Pascale Bonnefoy's Notebook:

Chile swings right in presidential election

With over 99 percent of the votes counted in this Sunday's presidential election, right-wing billionaire Sebastian Pinera has won with almost 51.6 percent, while Eduardo Frei, candidate of the government coalition, trailed behind with 48.8 percent.

Celebrations have broken out in the wealthier east side of Santiago, with thousands of cars converging in Plaza Italia and hundreds of supporters flocking to a downtown hotel that served today as Pinera's campaign headquarters to celebrate on the streets the first rightist to make it to the presidential palace since the end of dictatorship in 1990.

Earlier in the evening and with 60 percent of the votes counted, Frei had already acknowledged defeat, calling on “liberals and progressives” to unite to continue to fight for freedom and social justice. In a message read to supporters in his campaign headquarters, Frei was flanked by former presidents of the government coalition, the Concertacion, a symbolic image that seems to mark the definitive end of a transition to democracy that has already lasted 20 years.

President Michelle Bachelet congratulated Pinera on the phone, and both agreed to have breakfast on Monday to discuss the future. In a televised phone conversation, Pinera told Bachelet he wanted her “advice and help.”

The Concertacion is being pushed out of government for the first time since the return to civilian rule in 1990. And it's the first time since 1958 that Chileans elect a right-wing candidate into office. Chile’s other experience with the right in power was during the dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), who took over through a military coup, not democratic elections.

Businessman and former senator Pinera, although member of the right-wing groups that flourished under the protective umbrella of dictatorship and part of the business elite that thrived with its liberal economic policies, has tried to distance himself from that past. During the campaign, he promised he would not include any former Pinochet cronies in his cabinet.

His main message was change. Many questioned that he was promising change just for the sake of change, after two decades of relatively successful Concertacion governments that are coming to an end as the country becomes the newest member of the OECD.

But for people on the street, the message hit home. Corruption, unfulfilled promises and a rotation of the same old politicians undermined the Concertacion governments and caused inevitable exhaustion among the electorate.

Except among Pinera supporters, no one was terribly excited about this election. Voting for Frei became for many a lesser evil to ward off a right-wing president. No one I have interviewed or heard over the past few weeks since the first round of the elections on Dec. 13 has ever said they are voting for Frei because they really believed in him or liked him. It was like taking bad medicine.

Frei's campaign was bland and many criticized the fact that he has promised things he never tried to do when he was president between 1994-2000. His government was then perceived to be pro-business, conservative and his credentials on human rights were not good: When Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 due to an arrest warrant issued by a Spanish court, Frei immediately started seeking his release, and achieved it a year and a half later.

President Michelle Bachelet's outstanding popularity — 81 percent, according to the most recent poll — did not even touch Frei. Some voters I spoke with said they would have voted for Bachelet if she could run for a second term, but they wouldn't do so for Frei.

Abstention was very high — 42 percent — although this has been a growing trend for many years now. But a visit to polls this afternoon when the vote count was beginning was even more telling. The largest voting place in Santiago, the National Stadium, was void of the usually rowdy groups that stay around after the polls close to participate in the vote count, cheering for one candidate or another. Everyone had already gone home.

Dispatches on the Chilean elections:

Chile’s Elections: A guide

Chile’s Elections: Who gets the gay vote?

A fresh face for Chilean politics

Is Chile heading to the right?

Right-winger wins first round of presidential elections

(Sebastian Pinera and his wife after a victory speech in downtown Santiago. Photo: Courtesy of the Pinera campaign)

After winning 44 percent of the votes in this Sunday’s elections, right-wing billionaire Sebastian Pinera is poised to become Chile’s next president, but will have to compete with the government candidate, Eduardo Frei, in a runoff election on Jan. 17.

With over 98 percent of the votes counted, Pinera was leading with 44 percent, followed by Frei (29.6 percent), independent Marco Enriquez-Ominami (20.1 percent) and leftist Jorge Arrate (6.2 percent).

If Pinera confirms his victory in January, it will be the first time since the late 1950s that Chileans will have voted the right into power and the country will return to right-wing leadership since the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1990.

But it won’t be easy for either side.

Frei will most likely count with the votes of many of Arrate’s supporters and many more from Enriquez-Ominami, or MEO, for the runoff election next month. Speaking to supporters last night, Frei called on both camps to endorse their votes to his candidacy as a way to prevent Chile from turning right.

