A Tale of Two Editorials

Yesterday, the Washington Post wrote a mash note to Augusto Pinochet.

It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired.

Not only untrue (as Argentina is sporting a comeback of late), but a strange view of how ends justify means, that as long as the country is stable and economically vibrant 15 years after you leave power, you can throw political opponents out of helicopters. Somehow the WaPo believes that right-wing dictatorships produce more liberal democracies than Communist ones, quietly neglecting the whole of Eastern Europe in that meaningless equation. Human rights advocates are a bit more concerned with which innocents are dying than who ends up having the higher GDP 20 years later.

In fact, this is the only editorial I read yesterday that mattered to me about Chile.

IN 1995, I went to Chile's National Stadium to watch a soccer match. Soccer was something I neither enjoyed nor understood, but the game was hardly on my mind; instead, it was the arena.

I was 20 years old and had come to Chile to study. I also hoped to meet some of the surviving allies of leftist President Salvador Allende, who had been toppled in the 1973 coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. I didn't care that the team Colo Colo was playing Universidad de Chile, a squad affiliated with the college until 1980. I didn't understand why security police were everywhere, or why someone threw a flaming brick at me as I walked to the cheering section for La U, as the Universidad team is also known.

All I could think of was: My God! This is National Stadium, where the bleachers were once filled with dissidents of every stripe after the coup, a mass waiting room for those about to be executed or tortured. This is where women were raped for the crime of wearing pants.

And it was at nearby Chile Stadium where the great Victor Jara — the Bob Dylan of Chile and a political activist (or was Dylan the Victor Jara of the U.S.?) — was murdered by the Pinochet regime. Jara's fingers were mutilated in front of thousands of other prisoners. He attempted to sing songs of resistance, his hands bloody stumps, only to be gunned down as people in the stands tried to join him in chorus.

I didn't want to be near these places any more than I would want to watch a baseball game at Auschwitz.

The author does stay, however, and sees La Universidad de Chile win, a symbolic victory over the team that Pinochet backed during his rule. It's a powerful story that ends with the acknowledgment that while Pinochet never had to face his accusers and be called into account for his crimes, in his mind he knew his transgressions, and so did the Chilean people.

Transgressions that Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post don't seem to care about.