Questions of Chile
Written: Jan 17 '04 (Updated Jan 24 '04)
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Pros: almost military EFFICIENCY
Cons: almost MILITARY efficiency
The Bottom Line: Mostly, I have questions ... Read the review!
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Chile |
Have you ever gone somewhere, come back, and found that you have no opinion of it, only a collection of sensations that just won't cohere? Two weeks after returning from Chile, that's what I have. The impressions that follow might be called "things that the guidebooks don't tell you", but really, they're questions, mysteries. As usual, if you want what's in the guidebooks, don't read this. Read a guidebook.
Why is Chile a great outdoor destination, but not a cultural one?
Guidebooks agree on this: Go to Chile, they say, for the magnificent scenery. From the world's driest desert to the glacial fjords of the south, Chile's landscape is almost monotonously spectacular, a core sample of latitudes and altitudes compressed into the smallest possible space. There is no room in this country for vast expanses of plains. Everything is a slope, an edge, a vista.
But the guidebooks also warn that if you want an engaging, beautiful, and culturally rich big city, see Buenos Aires. Why does Santiago offer so little for the tourist, though it teems with intelligence and intention? The guidebooks agree on this, and try to explain it. Don't expect Chilean culture to dazzle you, they say. This is a staid country, not given to public displays of feeling such as, well, art. The dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989) involved, among many other evils, a conscious effort to destroy the cultural life of the nation.
Today, if you go looking for urban pleasures such as the arts, you can find them in Santiago, but not on the scale that you’d expect of a European capital, or even of Buenos Aires. Chile is not sure how to handle the messy business of art, especially the inevitable process of selecting and venerating certain artists above others. Where possible, they leave it to foreign authorities to make this decision.
Thus, the two most venerated artists in Chile are both poets, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, and the only thing that sets them apart from many other great poets is that they both won the Nobel Prize. One artist friend pointed out that there were several Chilean poets of Neruda’s prowess, but only Neruda had personal financial resources, an outsized personality, and a gift for self-marketing that doesn’t come easily to most poets. Gabriela Mistral had the advantage of being earlier (a less crowded field) and perhaps also being female, not an advantage in Chile but very important to the Nobel committee. I got the sense that the actual “greatness” of Neruda or Mistral mattered less to the Chilean tourism industry than their overseas recognition. Thanks to the Nobels, Mistral now gazes wisely from the 5000 peso note, while Neruda’s many residences are all developed, to some degree or another, as shrines to the great master.
Numbered provinces? NUMBERED?
One quickly notices that Chile is not a country of multiple great cities -- like the US, Canada, China, Japan, Australia, Germany, Italy, Russia, India, or Brazil. In Chile's national self-image, there is only one great city, Santiago, which is the public expression of the national government and a special focus of its attention. Chile appears to be following the model of other super-centralized states, of which the most successful example is France. (Would the spectacular achievement of Paris have been possible if it had not been the entire nation’s project?)
As in France, Chile uses various turns of phrase to reinforce the centrality of the Great National City.
France -- ever since Napoleon -- has been divided into almost 100 départements that bear no relationship to the cultural regions of the country. France also has the delightful term en province, which means “anywhere in France other than Paris.”
In Chile, the equivalent linguistic trick is to refer to the country’s internal divisions (las regiones) by number. The regiones have as much local pride as an American state or a Canadian province, but their names (they do have them) are secondary to their numbers. Drive along the Panamericana, and you’ll see billboards at each boundary, just as you would on a state or provincial line in North America: “Bienvenidos a la septima región!!”, they say, (Welcome to the Seventh Region!) along with some slogan about what makes this region special.
Only the Great National City, Santiago, is not in a numbered region. It is in the Región Metropolitana -- a clear statement, if any more were needed, that Chile has only one true metropolis, and will stamp out any competitors ...
Why is this peculiar? Well, in France, nobody is more than 800 km or so from Paris. But Chile is 4000 km long and barely 100 km wide. The northern most First Region is closer to Lima than to Santiago. Southernmost regions (the Eleventh and Twelfth) have no land access from Chile except via its archrival, Argentina. An organic development of such a long, thin country would have produced multiple major cities, as it did in other long-thin countries such as Japan, or Italy, or Canada (whose habitable portion approximates Chile’s dimensions). Major government force must have been applied to keep this country so centered on Santiago.