In recent weeks, Arrate had made public calls to Frei and MEO to agree to endorse their votes to whoever made it to the ballot in January to defeat Pinera. Arrate insinuated that calling on his supporters to vote for Frei would depend on how the Communist party candidates to Congress fared.

The Concertacion coalition struck an agreement with the Communist party earlier this year that consisted in that the Concertacion would forfeit one of its candidates on the ballot for Congress in favor of a Communist party candidate. The deal, clearly supported by President Michelle Bachelet, hoped to break the exclusion of the left from political office. Chile's disproportional electoral system doesn't allow minority parties representation in Congress.

And they fared well: For the first time since 1973, three members of the Communist party will be sitting in the lower house of Congress as of March.

Things aren't so certain with MEO followers. In a speech last night, the independent candidate said he wasn’t the owner of his votes and called on his supporters to vote freely in January. Visibly disappointed, MEO nevertheless stated that his candidacy had changed Chile, and indeed, it has.

Enriquez-Ominami was until mid-year a member of President Bachelet’s Socialist party, but broke off from the government coalition to run for president as independent when he wasn't allowed to compete in the Concertacion primaries.

The mere fact that a young, independent candidate could attract 20 percent of the votes has broken the duopoly of power that has gripped Chilean politics since the end of dictatorship in 1990. It reveals an electorate avid for more alternatives and one willing to take a chance and go beyond the traditional political establishment to seek something new.

To this Pinera appealed during a victory speech last night. In a clear message for MEO supporters to vote for him next month, Pinera said: “I share with Marco and all those who supported him, his diagnosis that the Concertacion is exhausted, with material fatigue, often tainted by incompetence and corruption, lacking ideas, enthusiasm and proposals, and captured by its political operators and party leaderships. I also share with Marco and his supporters the firm desire and will for change.”

Speaking before thousands outside a downtown hotel, Pinera outlined the thrust of his eventual government: one million new jobs, a crackdown on crime and drug trafficking, expanding Bachelet’s social protection network to the middle class, improving health and education, and combating government corruption and incompetence.

Pinera also appeased his more conservative allies in the UDI party by explicitly calling for protecting the unborn, and reiterated his call to respect and protect the rights of minorities.

Pinera announced that his triumph marks the beginning of a new transition. He may be right: The seemingly never-ending transition from dictatorship to democracy seems to give way to a new political scenario, one of shifting political allegiances and a new round of faces in government.

Victor Jara, presente

Thousands of people, young and old, on Saturday accompanied the remains of folk singer Victor Jara to the General Cemetery in Santiago, where he received a proper burial 36 years after his murder.

Born to a family of impoverished farm workers, Victor Jara was one of the main figures of the Chilean New Song movement. An accomplished theater director, composer and singer, his music was well-known in Chile and abroad, and continues to be played and remembered. His music spoke of poverty, injustice, solidarity, exploitation, change, hope and love.

A day after the military coup that ousted socialist president Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973, Jara, a member of the Communist Party, was arrested at the State Technical University (UTE) along with hundreds of academics, employees and students. They were all taken to the Chile Stadium — renamed Victor Jara Stadium — which was used as a detention center for thousands of political prisoners for about a week after the coup. 

In the stadium, he was singled out, beaten, his hands crushed, tortured and killed. His bullet-riddled body was later found in an isolated area of Santiago with two other victims. He was buried on Sept. 18, 1973 almost clandestinely by his widow, British-born choreographer Joan Turner, and two others.

Jara’s torturers and executers are still at large, although investigative judge Juan Fuentes has narrowed it down to a group of officers and soldiers. Last June, Fuentes ordered the exhumation of Jara’s remains to determine the precise cause of death. Fuentes had interrogated a soldier who admitted he was part of a group of soldiers who fired on Jara after a sub lieutenant shot him in the head playing Russian roulette.

Fuentes wanted to know if Jara died from the shot in the head or as a product of the multiple (more than 40) bullet wounds. The remains were sent to the Genetic Institute of Innsbruck, in Austria, which confirmed that Victor Jara had been tortured and the cause of death was the massive bullet wounds in his head, chest, stomach, legs and arms.

Once his remains were returned to his widow and two daughters, they and a number of organizations decided to mount a two-day vigil/wake and massive funeral for Jara, the one he deserved.

