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| Table talk: Lagos, left,
and Dorfman |
Chilean President Ricardo Lagos A.M. ’63, Ph.D. ’66,
Hon. ’05 returned to Duke last spring to deliver the commencement
address to the Class of 2005. During his visit, he sat down with
countryman Ariel Dorfman, Duke professor of literature
and Latin American studies, to discuss the direction Chile has
taken under his leadership—his term expires at the end
of the year—and the distance it still has to go.
Ariel Dorfman: Mr. President, we are very
glad to have you here at Duke, and I think the first question that
I would have is, why did you originally come here?
Ricardo Lagos: For two reasons: In the first place, the
economics department, as well as the professors that taught here
at the time, were renowned worldwide, particularly in Latin America.
The second reason is more practical: along with accepting me as
a graduate student, Duke also gave me an award that covered tuition
fees.
AD: So you were a lawyer who was going to study economics.
RL: Yes. I had worked as an assistant to a professor who
was chair of economics in a university, so I had been able to develop
a knowledge of economics that was superior to the norm for lawyers.
I did, however, have to take specific courses in mathematics here
at Duke and those didn’t count towards my graduate studies.
AD: I ask you about this because it’s typical of
the interdisciplinary spirit that currently prevails at Duke. Here,
we consider that if someone has stood out in a given field, they
are prepared to undertake studies in another field. Do you consider
that the relation between your experience as a lawyer and your
study of economics has helped you?
RL: Yes, I think it has. In the first place,
being a lawyer implies having a given way of thinking and of organizing
ideas which constitutes a very useful methodology. I think that
this combination was also useful because it put me in contact with
a series of forums for the discussion of international relations
and of international organizations. In that sense, it served as
a means to better understand the workings not only of American
society but also of the world itself (the United Nations and other
international organizations).
AD: This means that a lot of what you studied here proved
to be useful to you later in life.
RL: Clearly. This can be appreciated not only in academic
terms but also in my involvement in public institutions.
AD: The fact that you’ve spent so much time studying
here [at Duke] and then in Chapel Hill, how did this allow you
to understand Americans and to understand the meaning of American
society?
RL: In more personal terms, I was able to benefit from
a network of relations with people that influenced public opinion
within the sphere of inter-American relations –specifically,
with professors who were some of the main advisers for the State
Department and for the organizations that are in charge of political
decision-making. In the second place, it allowed me to better understand
the richness, the variety and the complexity that are at the heart
of American society, in the sense that it is not composed just
of its president, Congress, and the Supreme Court. This is where
decisions are made, but the process by which those decisions are
made reflects elements of the society that are much more dense.
My ability to understand this has been instrumental in situations
that I’ve faced later in life. When we were struggling to
re-establish democracy in Chile, our visits to Washington and to
other places had a determining role as to how our struggle to open
up a space for freedom in Chile was supported here in the U.S.
I remember that when I had been imprisoned for a brief period of
time in Chile, the first person that came to visit me was the political
adviser to the U.S. embassy in Chile. He came to make sure that
I was being treated properly. This was at the time of President
Reagan’s Republican administration, an administration that
we could hardly presume to be concerned about such matters. This
goes to show how important American society’s permanent values,
such as freedom and the respect for human rights, are.
AD: The same goes for your understanding of mass media.
I remember when we were interviewed together on Nightline shortly
after we won the Plebiscite [in 1988]. Your capacity of speaking
to the U.S. media revealed a familiarity with them that was different
from that of most Chilean politicians.
RL: Certainly. This was about knowing your audience.
AD: I suppose that when you were here at Duke, you read
assiduously, almost continuously.
RL: I did, I dedicated my days and part of my nights to
reading.
AD: What about now? Because I know how much you enjoy reading!
RL: Now I only read documents that are prepared for me!
(Laughs)
AD: What other things do you read now?
RL: I try to read other materials than the ones that I
work with.
AD: I ask you because I know that you have many friends
that are writers, like Antonio Skarmeta, among others.
RL: Right. But reading what friends write is pleasant!
It’s also pleasant to keep up with what is being published.
I try to set aside some time to do this during weekends. Reading
a couple of good publications is useful, too: I read the [International
Herald Tribune] every day. It’s also easier to do this
with the press briefings that are prepared for me since they include
the world’s main newspapers.
AD: I wanted to ask you about something else. One of the
outstanding aspects of your work has been the Valech Commission
on political prisoners and torture, along with the report that
it produced. Why did you think it necessary to do this, seeing
as it’s something that has never been carried out in other
parts of the world? In that sense, the Commission is important
to Chile and can also stand as an example for the rest of the world.