The numbering of regiones emphasizes their place in the nation, rather than their unique cultural identities. Not surprisingly, then, these regions' governments do not answer to their people. The President in Santiago appoints the governor of each region. The highest directly-elected level of local government is the municipal council, which can argue about micro-zoning and garbage collection but cannot really ask large questions. You get to vote for the President and the Congress, but once they’re in, they run the whole country, including your own regional government. (Imagine if Bill Clinton had been able to pick tree-hugging Democrats for the governorships of Idaho, Utah, and Texas, or if Bush had been able to put southern evangelicals in charge of New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont.)
Is Dictatorship Like Alcoholism?
Chile is a recovering dictatorship. General Augusto Pinochet ruled this country without any Constitutional restrictions from 1973 (when he overthrew the elected Salvador Allende) to 1989, when under international pressure he finally agreed to a plebiscite on his rule, and lost.
Pinochet’s reign was so long, and so recent, that it looms large in the memory of every Chilean over 30. If you weren’t a dissenter, and thus subject to being “disappeared,” the Pinochet era was 16 years of not asking questions, taking dictatorship for granted, at risk of not knowing how to live without it.
Today, many Chileans don’t want to talk about it. Even dissenters -- those who were imprisoned and tortured by Pinochet but not “disappeared,” -- don’t go into details. One reader of my article on Valparaíso felt that I shouldn’t have dwelled so much on Pinochet’s influence on the town. "Do not make people angrier on something we are trying to heal," he said. Anyone who has watched similar "recovery" efforts, such as in South Africa, can understand this sentiment.
A few are eager to talk, those who have their own concept of “recovery.” An innkeeper in Talca spent a pleasant morning with me in the garden, explaining how efficient Chile had been under Pinochet, and how everything had gone to hell with the return of democracy. She admitted that Pinochet had made “mistakes.” But then, only 3000 people actually “disappeared” under Pinochet, compared to 30,000 under the concurrent dictatorships in Argentina. (Key concept for Chilean identity: We’re doing much better than Argentina, and really, that’s the only game that counts.)
Also eager to talk, from the other side of the fence, was the Canadian-Chilean writer-activist Lake Sagaris, the wife of my host at a lodge in Huerquehue National Park (Ninth Region). Lake did a fine book about her experiences in Chile from 1985, when she arrived as a young reporter, through 2000, documenting Pinochet’s fall and the mass of unanswered questions that remain (After the First Death: A Journey Through Chile, Time, and Mind, published [alas] only in Canada). Most other great books on the subject were written by Chileans who went into exile, such as Ariel Dorfman, or by Americans who worked for Allende and fled the country after his demise, such as Marc Cooper.
But most Chileans have nothing to say. My host in Santiago said something to the effect that “When I was a child, Pinochet was President in the same sense that my father was my father -- it never occurred to me that the president could be anyone else.” This friend has turned out well, but it was spooky to imagine growing up not asking obvious questions, much as children in alcoholic families do.
So is dictatorship like alcoholism, something that is never really out of your system even if you’ve given up the drug itself? If so, Chileans don’t seem to be going to their meetings. The talk -- common among unrecovered alcoholics -- is all about moving on … forgetting all that unpleasantness …
Yet 12 years after liberation, the shadows of dictatorship are everywhere. Some of these, such as the fact that the police are part of the military, date from before Pinochet but reflect an order-obsessed society that was ripe for dictatorial rule. Others, such as the runaway privatization of everything, are part of Pinochet’s legacy that current governments largely still embrace.
Which is why I asked …
Is Anything Not for Sale?
Reversing the vision of his socialist predecessor, Salvador Allende, Pinochet sought to impoverish the government and leave it beholden to the private sector, thereby assuring that even if socialists came to power again, they would no longer control the levers to achieve real change.