The Victor Jara Foundation, headed by Joan, opened its cultural center (Galpon Victor Jara) to thousands of people who paid their last respects between Thursday and Friday this week. Thousands flocked to the Plaza Brasil, where the center is located, standing long lines, day and night, to go in and say goodbye, touch his coffin –draped with a black poncho- and write in a book of condolences.

On Friday, President Michelle Bachelet also paid her last respects to a man she described as “so coherent with the values of social justice, humanity, respect, solidarity, the values of justice.”

A stage was mounted in the middle of the plaza for musicians, singers and artists to pay homage to Jara. Renowned musicians such as pianist Roberto Bravo, Inti Illimani and Illapu, as well as other lesser-known singers and musicians took turns performing Jara’s music as well as their own.

On Saturday, Jara’s remains were taken in a long procession to the cemetery, accompanied by thousands of ordinary Chileans, many tearful.

“Victor Jara lives in the people,” they say.

Listen to some of his songs: 

Te recuerdo Amanda 

Luchin 

El derecho de vivir en paz 

Plegaria a un labrador

(Photos by Pascale Bonnefoy)

Peru accuses Chile of spying

Peru has accused Chile of paying a Peruvian Air Force non-commissioned officer to spy for us. The supposed spy is Victor Ariza, and Peru says he was paid thousands of dollars by Chile to provide sensitive information. He has been imprisoned in a high security prison in Peru for several weeks, but only this past Monday did the news break out.

When it did, the presidents of both countries were at an APEC summit in Singapore. Peruvian President Alan Garcia abruptly ended his stay and returned to Lima, canceling a bilateral meeting with his Chilean counterpart Michelle Bachelet.

The Chilean government has denied any espionage and believes the Peruvian accusation is part of an artificial escalation of a two-pronged conflict that has strained relations between the two countries in recent months: For one, Peru has taken Chile to The Hague over claims to territorial waters, and more recently, it learned that the United States had authorized the sale of weapons to Chile. Peru believes this — and Chile’s ongoing weapons purchases over the past decade — upsets the military balance in the region.

Peru claims that Ariza’s liaisons were two Chilean air force officers, but Chile’s Defense Ministry has said the two men were not members of the military.

Throughout the week, Garcia and Bachelet have been sending each other acid messages through the media. Garcia said that “only those who feel weak” resort to spying. Bachelet said Garcia’s statements were “offensive and bombastic.” Garcia retorted that “our country progresses and grows, and that’s why they are jealous and spy on us to find out what our secret is.”

Peru’s foreign minister has announced that if Chile continues to deny the accusations, “the entire relationship with Chile will have to be reassessed.” On Wednesday, Peruvian members of Parliament asked Congress to review the free trade agreement with Chile.

Yesterday, Peru delivered what is says are 2,000 pages of evidence of the espionage to the Chilean embassy in Lima on Wednesday. No details of their contents have yet been disclosed.

Four batteries and a tape

This is a not so uncommon story about the plight of an impoverished elderly man in the public health system in a country that is one step away from joining the exclusive club of the OECD.

The other day, kids started shouting outside my home crying for help. An elderly man, about 70, was lying face down on the sidewalk. Several boys gathered around him and we all tried to figure out if he was drunk or had suffered some sort of attack.

The man barely lifted his head and asked one of the boys to get an inhalator that was in his knapsack, which had fallen a few feet away. The man began inhaling and another boy rushed from a house with a glass of water so he could take a few drops of medicine he had with him.

They helped him get up and the old man explained: the day before, he had been hospitalized and submitted to a series of exams prior to replacing his pacemaker. But the hospital needed his bed because beds in public hospitals are always scarce and so he was asked to kindly surrender it.

Besides, there was one more exam to go, a halter test, but they couldn’t go ahead with it until the patient brought with him a 90-minute cassette and four double-A batteries. He didn’t have them, and he didn’t have money to buy them either.

So this elderly man we found lying on the street had crossed town to our neighborhood and had been walking the streets for hours in search of any odd job that could make him enough money to buy the tape and batteries. Perhaps fortunately, no one accepted his offer to clean up yards, sweep or whatever, because he would have probably collapsed even worse.

I gave him a virgin tape I had at home in a box full of old and new tapes and we went around the corner to a store and bought him the batteries. Such common and simple things to have around, and such sacrifice the man was going through to get them.

He refused to accept money to take a bus home. He said he would walk the many kilometers back home, because at least now, he had a tape and four double-A batteries. Now all he has to do is wait for someone else in the hospital to surrender a bed and hope he makes it there before his old pacemaker begins to fail.

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