How did it become possible to organize this commission?
RL: The work of the Commission seemed to me to be the natural
correlation to what we had already done in Chile in relation to
the dictatorship. The first thing that came up concerns what is
to be done with those who have been detained and disappeared, those
whose relatives are searching for even a little bone, even if they
know that these people are dead. In that sense, human beings have
a very strong notion of the burial of their people.
The second step concerned those who are living in exile. Can they
have any possibility of returning? Normally, after seventeen years
in exile, returning is like going into a second exile.
In the third place, we wanted to address those who had been expulsed
from public administration and from universities--people like you.
We had to evaluate the possibility of integrating them anew or
of offering them some sort of retirement fund since, for seventeen
years, they had had nothing. But there was still a big void. No
measures had been taken in relation to all of those who had been
imprisoned, most of them tortured.
AD: The survivors.
RL: Exactly. No one had asked them for their forgiveness.
So they started by getting organized to bring this about.
AD: Right. In Chile, it’s all about being organized.
RL: So, different organizations of former political prisoners
had already been formed, and I decided to form this presidential
commission that would be directed by a bishop of the Catholic Church
and that would count with the participation of people who had previously
done a good deal of work in human rights issues, and that would
also include members of the most diverse political trends. They
established a basic procedure according to which, for a year, they
would receive declarations from former political prisoners.
Chile is a very legalist country; even in the midst of the dictatorship,
if someone was arrested, their relatives could talk to a lawyer
and ask that he file an appeal for legal protection. These appeals
invariably failed, but they at least constituted a proof that this
person had been arrested in given circumstances or that they had
last been seen at a given time. On the basis of that information,
the Commission was able to recognize as valid 28,000 accounts out
of the 35,000 that were heard. These 28,000 cases then benefited
from a series of compensatory measures on the State’s behalf.
These measures were modest because our state is modest but they
were significant in the sense that these people got a lifetime
pension. Still, going beyond the pension, I think that this is
significant because their declarations were received by an organization
of the state, and also because a lot of them broke down as they
were telling their stories since it was very trying for them to
relive all of this. One of them once said, and many others echoed
this, that the fact that the state has received their declarations
allows them to make peace with Chile.
AD: And also to make peace with themselves, it could be
said.
RL: It’s a way of definitively “turning the
page,” so to speak, on these human rights issues that are
so affectively charged, while remembering at the same time that
there is no future without a past. It’s impossible for us
to build a future if we are incapable of bringing ourselves to
look at the past and this is what Chile has just done. It has had
the daring to look at the past and this is why it is better prepared
to face the challenges posed by this new century.
AD: What did you feel when you read these stories? A lot
of them involved people that both you and I know.
RL: Some might say that these stories were hardly new.
However, the Commission’s vice president, someone who has
spent a long time working in the field of human rights, came to
my office one day and said, “Mr. President, I never thought
that such brutal and violent things as the things that I have now
found out about had actually happened.” This leads one to
wonder why this happened in Chile, to wonder about the splitting
of a human being.
I remember
that here, in North Carolina, there was a meeting at one point
with Gustavo Molina, a Chilean doctor who had been the face of
public health in Chile. He had been imprisoned and he published
an article in TheNew York Times titled, “Doctor,
What Is This Pain That I Feel?” In this article, he recalled
that during one of the breaks that the torturers took, one of them
spoke to him of some aches that he had and then asked him, “Doctor,
what is this pain that I feel?” How could it be possible
for a torturer, in a break between tortures, to ask his victim
about his own aches? The ensuing question is very important: what
happens when a human being is able to split himself like this,
so as to consider torture as his job? Furthermore, what happens
in a society in which this can take place?
This is
also important from the point of view of how we have to act towards
this as a government and, in that sense, I don’t know of
any other instance in which our manner of proceeding was applied.
It’s particularly interesting that the Commission’s
report was published in such a way that it includes the 28,000
declarations that were recognized as such, as well as examples
that are put in quotation marks and that are used to describe the
arising themes. The report was done in such a way that specific
declarations cannot be attributed to their authors and this was
done so as to protect those victims who came forward with their
accounts and without any intention of protecting the perpetrators.
One woman told me that she had been raped when she was eighteen
years old, that she was now fifty years old and that when she turned
eighty years old, she didn’t want her grandchildren to find
out that their grandma had been raped.
AD: But omitting the names also has the effect of making
the reader feel that this is what happened to everybody.
