers of the daily press. Less well-known, however, is another story unfolding these last 10 years: the struggle to create (or perhaps, re-create) a democratic, participatory right in a country that once boasted a well-established conservative political and intellectual tradition. The subject is far from trivial, since Pinochet received support from a whopping 43 percent of voters in the plebiscite that forced him to step down in 1989; even now, anywhere from 25 percent to 35 percent of the Chilean electorate can be said to have conservative sympathies. Indeed, leaders of the ruling Christian Democratic-Socialist coalition often avow that without a truly democratic right, Chilean democracy will never recover its former vitality. The same could be said for many Latin American countries emerging from the long night of military authoritarianism.
The struggle to create such a right coincides, and is in a certain sense even conterminous, with the temporarily truncated political career of Andrés Allamand. Although only 43 years old, he has been active in Chilean politics since high school, first as an opponent of Marxist President Salvador Allende, and then during the 1980s as a mediator between the Pinochet regime and its Socialist and Christian Democratic opponents. After 1989, as a congressman and president of the National Renewal Party, he was a leader of the loyal opposition to the first democratic governments. Defeated for a Senate seat in 1997 and subsequently deposed as leader of his party, he has lived since 1998 in the Washington, D.C. area, where he works at the Inter-American Development Bank.
A tender age for a political autobiography, one might say. However, A Necessary Leader is not just about Andrés Allamand but about the political pathologies that persist on the rightward side of the Chilean political spectrum. The dividing line is not one between good guys and bad guys. The left, after all, bears most of the responsibility for the breakdown of democracy in 1973. But the experience with President Allende so traumatized the Chilean right that it brought to the fore some of its most sinister personalities, particularly at the leadership level. Allamand’s two most valued political mentors—former President Jorge Alessandri and businessman-politician Pedro Ibáñez, genuine democrats both—were already in their dotage when he began his political career. But today his principal opponents within the right tend to be 40- and 50-something men and women who owe their careers to the Pinochet dictatorship and who remain unapologetically committed to its perverted vision of politics.
Until the very eve of the 1988 plebiscite, most of Pinochet’s supporters (not to mention the general himself) fully expected the Chilean public to ratify another eight, possibly 16 years for the military regime and its irreplaceable leader. Although Allamand publicly supported the “Yes” vote, we now learn that in private he argued against Pinochet’s candidacy and even the whole concept of an up-or-down vote, which he rightly believed the government was bound to lose. Such overconfidence exacted a high price: As Allamand notes, the morning after Pinochet’s defeat, his regime, which had so assiduously discouraged the reconstitution of Chilean parties, suddenly found that it had no organized political force to advance even the most constructive aspects of its historic project—its thoroughgoing reform of the Chilean economy.
Creating such a party—particularly one with unquestioned democratic convictions such as those held by Allamand—was a daunting task. Most conservatives in Chile felt uncomfortable with democratic inter-party deliberations; instead, they preferred the strong hand of personalist caudillos. And finally, on fundamental moral questions, such as the responsibility for past human-rights violations in Chile, the right “first denied, then minimized, and finally, on various pretexts, excused” the tortures, murders, and disappearances that accompanied the overthrow of Allende and persisted for many years thereafter.
“I have always regarded this as an enormously important issue,” Allamand writes. “Reconciliation demands the healing of wounds. But how can you ask the offended party to seek peace in amnesia without someone saying to them, face to face, that at least they are sorry for what happened?”
Moreover, he writes, “It makes no sense to trust in freedom in the socioeconomic field... and not apply the same premise in the field of politics, arbitrarily supposing that... the decisions of the majority are invariably wrong.” Decrying the adoption of “institutional safeguards to avoid presumably undesirable effects” (such as the various authoritarian devices created by the 1980 Constititution, many of which remain in place), Allamand concludes: “The conservative right needs to recover its conviction that freedom is indivisible and when truncated, inevitably produces mutilation and intellectual impoverishment.” To win, the right needs to grasp ideas “with genuine conviction and to demonstrate that it has no fear of democracy.”
With ideas such as these, it is perhaps not surprising that Hermógenes Pérez de Arce, one of the most vituperative partisans of authoritarianism in Chile, once remarked to Allamand, “At times we feel that you’re not really one of us.” No doubt. But instead of attempting to defeat Allamand in open debate, his enemies within the right resorted to political espionage, yellow journalism, rumor-mongering, and other dirty tricks, such as spreading the word that Allamand used cocaine. The whole story is told here in rich—and deeply depressing—detail. This kind of candor is unusual in Chilean political discourse and explains why A Necessary Leader has become a bestseller in Santiago and elicited angry (though often hardly credible) denials by Allamand’s adversaries. Ironically, the former are probably more numerous within National Renewal and the Independent Democratic Union than in the ruling Socialist and Christian Democratic parties. That, of course, is part of Allamand’s problem.
But that is for the moment only. History is not standing still in Chile, and although the country may continue under its Christian Democratic-Socialist coalition for the immediate future, alternance is only a matter of time, as the Spanish case—so similar to that of Chile’s—clearly proves. And, with luck, so is an eventual presidency of Andrés Allamand. A Necessary Leader sets forth the logical, coherent philosophy that could act as its lodestar.