When Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet was rushed to the hospital last weekend from his “luxury mansion” in the Santiago suburbs, it made me think of a time when I visited Pinocho’s neighborhood.
This was in 1997, before he was placed under house arrest for war crimes, but after he gave up his 17-year dictatorship and returned the country to a democratically elected government.
When we lived in Chile, I had an American friend who lived across the street from the former dictator. I showed up one day in a borrowed delivery van to transport a sofa our
English-language theater group needed for a play.
She opened the large wooden gate that shielded the driveway. Like nearly every other house in Santiago – hers, Pinochet’s and mine – it was surrounded by high walls and sturdy gates. Some people even top their walls with broken bottles set in cement. Many keep German shepherds or Rottweilers, whose snarls and fierce barking would terrify my kids when we went for walks (a gringo habit that was looked upon with suspicion).
This friend had a small, nice dog – not a guard dog – that escaped when we were trying to load the van. We embarked on a Three Stooges routine, chasing the fluffy white pup out of the street, around the gate and back into the street, trying to get him back inside the walled garden.
The whole performance was witnessed by the two guards, armed with machine guns, flanking Pinochet’s gate, and followed by a video surveillance camera mounted on the high stucco wall across the street. We must not have seemed a threat. They remained still, faces impassive at the antics of the two gringas.
I asked my friend if she felt more safe or less, living so close to a man who inspired such passion among his fellow Chileans. (Both love and hate – conservative women swoon over “mi general,” while the mothers of the disappeared wear their
despair like a shawl around stooped shoulders.)
My friend shrugged and said she guessed it was safe there. After all, the rock-throwing mobs that appeared occasionally on international TV were far from suburban La Dehesa. How would they even get up there? They’d have to take at least two buses.
The general’s neighborhood, La Dehesa (which means “pasture” in Spanish), is a green enclave in the Andean foothills east of Santiago. It is a nice neighborhood, especially by Chilean standards. Shielded on the south by the gritty Mapocho river and on the north and east by rippling hills, the suburb is truly a world away from the chaos and grime of Santiago, although the tree-lined streets are just as congested.
This part of town is known as the barrio alto, or high district, and not just for its higher altitude. Mercedes sedans carry impeccable housewives to the elegant “Shopping de La Dehesa” in the heart of the ‘burb, while large yellow buses ferry the domestic army necessary to maintain these grand houses an hour or two across town.
That trip cuts through the socioeconomic spectrum of the city. From leafy La Dehesa the buses run along the river, where the very poor live in shacks on the rocky banks, and wild tomatoes provide the only color against the gray glacial rubble.
Then they pass through Providencia, the former barrio alto, where shops and offices occupy dingy former mansions. Many of the elegant old buildings have been torn down to make room for high-rises encased in mirrored glass, like the sunglasses worn by the motorcycle cops, who look menacing – and very cool – in their guacamole-green leather jackets.
As the buses enter the centro, they line up along the main drag like a swarm of wasps, bulging with workers, on their way home. This is where most of the protests seen in the press take place, far out of ear-shot from Pinochet and his neighbors. From there, they disperse for the sprawling anti-suburbs of cinderblock and dust, where the smog pools at night.
In the morning, from the hills of the high district, the privileged can breathe in relatively clean air as they watch the smog roll up Avenida Apoquindo like a storm front.
Once the buses have delivered the workers to the kitchen doors of the barrio alto, the smog settles over the city, suffocating general and janitor alike.
After finally taking responsibility a couple of weeks ago for the abuses, torture and killings of his regime, the 91-year-old former dictator had been under house arrest again, holed up in that big house. But in Santiago nearly everyone is holed up behind high walls. Walls that protect and imprison.
And like the smog, Pinochet’s persona permeates the country, leaving a complex haze of power and blame, pride and denial.
Maybe it’s finally time to fling open the gates, blow away the smog and let the truth out.
Denver Post Food Editor Kristen Browning-Blas lived in Santiago from 1993 to 1999.