RL: Yes, of course it does. If you read the report, you’ll
see that all of the dictatorship’s places of imprisonment
are described in it, that all of these places are associated with
the specific types of torture that were practiced in them, and
that these descriptions are accompanied by photographs. The report
is very complete and I would add that it has a strong emotional
impact.
AD: Don’t you think that, beyond having been of use
for Chile, this stands as a model for the rest of the world in
such a way that our pain could be a part of the world’s pain?
Modestly speaking, wouldn’t you say that this is the way
to proceed when a state institution has done such terrible things?
RL: True, this question has been frequently debated. Human
rights organizations are very much surprised that we were able
to take this step in Chile. Still, I think that having the daring
to face what happened in the past is the way to allow for wounds
to heal precisely so that this can never be made to occur again.
AD: I wanted to ask you about wounds, about the problem
of inequality. I’m asking you about this because you might
remember the meeting that took place in Chile between Chilean,
South African, and Australian writers (Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey,
and André Brink were there, among others), back in 1999
when you were a candidate for the presidential elections. You came
and spoke to us then and I remember that the guest writers were
very surprised and they asked in amazement: “In what other
country would the country’s soon-to-be president come to
speak to a group of writers?”
RL: Yes, I remember that very well.
AD: One of the things that you spoke of at that meeting
was precisely the problem of poverty, of inequality in Chile. I
know that now that you are about to finish your term as president,
and one of the points that the opposition’s candidate, Joaquín
Lavín, is bringing up is the problem of inequality in Chile.
That is to say that the Concertación’s [the governing
coalition of parties in Chile] three consecutive governments have
been unable to solve the problems of poverty and of inequality.
This charge is somewhat hypocritical because the opposition and
the economic policies that they praise are responsible for poverty
being so widespread. Still, I ask you about this because, economically,
Chile has grown a lot in the past few years but 20 percent of its
population is fifteen times wealthier than the poorest 20 percent
of Chileans. Can you speak in detail about this economic and moral
problem?
RL: I would like to start off by saying that this debate
makes me very happy because it points to a change in these problems’ status
since they have now come to be viewed by Chilean society as significant
and fundamental themes. This is part of what we aimed to do. This
also means that no country that has high rates of poverty can be
competitive, can venture in a global framework. Successful countries
that grow and that become inserted in the world are practically
devoid of social tensions. This is why this is such an important
debate and, in light of it, I can signal out two processes.
In the first place, the distribution of monetary income in Latin
America has deteriorated over the past few years in such a way
that it is now more unequal than ever. The only country in which
this distribution has remained the same is Chile. This is no cause
of cheer since as you very well said, the average income of the
wealthiest 20 percent of Chileans is fifteen times the poorest
20 percent of Chileans’ average income. Still, what has happened
in the past fifteen years?
AD: You mean, since the dictatorship’s fall in 1989.
RL: In the past fifteen years, a set of public policies
concerning housing and education have been implemented. One out
of every four houses in present-day Chile has been built in the
past fifteen years. We went from allotting a total of 2 million
pesos for the education of a total of 3 million students to allotting
14 million pesos towards that same purpose. From funding 400,000
breakfasts and lunches in schools, we are now funding 1,600,000
of them.
Chile’s population growth rate is fairly small. Our education
system used to be based on half days and it is now based on entire
days. In practice, this translates as having extended the twelve-year-long
course of schooling by 2.5 years. This has signified a considerable
investment in educational infrastructure.
Measures have also been taken to increase the minimum wage, to
increase social security benefits, as well as health care and pensions.
When you take all of these elements into account, the average income
of the wealthiest 20 percent of Chileans becomes only eight times
as big as the 20 percent poorest of Chileans’ average income.
Consequently, these public policies have made a difference in that
they have allowed us to reduce this gap. In the long and middle
run, increased levels of education are instrumental in reducing
inequality, and, if one thing makes me proudest, it is the fact
that seven out of ten of the 600,000 post-secondary students that
we have this year are first-generation university students.
I think that, in the long run, there is a correlation between
levels of access to education and knowledge and the redistribution
of income. I think that this is the means to effect change
in the long run--there are ways to accomplish this faster, and
the Scandinavian countries do this by implementing specific systems
of taxation. Even in that case, the important thing is that systems
of taxation shouldn’t cause the levels of investment to deteriorate
because, should this happen, future growth will also deteriorate.
Even if we’ve had a very accelerated economic growth in the
past few years in Chile, we still have a long way to go before
we can become a more developed country.
