SANTIAGO, Chile -- The meeting of Chilean President Eduardo Frei with President Clinton in Washington this week signals the arrival of this former pariah nation of South America to a position of eminence shared by few other countries in the world.
Chile is almost certain to be the next country to join the North American Free Trade Agreement. Or it will sign a bilateral free trade arrangement with the United States, a status enjoyed only by Mexico, Canada and Israel.
President Clinton endorses the idea, as did President George Bush before him.
Clearly Chile has come a long way, from despised dictatorship to a probable partnership with the world's leading economic power. In fact, some people regard what happened here over the past two decades as a miracle, an economic explosion that changed the nature of the country, if not the people.
For others, people like Ximena George-Nascimento, the miracle was more a nightmare. She spent the first year of the transformation of Chile in prison. What she recalls of that time, before she fled the country in 1974, were "beatings and beatings," mock executions, "more beatings." Then she endured years in exile.
Even today, when she rides on Santiago's Metro, she can't help but suspect that some of the victims of Gen. Augusto Pinochet -- some of those several thousands whose whereabouts are still unknown -- might be buried in the concrete beneath the rails.
"It would have been a good place," she says with a shudder.
The subway was just a long ditch through the heart of Santiago in 1973, when, on Sept. 11, General Pinochet laid siege to the Moneda, the presidential palace, causing the suicide of the elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende.
As the world turned away from Chile, the general consolidated his power and held on to it for the next 17 years, until, in 1989, the Chilean people told him in a plebiscite they had had enough.
In 1990 civilians regained control of Chile's government.
Sept. 11, 1973, was a pivotal date in the history of this country.
Since then, Chile has become something of an economic wonder. Its annual growth rates of 6 percent over the past decade exceed those of every other country in Latin America and those of most in the rest of the world. More foreign investment flows in here today than into Hong Kong or Taiwan.
The invitation to President Frei, his scheduled lunch at the White House, conversations with leading U.S. businessmen and Cabinet members, are a measure of the warm relations between Chile and the United States.
They weren't always this way.
Though elements in the United States fearful of Allende's socialism were thought to have contributed to bringing on the coup, Washington's relationship with Chile turned sour shortly afterward in response to the barbarity of the repression. They worsened during Jimmy Carter's administration, with its strong human rights emphasis.
The improvement leading to the present friendship began during the Chilean recession of 1983-1984, according to Riordan Roett, director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "It developed when the first signs of political opening were seen," he said.
"For us it is very vital to have such a [free trade] accord," said President Frei in a recent interview here. "In the short range it wouldn't signify much change in Chile. In the long range it would mean greater recognition in the world."
How did this little country of 13 million reach this eminence? What did it all cost?
The answer to the first question is complicated. The second is easier: the cost was high in terms of economic dislocation, suffering, even death. For General Pinochet changed life as Chileans had known it.
Immediately after the smoke cleared over the Moneda, he banned political parties and crushed the trade unions. Thousands of Chileans were swept into prisons, tortured, murdered. Thousands more escaped into the embassies in Santiago, then into exile.
The general closed the play of politics in Chile entirely, smothering democracy in this country, which had known little else in its 184-year history.
Since the poor and working class constituted the bulk of President Allende's constituency, General Pinochet directed most of his wrath toward them: He ended unemployment insurance and cut public health services; he slashed public education funds at every level.
He then turned to a group of economists at the Catholic University, disciples of the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman. He chose them, says a Chilean diplomat who asked not to be named, not because he had much knowledge of Dr. Friedman's free-market ideas, but because in a country run by Socialists, they were never consulted and so had no political taint.
The so-called "Chicago Boys," led by their mentor, Sergio de Castro Spikula, as General Pinochet's economy minister, reversed modern economic history in Latin America by rejecting the dominant policy of those years. The old policy encouraged countries to produce for their home markets and keep high tariff walls against foreign imports. It was a formula for economic stagnation. It killed the competitive spirit.
