In January of last year, Chilean actress Danielle Tobar made international news by moving into a glass house in downtown Santiago. During the short course of “Project Nautilus,” the intimate details of her daily life were open to the (largely prurient) curiosity of onlookers. After only six days, Tobar abandoned the house, claiming security concerns.

At that time, I was backpacking in southern Chile. I did not find the news surprising. In a world culture that has produced MTV’s Real World and realtime voyeur websites, the glass house is the next logical step. I wasn’t even surprised that it happened in Chile. The country has a large “artsy” clement, especially among the “wired” generation. Combine “artsy” and “wired,” and the glass house is a natural result.

What really struck me about the whole affair was the aptness of the glass house as a metaphor for Chile’s relationship with the outside world. Since the brief reign of Salvador Allende’s Marxist-Leninist Unidad Popular (UP) government (1970-73), the internal affairs of this small country have often been the subject of intense international scrutiny. The window panes on the house are highly convex, causing certain inhabitants—like Allende and former military dictator Augusto Pinochet—to be magnified in the eyes of observers. This magnification is accompanied by a great deal of distortion.

This was my fifth visit to Chile in five years. Politically, it was by far the most interesting of the visits. The trip coincided with several major events: first, the election and inauguration of Ricardo Lagos, the first Socialist Party president since Allende was deposed; second, the return to the country of Pinochet after 17 months’ detention in London; third, the beginning of the prosecution of Pinochet for acts of violence committed during his 17-year rule; and fourth, the arrival in Chile of U.S. justice Department officials investigating Pinochet’s involvement in the 1976 Washington, D.C., car bombing of former UP minister Orlando Letelier.

Like actress Tobar, who found it impossible to ignore the stares and hoots of her viewers, the Chilean nation is keenly aware of outside pressure. In his inaugural address, Lagos spoke of the foreign visitors at the event (including Janet Reno), saying that they would “tell the world that Chileans were able to rediscover truth, justice, and respect for human rights.” This kind of “we have to show the world” statement is now a common refrain in press editorials, but efforts at prosecuting Pinochet and other military officers only began to gain real ground after October 16, 1998, when the former dictator was kidnapped by British authorities at the behest of Spanish judge Baltasar Carzón. In August 1999, Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán began indicting military officers for human-rights abuses. In the two years since, the case has continued to twist and turn its way through the Chilean legal system, although most observers believe that the 85-year-old “English patient” will not live to see an actual trial.

Chile’s glass house has a way of magnifying hypocrisy: Just compare how Pinochet (2,000 to 3,000 killed, some in combat) and Fidel Castro (15,000 to 17,000 political prisoners killed) have fared in the European and American media. More importantly, the glass house also tends to magnify historical distortions. One enduring myth is that Chilean constitutional democracy was destroyed during the fall of Allende and the UP on September 11, 1973. In truth, Chilean democracy was long dead by the time Pinochet took over. For an alternative date of demise, try November 10, 1971, when Castro arrived in Chile for what turned out to be a three-week tour. During his visit, Castro gave Allende an inscribed AK-47 rifle. This was a very telling gesture: Throughout Allende’s regime (and with his tacit consent), planes and boats smuggled Cuban arms into the country and into the hands of leftist guerrillas. The scenes of Allende in his last hours, wandering around the Moneda palace with a bottle of Chivas in one hand and Fidel’s AK in the other, are aptly symbolic. His attempts to preserve democracy were the political equivalent of a drunken stumble; at the same time, he always kept one finger in the trigger guard of violent revolution. The death certificate of Chilean democracy was issued on August 22, 1973. On that day, the Chamber of Deputies, voting 81 to 47, approved an accord denouncing the “grave rupture in the constitutional and legal order of the Republic” and stating that Chile’s armed forces had a constitutional duty to “put an immediate end” to the situation.

Another myth perpetuated by the mainstream media is the idea that the UP’s failure was due to an economic “destabilization” orchestrated by the U.S. government—specifically, by the CIA. The CIA did play a well-documented role in keeping opposition media alive in the face of government harassment, but the left is always waiting for some magic document to be declassified that will prove that the U.S. government caused Chile’s economic implosion. This is lamp-rubbing. No matter what is unearthed, the CIA was not responsible for nationalizing private industries, destroying the price system, or creating 500-percent inflation.

