Living Next Door to a Dictator

I’m standing on a square piece of pavement in front of 4240 Presidente Errázuriz Avenue in Santiago, Chile. General Augusto Pinochet often stood on this exact same spot to watch military bands parade by while middle-aged women cheered and soldiers with ridiculously large amounts of firepower stood guard. The pavement has probably been relayed a few times since Pinochet’s boots stood here, but standing on the quite ordinary, grey slab of pavement still has a certain sense of grandeur and gravity to it. Behind me is the house where Pinochet lived for almost the entirety of his regime, a regime which was responsible for the systematic and widespread abuse of human rights in Chile for just under 17 years—from September 11, 1973 until March 11, 1990. Next to me is Edmundo, his old neighbour.

Edmundo was born soon after Pinochet moved in next door. He was from a well-off family, his father was a successful businessman and his mother a young German his father fell in love with and brought back to Chile. “If you ask me for my direct memories, it was a beautiful, protected, fantasy world where everything was clean, beautiful, nice neighbours,” says Edmundo. “I just saw the beautiful uniforms of soldiers that came for Pinochet’s birthday, or for every national holiday—they came and marched and played instruments. For me it was like a game. I’d go outside with this little Chilean flag and Pinochet would be about five metres away, with this great cape that he loved wearing, and these gloves and stuff, the military playing, and these women—he always had a bunch of women [at the parades]—his fans. These 40- or 50-year-old crazy women screaming ‘I love you, I love you! You saved us from, you know, the communists, the Marxists…’”

Meanwhile, General Augusto Pinochet was running a regime responsible for the torture (physical and sexual abuse) of 27,255 people and the executions of 2,279 people. Victims of the regime just ‘disappeared’, sent to one of more than 1,000 torture and detention centres run by the DINA [Chilean Intelligence Services]. Bones from the bodies of who were murdered have been found in the northern deserts of Chile, while ex-Chilean military intelligence have since revealed some 1,200 bodies were thrown into the ocean. Others were never found. Most victims were political dissidents who were seen to be too closely tied or sympathetic to the overthrown, democratically elected socialist government run by Salvador Allende.

But as a neighbour General Augusto Pinochet was just “the best”, says Edmundo. “When I talk to my mother about her memories she always says ‘okay, I divide my perception of him as Pinochet my neighbour and Pinochet the dictator. When you talk to her about Pinochet the dictator she’s like ‘yeah, this guy is horrible’ but as a neighbour he was the best, like super kind, super charming guy.” The dictator would often courteously let his mother pass ahead of any parades and even once helped evacuate her friend’s son from Bolivia during a violent uprising, arranging for him to be airlifted to Santiago within 30 minutes.

Growing up, Edmundo’s street was closed off and surrounded by Black Berets with heavy weaponry and undercover agents, but he considered all of it ‘just natural’, normal. “I had this very nice neighbourly relationship with all the Black Berets,” says Edmundo. “They all knew my name, they all knew everything that was going on in my house.”

The Berets would even help Edmundo sneak girls into his house. “I remember the last two years of school I started playing in a band and there was a singer who I fell in love with – not really fell in love with, I was like hipnotizado [hypnotised], attracted to her, and I would invite her to the house and I would sneak her in so my parents didn’t know. We would go sleep in the service rooms right next to the garage and to get there we had to climb the back gate [which was right next to Pinochet’s front gate]—because we didn’t have keys to the house.”

Whenever Edumundo had a gig on, he’d make sure the Black Berets knew he would need help being hoisted over the fence. “It’s so funny looking back from this perspective, these Black Berets were like helping me and this girl to get over my back fence.” He pauses for a second. “I mean for her I can’t imagine what that was like.”

His sister’s dating prospects weren’t treated as well. “Well, one of my sisters had many boyfriends, and when they went to the house, sometimes they’d wait outside of the park, if they were there—if anyone was there for more than five minutes—the tiras [undercover military police] would approach them and get all their information.”

The dictatorship ended when Edmundo was about 15. Pinochet had come under increased international and national pressure to transfer Chile’s political system back into a democracy, first giving himself an automatic eight-year presidential term in 1980 with his first constitutional reform. In 1987, he legalised the existence of other political parties and very limited political advertising, and in 1988 he held a referendum as to whether he would have another eight-year extension of his so called presidency. In the end, 56 percent of Chileans voted no, and Chile officially became a democracy again. Pinochet still kept the role as the Commander in Chief of the Chilean army until 1998. That same year he travelled to London for minor surgery on his back and was arrested for human rights violations. He was released in 2000 and then also charged by Chilean courts for human rights violations, but the court procedures were suspended for alleged medical reasons and Pinochet died in 2006 without ever being genuinely held accountable.

It took years for Edmundo to find out about the disappearances, the torture and the murders—everything that was happening outside of his bubble. “It didn’t happen all at once, that all the information came. It was really progressive. When I started realising what all these guys did, it was pretty shocking, all the torture, the DINA and all these institutions that were chasing and killing people. How can people that I had a relationship with and that were very kind, do things like that?” He stops. “Now I understand, it’s not shocking anymore, but it was a process. Anyone can split like that.”

Although the country has taken mostly positive steps to recognise the victims of the dictatorship, there are Chileans who continue to be avid Pinochet supporters in spite of all the information available. “For those who are pro-Pinochet the only thing is to wait for them to die,” says Edmundo. “Because you can show them all the information but ‘there’s no way, Pinochet’s my man’. Even after they discovered his hidden accounts, [the tortures and killings,] everything. When he died you could see very clearly how Chile split in half—when he died 60,000 went to his funeral, half were pro[-Pinochet], half were protesting.”’

Political views in Chile remain strongly diverged, and a sizeable chunk of the population still supports the Pinochet dictatorship and its mandate. Just recently, Jose Antonio Kast—a highly conservative 2017 Chilean presidential candidate—praised the dictatorship for "what it has done for positive human rights in Chile", and said that "if Pinochet were alive he would probably vote for him". He gained 7.9 percent of the first round of votes for last year’s election. Recently, Kast was also violently beaten up by a mob while at the University of Arturo Prat in the town of Iquique to give a talk.

Edmundo’s opulent life in the Las Condes neighbourhood of Santiago ended after his father’s death—about a decade after Pinochet moved out, although he still comes past the neighbourhood every now and then to give private English classes. We loiter around the street for a little bit longer, taking in the very normal, nice looking house in the very normal, nice looking neighbourhood where one of Latin America’s worst abusers of human rights lived. Across the road in the thin strip of park mums push oblivious, round-faced babies around in prams under a perfect bluebird sky. Somewhere off in the distance, one of them starts to cry.

Follow Laetitia on Twitter.