The kind of shock Friedmanites elsewhere could only theorize about suddenly became real here. It happened to real people. Within a year 5 million Chileans were impoverished.
The Chicago Boys cut Chile's immense tariff down to its current 11 percent. Goods flowed in from everywhere. Chilean industries, long subsidized, failed on every side. Unemployment hit 30 percent, a catastrophe in a country without unemployment insurance. Government enterprises were sold off: banks, phone and power companies, much of the industrial infrastructure.
Chile then followed the example of Singapore and South Korea, the "little tigers" of Asia. It became an export economy. One figure illustrates the change this brought: In the early 1970s, over 80 percent of Chile's foreign earnings came from copper; today it accounts for 47 percent.
But Chile isn't selling less copper; it's selling many other things.
Chile exports more fresh fruit than any other country in the Southern Hemisphere. It sells more farmed salmon than any other country in the world except Norway. Only two countries sell more wine than Chile in the United States.
It exports software to manage hospitals and run automated teller machines; appliances, shoes, jeans, tools, furniture and automobile parts.
As a result of all this, some people have made a lot of money here. Most have not.
To many Chileans General Pinochet was a force of nature. He hit them like the occasional Andean earthquake. They are still trying to recover.
Says Luis Maira, the planning minister: "In 1970, three years before General Pinochet seized power, 17 percent of Chileans ++ were poor. At the end of the 17-year dictatorship, 43 percent of Chileans were poor."
"Even today our distribution of wealth is the most unjust in Latin America," he said. "Only Brazil's is worse. Here, 40 percent of the population receives only 13 percent of the income. The top 20 percent take in 25 percent of it."
These figures are not advertised by the promoters of Chile as a comer on the world scene. Despite 10 years of steady growth and many impressive gains in the economy, Chile's profile remains strictly Third World.
Still, it is evident that lives have been improved in the poorer parts. Ms. George-Nascimento notes this as she drives through south Santiago, the older, dusty neighborhoods sprawling out toward the Andes.
"People are dressed better these days," she says. "I think that is because of these stores that sell all the used clothing from Europe and the United States. It's a big business here."
But not everybody wears secondhand clothing. Not in neighborhoods such as Providencia and Las Condes. This is where the boom is most evident -- in the new high-rises, the proliferation of marble-clad malls, boutiques, art galleries, antique and jewelry shops, and restaurants serviced by waiters in burgundy blazers. The logo of the boom is the cellular phone. All the thrusting executives keep in touch.
From atop the pine-choked San Cristobal hill, looking across the turbulent Mapoche River, Providencia looks like a clean Alpine -- town, confident in its prosperity, ornamented and enhanced by its river park where the willows dip gracefully.
The energy is even evident in the old downtown, where new steel and glass banks have been inserted beside the dusty domes and dark arcades thought grand at the turn of the century, which gave Santiago its frumpy but comfortable appeal.
The downtown is where the citizens of the "two Chiles" created by General Pinochet's shock come together. And there you can see that even the poor have a little money these days.
And it goes farther, too: Inflation this year is expected to be about 10 percent. It was over 500 percent a year after the coup. A young couple can go to a medium-range restaurant, have a full meal with wine and dessert, and get out for about $22.
Pinochet's handcuffs
People who have been outside the country for long periods, like the returned exiles, have noticed that Chileans have changed.
The crisis they went through has made them more self-reliant, more inventive of odd careers. They sing on the street -- opera, tangos, you name it. They sell trifles like combs and shine shoes. They park cars. They have devised a new occupation, called "traffic controller." These are the young men who stand at bus stops and, for tips, advise the bus drivers how far the previous bus is ahead; it allows the drivers to pace themselves to pick up more passengers.
Though Mr. Maira admires the unsinkable spirit these enterprises suggest, he knows their disappearance will signal a more genuine progress than what is currently being touted by Chile's cheerleaders in business, banking and foreign investment circles.