Myths and hypocrisy aside, the case of Chile poses some tough moral problems. Although it’s true that the leftists brought the repression on themselves, the brutality of the military government is difficult to justify.

In mid-March, near the end of my trip, I rented a car in Iquique and drove to the far northern seacoast hamlet of Pisagua. Wedged onto a strip of rocky coast at the base of thousand-foot desert headlands, it is a place of existential isolation, a natural prison. Around the turn of the century, when Pisagua was still a booming nitrate port, a jail was built in the town. After September 1973, much of the town was turned into a prison camp. For a period of two years, some 800 prisoners were housed in Pisagua for detention, interrogation, torture, and punishment. Nineteen were killed, and their bodies disappeared. In the summer of 1989, the village—having long since returned to its status as a quiet home to a few dozen fisherman and shellfish divers—made news again. A mass unmarked grave, containing the 19 bodies, was discovered in the town’s cemetery. Pinochet had stepped down from power only a few months before, and the story rapidly became a cause célèbre among those trying to make truth and reconciliation (or retribution) pillars of the new democracy.

Driving to Pisagua, I miscalculated the time needed to cross the desert and descended into the hamlet long after dusk. Too late to find a suitable camping spot, I checked into the only hotel in town. It had been open for a year and was located in, of all places, the old jail building. The woman who ran the hotel (her family had bought it from the government) explained that the bad things had taken place elsewhere in the town. Also, they had done a lot to make the jail hospitable: The guest rooms were in the administrative wing of the structure, and some of the cells had pool tables in them. Still, the whole thing was more than a little creepy. Lying in bed and listening to the cool wind rustling through the fronds in the atrium, it was impossible not to think of the terror and suffering endured by the prisoners during those two years. Those thoughts were compounded the next day, when I visited the empty grave.

And yet, the question remains: What do you do when ultra-leftists are taking over your country by force? My instinctive preference is for the kind of armed resistance practiced during the Allende years by Patria y Libertad. However, even if such resistance had been successful, it would have been far more costly in human life than Pinochet’s golpe. More likely, Chile would still be in a state of civil war, like Colombia.

The guerrillas—and their “civilian” allies—undoubtedly needed to be jailed or exiled. Torture and execution are different matters. I would like to believe that Christians would be incapable of torturing or executing prisoners. Still, in a land where prominent clerics espoused liberation theology and violent class struggle, it should not have been surprising to see a dearth of Christian mercy.

As Chile has moved closer toward putting Pinochet on trial, there have been some grumbles from the military and from the large minority of citizens who regard him as the savior of their country. Remember, in the (mandatory) 1988 plebiscite, 43 percent of Chileans voted to extend his presidency for another eight years. Even so, I believe that civil turmoil over the issue will be minimal. The most interesting irony, as Chile’s democracy continues to assert itself, is that the new democracy was made possible in large part by the very same military government that is now on tiial. Indeed, the most important achievement of Pinochet’s reforms was to create social peace by depoliticizing wide sectors of the Chilean economy.

Today’s Chilean democracy is blessed with good leadership on both sides of the present political spectrum. So far, Lagos has kept his inaugural promise to be “president of all the Chileans.” The problem with Lagos, as the country limps out of a hard hvo-year recession, is that he does not have the ideological conviction necessary to finish the privatization revolution and to create the kind of business and inveshnent environment that will allow the country to catch the next wave of strong economic growth.

Lagos’ opponent in the election was Joaquin Lavin, a 48-year-old economist who served as the highly popular mayor of Santiago’s Las Condes suburb. Lavin went from his narrow loss to an easy win in Santiago’s mayoral election. If Lavin can win the presidency in 2005, it will be good news for Chile’s future. Lavin understands that, if Chile is going to achieve the growth rates necessary to catch up with the industrialized world and to eradicate severe poverty, the government must allow domestic and foreign investment to effect a rapid technological transformation of Chile’s productive capacify. Further, he would let Chilean workers profit from globalization by allowing the privatized pension companies to invest a larger share of their assets in foreign securities (the current limit is 20 percent).

Politically, the election of Lavin in 2005 would mean that Chile’s democracy has finally made peace with its authoritarian past. If Chileans prove capable of overcoming their political rifts, and if they succeed in joining the First World nations economically, they will richly deserve the resulting peace and prosperity. Chileans are a hard-working people, and they are justifiably proud of their beautiful country. Most of all, they have suffered a lot during their three decades under the hot glare of the glass house.