book review, Volume 3 number 7, July 2001 Che and Pinochet Chasing Che Pinochet and Me In 1952, a young Argentine medical student named Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna set out with a friend on a motorcycle trip across South America. It was a transformational journey for Guevara in which he encountered first hand the poverty and corruption which was (and still is) endemic throughout Latin America. He returned home radicalized and bearing the nickname "Che" (literally, "hey, you"). By the end of the decade he was a leader in the Cuban revolution and a myth of his own making. Killed while attempting to spark resistance in Bolivia, he has in death become the symbol of hope for millions of Latin Americans, even as the communist cause he espoused has withered and died. Three decades after Guevara’s death, Patrick Symmes retraced part of his path, seeking to discover the real Guevara and to understand the present state of South America. In Chasing Che, readers accompany Symmes on his motorcycle through Argentina and Chile, two nations still in the early phases of recovery from harsh right-wing dictatorships, then on to Peru where the citizenry is caught between the pathological Shining Path guerrilla movement and an equally sadistic government, and ultimately to Bolivia and the site of Guevara’s final battle. Symmes never takes the easy route of casting Guevara as idol or demon. Though fascinated by the early adventures of the wide-eyed traveler, he makes no excuses for the ruthless violence Guevara ultimately turned to in order to make his dreams a reality. Encountering many of the same conditions as Guevara, Symmes recognizes the poverty and hopelessness which drove the Cold War era revolutions across the Western Hemisphere. He notes that the majority of the blood is on the hands of the political right, but he won’t let the left off the hook, particularly in Peru and Cuba where it has shown itself as morally bankrupt as the right. The problem, as Symmes notes, lies in the grotesquely lopsided distribution of land which keeps wealth out of the hands of most citizens of the region. (The United States, with its extreme emphasis on property rights, has never fully grasped this reality, and has long supported dictatorial regimes which share this view, prolonging and worsening the poverty. Trade deals will not resolve this elemental issue.) Chasing Che grapples with Guevara’s troubled legacy and the tragedy that is Latin America, and while Symmes (unlike Guevara) has no easy answers, he provides an honest, balanced assessment of this too often overlooked part of the world. One protégé of Guevara was Salvador Allende who, in 1970, was elected president of Chile. Allende attempted to direct Chile towards a socialist economy while maintaining democratic principles. In what still stands as one of the worst crimes in the history of U.S. foreign policy (and it has plenty of competition), the Nixon administration financed and directed the military coup which led to the death of Allende in 1973 and the subsequent bloody rule of General Augusto Pinochet, one of the Western Hemisphere’s most brutal dictators. Journalist Marc Cooper, a translator for Allende, was on hand for the overthrow. In his new book, Pinochet and Me, Cooper recounts his time in Chile over the years, including his hair-raising escape in the days which followed the coup (he had good reason to fear for his life: two Americans were targeted and killed by the junta, and there is increasing evidence of Nixon administration involvement in this). Cooper’s book draws on his personal journals, with entries from various key periods in Chile’s history. He describes Chile at its harshest and most repressive in the mid-seventies when dissidents were being "disappeared" (in other words, killed, often by being tossed into the ocean from airplanes so their bodies could never be retrieved), and when a palpable fear controlled a once-free society which, prior to Nixon’s intervention, had enjoyed a century and a half of uninterrupted democracy. Returning to Chile in the theoretically democratic post-Pinochet era, after the general’s well-publicized arrest in London on human rights charges, Cooper finds a schizophrenic society unwilling to come to terms with its own past. Though real income is less than it was under Allende, Chile is now frequently cited as Latin America’s economic miracle. Yet privatized social security has bankrupted the poor and middle class, while the rich have profited handsomely from the scheme (a good lesson for Americans toying with the same idea). Everyone, it seems, is living on credit, and the inequities in wealth distribution keep growing wider. Still, some judges have recently been willing to go after military officials from the old regime, and even Pinochet himself has been brought up on charges (though these have been reduced since the book was written). Pinochet’s arrest in Europe has put many world leaders (including Henry Kissinger, arguably America’s greatest war criminal) on notice. They can no longer travel the world freely. A new ethic is slowly emerging, and a global system of justice may yet force some of the most violent leaders of recent years to atone for their actions. One can only hope. In the meantime, we have this all too short book by Marc Cooper to remind us of what has occurred, and of how the United States has frequently opposed democracy when it did not go the way we wished.
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