Pinochet made his country a laboratory for Milton Friedman’s “Chicago boys” (based at the University of Chicago), where they experimented with radical privatization of everything. The policy was often disastrous for ordinary Chileans, but very profitable to some big American corporations. Today, rampant privatization is still the rule of the day …
Some of the results are comical, others just scary. At the scary end are the buses of Santiago, all painted yellow but operated by hundreds of little companies -- in some cases literally Pablo and His Bus. Drivers operate along predefined routes but are paid through the fares they collect. Entrepreneurs like Pablo are thus motivated to race down their routes as fast as possible, attempting to pass other buses on the route in order to collect more passengers. For the same reason, Santiago buses all run with their doors open; you never know when a fare will jump on, and while passengers may fall out on sharp left turns, that’s no loss to the driver, since they have already paid. (To their credit, the Ministry of Transport under President Ricardo Lagos has plans to bring the buses under more direct government control, and motivate the drivers to cooperate in keeping a schedule.)
At the comical end of Chilean privatization is the corporate sponsorship of streetsigns and other civic infrastructure. In the resort town of Villarrica, in the mountainous south, every streetsign bears the Coca-Cola logo just above the streetname. All bus shelters are festooned with the logo of Nivea sun-protection products -- an important market so close to the ozone hole. If you want to see the advertising industry's wet dream, where no visible surface has "gone to waste", this place is a must-see. If Chile had a space program, I'm sure they would have billboard-satellites by now, brightening the night sky with moving images to dictate your desires.
Villarrica is a fairly prosperous town; I could only wonder whether mayors of poorer, less touristed towns had waited hat-in-hand at the Coca-Cola headquarters to pitch for their share of a limited advertising budget, only to be told that they lacked enough of the Coke-buying demographic to get streetsign-billboards for free.
Privatization also does odd things to the roads. Chile’s backbone freeway, the Panamericana Highway 5, is a toll-road where different segments are controlled by different private companies. Drive a length of the Panamericana, and you’ll notice differences in the tollbooth practices -- these take credit cards, those don’t -- as well as signage. This really leads, though to a separate question.
Why, in such an organized country, are the roadsigns so disorienting?
If I were inclined to paranoia, I would suspect that Chilean authorities want people to get lost. Maps show highway numbers, but roadsigns never mention them. Instead, signs just point toward towns, many of them much too small to appear on the map. This leaves you to figure out which road on the map you’re actually on. If there are three roads to Temuco from where you are, a sign pointing you to Temuco tells you almost nothing, except that this is one way to get to Temuco eventually (and is perhaps the one that will take you past merchants owned by the company that owns the road).
This phenomenon cost me most of a day as I drove back north toward Santiago on the Chile’s backbone freeway, the Panamericana. I wanted to see Valparaíso again before heading to the airport, so foolishly, I exited at the first offramp that was signed as leading to Valparaíso. Only after I’d driven a bit did I realize that I was still over 100 km south of Santiago. From the “Valparaíso exit,” then, I had 200km to cover on back roads, and through unattractive industrial cities, and for most of that distance, no roadsign mentioned the city that I had obediently left the freeway to reach. I suspect that the private tollroad authority, nearing the northern limit of its zone of control, wanted to advertise Valparaíso among its “products,” and therefore wanted to have a Valparaíso exit at the northernmost limit of the segment of freeway that they controlled. The local authorities clearly didn’t share this interest; they didn’t mention Valparaíso on their signs because nobody in their right mind would be trying to go such a long distance on local roads.
Where is the Roadkill?
This may seem an indelicate question, but it's unavoidable. Pedestrians, both human and canine, are a common sight along Chile’s highways, even the main freeway. The people seem to take rational care, and so do many dogs, but the canine fascination with cars brings many dogs into harm’s way.
Yet I never saw a dead animal on any highway in Chile.
One explanation, of course, is that Chile has few native mammals that are large enough to be noticed at 100 kph, and these (mostly of the llama family) tend to stay up in the mountains. But still, dogs multiply like rabbits. There is no sign of any effort to neuter them, so one person’s beloved pet may sire countless feral offspring.
Perhaps everyone behaves as I did in Collipulli, a hardscrabble town along the Panamericana. Driving past the town’s main interchange in the fast lane, a white dog began running alongside my car. I slammed on the brakes and managed to slow from 120 kph to about 20 kph, but this permitted the dog to pass me. At once, he cut in front, so that I hit him even while braking. He rolled about six times, and was still.
