It’s curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher
died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains
of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic “Twenty
Love Poems and a Song of Despair” and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in
Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate
cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup
launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country’s elected Socialist
President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and
Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him
by Cuba’s President Fidel Castro as Pinochet’s goons stormed into the
Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende’s; he
was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he
had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his
home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.
At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through
the streets of Santiago—a grim city that was otherwise empty except for
military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public
defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the “Internationale” and
saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime’s men were going
around the city, burning the books of authors it didn’t like, while hunting
down those it could find to torture or kill.
A couple of years ago, Neruda’s former driver came forth to
express his suspicion that Neruda had been poisoned, saying that he’d heard
from the poet that doctors gave him an injection and that, immediately
afterward, Neruda’s condition had worsened drastically. There are other tidbits
of evidence that bolster his theory, but nothing conclusive. Forensic science,
in the end, may provide the answer to a nagging historic question.
Why bring Maggie Thatcher into it? In a tribute Monday,
President Barack Obama said she had been “one of the great champions of freedom
and liberty.” Actually, she hadn’t. Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and
when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion
for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred
talking about his much-vaunted “Chilean economic miracle.”
And kill he did. Pinochet’s soldiers rounded up thousands in
the capital’s sports stadiums and, then and there, suspects were marched into
the locker rooms and corridors and bleachers and tortured and shot dead.
Hundreds died in such a fashion. One was the revered Chilean singer Víctor
Jara, who was beaten, his hands and ribs broken, and then machine-gunned, his
body dumped like trash on a back street of the capital—along with many others.
The killing went on even after Pinochet and his military had a firm hold on
power; it was just carried out with greater secrecy, in military barracks, in
police buildings, and in the countryside. Critics and opponents of the new
regime were murdered in other countries, too. In 1976, Pinochet’s intelligence agency
planned and carried out a car bombing in Washington, D.C., that murdered
Allende’s exiled former Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, as
well as Ronni Moffitt, his American aide. Britain regarded Pinochet’s killing
spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with
weapons—that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.
In 1980, the year after Thatcher took office, she lifted the
arms embargo against Pinochet; he was soon buying armaments from the United Kingdom.
In 1982, during Britain’s Falklands War against Argentina, Pinochet helped
Thatcher’s government with intelligence on Argentina. Thereafter, the
relationship became downright cozy, so much so that the Pinochets and his
family began making an annual private pilgrimage to London. During those
visits, they and the Thatchers got together for meals and drams of whiskey. In
1998, when I was writing a Profile of Pinochet for The New Yorker, Pinochet’s
daughter Lucia described Mrs. Thatcher in reverential terms, but confided that
the Prime Minister’s husband, Dennis Thatcher, was something of an
embarrassment, and habitually got drunk at their get-togethers. The last time I
met with Pinochet himself in London, in October, 1998, he told me he was about
to call “La Señora” Thatcher in the hopes she could find time to meet him for
tea. A couple of weeks later, Pinochet, still in London, found himself under
arrest, on the orders of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. During Pinochet’s
prolonged quasi-detention thereafter, in a comfortable home in the London
suburb of Virginia Water, Thatcher showed her solidarity by visiting him.
There, and in front of the television cameras, she expressed her sense of
Britain’s debt to his regime: “I know how much we owe to you”—for “your help
during the Falklands campaign.” She also said, “It was you who brought
democracy to Chile.”
This, of course, was a misstatement of such gargantuan
proportions that it cannot be dismissed as the overzealousness of a loyal
friend.
Pinochet himself finally died in 2006, under house arrest
and facing over three hundred criminal charges for human rights abuses, tax
evasion, and embezzlement. By then, he was alleged to have over twenty-eight
million dollars stashed in secret bank accounts in various countries, with no
sign that it had been legally earned. At the end, Pinochet’s only defense was a
humiliating claim of dementia—that he couldn’t remember his crimes. His final
heart attack came before he could ever be convicted.
During the years of what could be called Chile’s return to
democracy, after 1990—when Pinochet was forced to step down from the Presidency
he had seized following a referendum on his rule, which he lost—little was done
to truly exorcise Chile’s demons, much less judge them. Pinochet retained the
command of the armed forces, and when he stepped down from that role, in 1998,
he retained a senatorship-for-life, which gave him immunity from prosecution.
Until his detention in Britain, the Presidents who ruled “democratic” Chile
continued to tiptoe around the fact that the country’s chief former tormenter
continued to dictate the terms of the national discussion about the recent
past. Following his return home, after sixteen months, however, Pinochet was
stripped of his parliamentary immunity, criminally indicted for some of his
coup-era crimes, and spent much of the remainder of his life under house
arrest. But it took Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s President from 2006 to 2010—the
daughter of a general who opposed the coup and was tortured until he died of a
heart attack in detention—to end the tradition of deference.
In a country where, for decades, history was buried, it is
fitting for Chileans to dig up Neruda to find out the truth of what happened to
him. In a sense, Neruda was Chile’s Lorca, the Spanish poet who was murdered in
the first weeks of Francisco Franco’s Fascist coup of Spain in 1936, and whose
blood has been a stain on the conscience of his country ever since.
Chile now has a chance to do the right thing by its poet.
Neruda’s beach home, at Isla Negra, some miles from Santiago on the coast, is a
lovely, modest villa on a rocky beach, with windows that look out to sea and
the poet’s lyrical collection of old ship mermaids as decorations. He and his
widow, Matilde Urrutia, were buried there, and that is where the investigators
went to look for the truth of what happened. In the end, even if Neruda died of
cancer, as was said at the time, his exhumation is an opportunity to reinforce
the message to authoritarians everywhere that a poet’s words will always
outlast theirs, and the blind praise of their powerful friends.
