From Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Jared Diamond, 2019) pp163-5
With that “No!” victory, Pinochet’s opponents at last gained the opportunity to return to power in the presidential elections scheduled for 1990. But the “No!” campaigners had consisted of 17 different groups, with 17 different visions for Chile after Pinochet. Hence Chile risked going down the path trodden by the Allied democracies that had defeated Germany and Japan in World War Two, and of whom Winston Churchill had written as the theme of the last volume of his six-volume history of World War Two, Triumph and Tragedy, “How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.” A similar question was pending for Chile: would Chileans resume their follies of intransigence and of the no-compromise posture that had cost many of them their lives, and that had cost their country its democratic government?
Of Pinochet’s leftist opponents who were not killed by Pinochet, 100,000 fled into exile, beginning around 1973. They remained in exile for a long time, about 16 years (until 1989). They thus had ample time to reflect on their former intransigence. Many of them went to Western or Eastern Europe, where they spent years watching how socialists, communists, and other leftists of European countries operated, and how those leftists fared. Those Chilean exiles who went to Eastern Europe tended to become depressed upon discovering that intransigent leftist idealists in power didn’t create national happiness. Those exiles who fled to Western Europe instead observed moderate social democracies in action, the resulting high standard of living, and a calmer political atmosphere than the atmosphere that had prevailed in Chile. They discovered that leftists don’t have to be radical and intransigent, but that they could achieve many of their goals by negotiating and compromising with people who hold different political views. The exiles experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe’s communist governments, and China’s bloody suppression of demonstrations in 1989. All of those observations served to temper extremism and communist sympathies of Chile’s leftists.
Already during the “No!” campaign of 1989, “No!” backers of disparate views realized that they couldn’t win unless they learned to cooperate with each other. They also realized that Pinochet still enjoyed wide support among Chile’s business community and upper class, and that they couldn’t win, or (if they did win) that they would never be permitted to assume power, unless Pinochet supporters could be assured of their personal safety in a post-Pinochet era. Painful as the prospect was, leftists in power would have to practice tolerance towards former enemies whose views they loathed, and whose behavior towards them had been horrible. They had to declare their willingness to build “a Chile for all Chileans”: the goal that Patricio Aylwin, Chile’s first democratically elected president after Pinochet, proclaimed in his inaugural speech of March 12, 1990.
Once the alliance of the 17 “No!” groups had thus won the referendum, the alliance’s leftists faced the necessity of convincing the alliance-centrists of the Christian Democratic Party that a new leftist government wasn’t to be feared and wouldn’t be as radical as Allende’s leftist government had been. Hence leftist and centrist parties joined in an electoral alliance termed Concertacién. Leftists agreed that, if the alliance could win the 1990 election (which it did), they would let the presidency alternate between a leftist and a centrist, and would let the Christian Democrats fill the presidency first. Leftists agreed to those conditions because they realized that that was the only way that they could eventually return to power.
In fact, Concertacion proceeded to win the first four post-Pinochet elections, in 1990, 1993, 2000, and 2006. The first two presidents were the Christian Democrats Patricio Aylwin and Eduardo Frei. Jr. (son of former president Eduardo Frei). The next two presidents were the socialists Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet; the latter was Chile’s first woman president, and also was the daughter of a general who had been tortured and imprisoned by Pinochet’s junta. In 2010 Concertacién was defeated by a rightwing president (Sebastian Pinera), in 2014 socialist Bachelet returned to power. and in 2018 right-winger Pinera again. Thus Chile after Pinochet reverted to being a functioning democracy still anomalous for Latin America, but with a huge selective change: willingness to tolerate, compromise, and share and alternate power.
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