I stopped in the fast lane, turned on my flashers, and walked forward to collect the dog. His eyes were wide awake, but the back end was clearly no longer functioning. I bundled him into my rental car, and with my right hand on his head, I drove back to Collipulli. Fortunately, a policeman was right behind me, and I hailed him to stop. I explained the situation in very broken Spanish (“No es mi perro; es un perro de aquí, de esta ciudad!”) Though I never understood a word he said, I managed to get out "Puedo seguir usted ...?" and at once he nodded and led me to the police station, where we unloaded the dog. Six policemen stood around the dog, talking over their options, seeming to accept him as their problem. I headed back to the road thinking that even if the dog was going to die, at least he was in his hometown, and wouldn’t die out on the freeway …
How did the Chileans master pan-European phonics?
Most North Americans usually pronounce their local Spanish names as though they were English. Living in California, I must memorize the official mispronunciation of each Spanish placename if I want to be understood by the gringo locals.
By contrast, Chileans take pride in pronouncing foreign names correctly. The odd, long history of aristocratic immigration has flooded the nation´s history with non-Spanish names. Of the last four presidents, only the current one, Ricardo Lagos, as an entirely Spanish name. Every city has an Avenida del Libertador Bernardo O´Higgins, and everyone says the H in O´Higgins correctly as in English. (H is silent in Spanish, while J approximates our H sound.) Spanish doesn´t have a W, but everyone pronounces former President Patricio Aylwin´s name in the same way that we would. (Which is to say, they mispronounce this Welsh surname in the same way that the English do.)
The respect for European languages doesn’t extend to actually learning them, of course. Chile is one of the world's most monolingual countries, right up there with Australia. Even the lady at the American Airlines (!) office in Concepción spoke no English at all, forcing me to explain my complicated needs of the moment in my broken Spanish. There’s plenty of ambient English on tape -- American pop stars rule the stereo systems in cafes -- but almost nobody will admit to understanding a word.
Chilean monolingualism isn’t surprising given that it’s 1000 km from the nearest foreign language (Portuguese) and 1/3 of a planet away from English or anything else more challenging. There are, of course, the indigenous languages, primarily that of the Mapuche, but as with Native [North] Americans, these languages are a constant struggle to save.
Where is the Chile depicted in advertising, where everyone is blond and white, and most are women in skimpy swimwear?
Guidebooks WILL tell you that an undercurrent of racism remains in Chile, preferring white skin (=pure European descent) over the more common range of browns (=indigenous blood). European-white skin is still a rarity, except in the uppermost classes. Guidebooks will also warn you that Chile tends to objectify women to about a degree that was normal in 1950 North America.
Advertising, however, can still be a shock. The most egregious was an ad from the telephone company -- on billboards, phone books, sides of buses, presumably on television -- which shows three young women in two-piece swimsuits with long, flowing Charlie's-Angels-hair. One is blond, one brunette, one black haired, but all are of white complexion. The upper portions of their swimsuits bear the numbers 1, 2, or 3 (in that order). The entire message of the ad appears to be that you can get some new service just by dialing 123. The subtext seems to be that you're more likely to do this if you can imagine that with each number you're touching a virginal European breast.
The summertime Christmas is another opportunity to flaunt female bodies in skimpy dress. The photo of one come-hithering young woman was all over the Paris department store. Her clothes, hair, and skin all seemed to be pulsating, as though she was being sexually stimulated just below the photo's crop-line. Above her, in a fiery, dramatic font, was the single word "NAVIDAD!" The word means Christmas, but it also just means "birth", an odd juxtaposition with the image of a sexually mature but nonmaternal young woman. Birth, sex, Christmas ... it all gets mixed together somehow, and while it doesn't work for me, it must be working for someone ...
Which leads to a final question ...
I know it’s a Catholic country, but does Christmas (Navidad) really work in the summer?
Yes, people really do set up styrofoam snowmen, dress as Santa, and take on all the other appurtenances of Christmas in midsummer, just as the Australians do. Unlike Australians, they don´t seem to see how funny this is.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Dec - Feb
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Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
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Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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