But by themselves they represent success of a sort: in 1975, when the shock of General Pinochet's policies had run through the country, Santiago's streets were full of beggars.
A loss of fear
And there is progress in another, possibly more important, area. Poli Delano, a novelist and short story writer who returned from exile in 1984, sees it.
"There has been an increasing loss of fear," he says. "I feel it myself. In 1984 after I returned I never slept well. That has changed. Everybody who was against the regime sleeps better now. They are losing their fear."
David Becker says fear was the preferred instrument of control used by the military. He is a German psychologist, a director of the Latin American Institute for Mental Health and Human Rights. He works with the victims of the repression -- survivors of torture, the relatives of the disappeared, the disoriented exiles who have come home.
"In Chile the repression was applied in an intelligent and organized way. Just enough to keep the population under control," he says.
"Between 1973 and 1978 it was very severe. But people thought it was worse than it was. If you told them [30,000] to a hundred thousand people had been killed, they would have believed it. The government instilled fear through torture. The final objective of torture is not only to get information but to create fear, to torture people, break them, then let them go out so others can see them."
For Mr. Becker the turning point came in 1983, when Chile was pitched into possibly the worst recession of its history. Unemployment again ran up to 30 percent.
"It made people lose their fear," he says. Thousands went into the streets. Some were shot. The torture continued. But so did the protests.
As the economic situation began to improve, and Chile moved into its current accelerated period of economic growth, the protests diminished. So did the number of human rights abuses. The Pinochet government was approaching its end.
In 1988, the general, feeling growing pressure against him, asked Chileans to decide by plebiscite whether he should stay in power or go. Go! they said.
And he did, but not far.
"The military created the terms under which politics would continue in this country," Mr. Becker says, alluding to the Pinochet-imposed constitution that virtually exempts the armed forces from the president's authority. It provides amnesty for all crimes committed during 1973-1978.
General Pinochet also said he would remain head of the army until 1997.
The first civilian government took office in 1990, headed by the Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin. To Poli Delano, the writer, "it was handcuffed."
President Aylwin and other civilian leaders expected their tenure to be difficult but not unmanageable. But right away anger and passions long suppressed in Chile bubbled to the surface. People demanded information on the disappeared. They wanted know how many there were, what happened to them.
Truth and silence
President Aylwin, in a dangerous gambit, set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to find out. In 1991 it reported that a total of 2,279 people had been kidnapped and murdered by the military. The number has since risen by about a thousand.
The report did not have the effect intended. People were not satisfied to know only how many there were. They wanted to know who did the crimes. They wanted to know where the bodies are.
The military has remained silent.
President Frei, also a Christian Democrat and son of a former president, is as handcuffed as Mr. Aylwin was. This became evident when he asked Gen. Rodolfo Stange, the head of the national police, to resign for blocking an investigation into the murders of three Communist leaders in March 1985. General Stange refused. Recently he went on leave with pay. President Frei does not have the authority to fire him. A stalemate obtains.
Though General Pinochet retired to the barracks with all his force intact, the plebiscite of 1988 proved he was not invincible. One of those active in the campaign for the vote against him was Ricardo Lagos, the current Minister of Public Works, a Socialist and former adviser to President Allende. He describes the plebiscite victory as an "epic" event.
"I walked all over Chile telling people not to be afraid," he says.
He talks about how their apprehensions, stoked for so many years, had forced Chileans to suppress their dreams, to tiptoe through their national life, making few demands for fear that this large animal they lived beside might bite again. He tells a story of an old woman he met in south Santiago.
"She was crying, very emotional," he recalls. "I went to her and she embraced me and told me she was an Allendista [supporter of the late president] and that she would vote for me. I said, 'Of course you will vote for me. I'm an Allendista, too.' "
"She told me: 'I dreamed so much and I suffered so much.' Her house had been filled with bullets. 'But you have convinced me that if you win, they won't come back.' "
She had lost her fear.