AD: In the 1990s, it seemed that the so-called Washington
consensus was on everyone’s lips. I would go as far as to
say that, currently, something that we could refer to as the “Brasilia
consensus” has come into being. About two or three years
ago, Chile was generally considered to be isolated in relation
to the region. This characterization has been proven wrong with
the naming of José Miguel Insulza as the OAS [Organization
of American States] Secretary General. I still wonder about this
because Chile has somehow come to be considered as a model in the
eyes of very different people and very different tendencies. We
can either marvel at this or worry about it. I’m interested
in knowing what you think about it because I know that you have
a very strong Latin-Americanist vocation.
RL: I’ve always said that countries design their
foreign policy based on their geographical reality. Nothing else
matters apart from that. If Spain is an important voice in present-day
Europe, it owes this to the Spanish socialists’ role in debunking
the illusions created during the kingdoms of Carlos V and Felipe
II--that the Pyrenees blocked Spain from Europe. Consequently,
Spain’s current role in the world is now defined in large
part by its role in Europe. Having said that, I must disagree with
the way in which the Washington Consensus, in light of its prescriptions
concerning the economic sphere, posits Chile as an example.
I disagree here because, even if Chile did follow these economic
guidelines, it also introduced a series of socially oriented measures
concerning housing, health, and education, among others, that are
viewed as heterodox in relation to the Washington Consensus.
Why is it that Latin America is undertaking this critical revision
of the Washington Consensus? Because our societies have the lingering
feeling that, despite having complied with the Consensus’ prescriptions,
they are still not satisfied. They are unsatisfied because many
of these countries have grown but this growth has not translated
in the form of scholarships for students, of better housing, of
an improved health system, or of a more adequate infrastructure.
Accordingly, when growth exists without a simultaneous redistribution
of the fruits of this growth, people begin to feel that this progress
is flawed. This explains the critical revision of the Washington
Consensus in Latin America during the past few years. What it prescribed
was not wrong--it’s necessary to have organized fiscal accounts,
to have autonomous monetary policies, as well as freely fluctuating
exchange rates--but social policies are also necessary. Without
them, our Latin American societies do not function.
I’d like to make a final reflection: The market
is very effective and successful in providing resources for those
needs that can be met by buying power. But the market cannot address
needs which require other solutions than buying power since those
needs do not function the same way as demand does. This is where
democracy comes in.
Democracy is the process by which societies determine
which goods they will consider as “public goods,” that
are to be made available to all citizens. The circulation in a
country of the very phrase, “Eight years of mandatory schooling,” means
that this country considers education to be a public good that
must be accessible to all, regardless of whether it is provided
by a private or a public school. As a consequence of this, I believe
that it is important that our systems add a growing number of goods
to the category of “public goods,” because this is
what differentiates one system from another. This is also what
we’ve been doing in Chile as of late.
In today’s Chile, solidarity is about going
to see a modest family and speaking to their very dignity. These
are unemployed people who often don’t know what they are
entitled to, who don’t know what their rights are. So, we
go up to their door and we explain the current situation to them.
I think that this is what has taken place in our country and that
this also explains the degree of support for governmental policies
since growth is perceived as reaching diverse sectors of the population
in one way or another.
AD: I’d like to ask one last question
about Iraq. How is it that Chile decided not to vote in favor of
the American invasion of Iraq?
RL: This was a function of two things. In
the first place, it was unthinkable for us to take a decision that
would be outside the UN’s framework. Secondly, within the
UN’s framework, a series of steps still had to be taken before
the use of force could be authorized. The use of force is seen
as a last resort and it must be used within the parameters set
by the UN.
Since ours is a rather small country, we had to look
at the situation as part of a global system. In that sense, security
systems must be addressed by given states according to established
rules and consensuses. If rules don’t exist in relation to
a global framework, then these rules tend to favor the strongest
countries. Accordingly, just as we want rules to govern inside
our country, so we want rules that currently govern this world
to stem from the way in which we are expected to get along within
the UN’s system. And this is precisely why, ten months after
Iraq, this very same Security Council decided to intervene in Haiti
in order to pacify the country. In seventy-two hours, Chile had
sent troops to Haiti in an act that I consider proof of coherence
in foreign policy.
If we speak of the need for agreements within the
Security Council, then these agreements must be implemented so
that they can be more than a mere declaration. This is why Chile
was willing to be present in Haiti. We voted against Iraq because
we thought that there was still some margin left for forcing Hussein
to adopt an attitude that was more in-tune with the democratic
canons.
AD: Thank you very much, Mr. President.
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