Patricio Aylwin, President Who Guided Chile to Democracy, Dies at 97
JONATHAN KANDELL, PASCALE BONNEFOY
International New York Times, April 19, 2015
accessed May 6, 2016
l 溫和轉型正義成功率高。
l A mild-mannered, centrist political leader who can maintain good economic growth has a better chance in successful transitional justice.
Chong-Pin Lin April 23, 2016
l 溫和而不偏極的政治領袖在推動轉形正義上成功機率比較大。智利在獨裁者之後的總統愛爾溫，剛過世，便是個模範的實例。
林中斌 2016.4.23
Patricio Aylwin, the former president of Chile whose election in 1989 put an end to the long dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and who set up a commission that exposed the government’s brutalities, died on Tuesday at his home in Santiago. He was 97.
His family confirmed his death.
Mr. Aylwin (pronounced ELL-win), the leader of the centrist Christian Democratic Party for more than half a century, was the first elected civilian after General Pinochet’s 17-year rule.
A mild-mannered lawyer, he initially seemed no match for the gruff General Pinochet, who remained the army commander in chief. But Mr. Aylwin went on to hold together a coalition of 17 moderate and left-wing parties, maintained the high economic growth rate he had inherited from the Pinochet years, distributed income and social benefits that helped reduce poverty levels and — perhaps his greatest accomplishment — established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to collect testimony on human rights abuses under General Pinochet.
The negotiated terms of the transition to civilian rule had placed severe limitations on Mr. Aylwin’s government. They included keeping General Pinochet’s authoritarian 1980 Constitution in place, albeit with revisions, allowing the former dictator to remain head of the army for eight years and later to take a seat in the Senate for life.
Mr. Aylwin was under pressure to reverse General Pinochet’s policies and bring those responsible for human rights crimes to justice. But he met resistance from the army, which still exerted influence over the nascent democratic institutions and made constant threats, and from an obstructionist new Congress, which skewed to the right because of an electoral system that favored General Pinochet’s allies.
Nevertheless, Mr. Aylwin pushed ahead with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, acting against the advice of some of his ministers, who feared further straining the relationship with the military.
“President Aylwin was convinced that it was a moral imperative to confront the legacy of human rights violations,” said José Zalaquett, a leading human rights advocate in Chile and a co-author of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report. Its findings, published in February 1991, counted almost 3,200 victims, further blackening the Pinochet government. By the time the general resigned as head of the army in 1998, his poll ratings were below 20 percent.
After the findings were released, Mr. Aylwin, practically in tears in a televised speech, asked for forgiveness from the families of the victims on behalf of the Chilean state.
Years later, the Aylwin model inspired similar commissions in South Africa and other countries with long legacies of human rights abuses.
Patricio Aylwin Azócar was born on Nov. 26, 1918, in Viña del Mar, a Pacific beach resort west of Santiago, the Chilean capital. Although largely of Spanish Basque heritage, he owed his last name to a Welsh ancestor who immigrated to Chile in the 19th century. His father was a Chilean Supreme Court president.
Like his father, Mr. Aylwin became a lawyer, graduating from the University of Chile Law School in 1943. After years of successful practice, he gravitated toward politics and was elected to the Senate in 1965 on the Christian Democratic ticket. He was elected president of the party seven times.
In 1970, Chile was plunged into political turmoil with the election of Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist head of a Marxist coalition, as president. He received slightly more than a third of the popular vote after the two other major party candidates split the remaining ballots.
Under President Allende, hundreds of companies were expropriated, the copper industry was nationalized, and an extensive program of agrarian reforms redistributed lands among the poor. But government overspending on social programs and American-orchestrated economic strangulation led to food scarcity and hyperinflation, leaving Chile bitterly divided between left-wing and right-wing camps. The rightists ultimately asked the armed forces to intervene.
On Sept. 11, 1973, General Pinochet and three other military junta members began a bloody coup, with the Air Force bombing the presidential palace. Mr. Allende committed suicide during the assault.
Along with most Christian Democrats, Mr. Aylwin publicly endorsed the military regime. But as it became increasingly repressive, and after General Pinochet announced his intention to remain in office indefinitely, Mr. Aylwin, like other centrists, became an opponent. He eventually emerged as a leader of the center-left and moderate opposition, though he had been anathema to many leftists because of his early support for the dictatorship.
General Pinochet, confident that his high-growth economic policies had gained him public support, sought to extend his rule by eight years through a plebiscite sanctioned under his Constitution. But the opposition leaders coordinated a campaign that led to a resounding popular rejection of General Pinochet’s proposal and forced him to call democratic elections for president and Congress the next year.
On Dec. 14, 1989, Mr. Aylwin, then 71, won the presidency with 55.2 percent of the vote, easily defeating General Pinochet’s handpicked candidate and former finance minister, Hernán Büchi, as well as another right-wing candidate, Francisco Javier Errázuriz, a businessman.
“Chile doesn’t want violence or war; it wants peace,” Mr. Aylwin declared on taking office on March 11, 1990.
With the return of civilian government, Chile ended its diplomatic isolation from the rest of the world. Foreign capital poured into the country, especially to exploit its rich copper mines, and domestic investment further expanded an economy that benefited from the balanced budgets, low inflation and strong private-sector bias of the Pinochet era.
“We may not like the government that came before us,” Mr. Aylwin’s finance minister, Alejandro Foxley, said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times Magazine. “But they did many things right. We have inherited an economy that is an asset.”
The political transition was not always smooth. In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Aylwin recalled that on the day he took office, General Pinochet told him, “You are my boss; I obey you, but nobody else.”
Still, the general did not hesitate to rattle his saber as army commander when government policy displeased him. The tensest moment was in December 1990, amid calls for his resignation in the wake of a corruption scandal involving his son, also named Augusto Pinochet. As a show of force, General Pinochet ordered troops confined to their barracks. A second attempt to investigate his son’s shady deals provoked another threatening response by the military.
Mr. Aylwin struggled to control the armed forces while promising “justice insofar as it is possible,” a phrase that human rights groups considered to be synonymous with impunity. Although Mr. Aylwin gave the courts information on the human rights abuses laid out by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, years passed before judicial investigations led to any convictions.
Mr. Aylwin also pushed the army high command to weed out hundreds of agents of the C.N.I., General Pinochet’s repressive secret intelligence agency, who were still active in the army.
Mr. Aylwin, who was limited to one term as president by the Chilean Constitution, left office in 1994. But he remained one of the most admired political figures in Chile, gaining status as the leading elder statesman.
He is survived by his wife, Leonor Oyarzún, whom he married in 1948; two daughters, Isabel and Mariana; three sons, Miguel, José Antonio and Juan Francisco; 15 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
“Chile has lost a great democrat,” President Michelle Bachelet said, “a man who always knew how to place the unity of democrats above their differences, which helped him build a democratic country.”
She declared three days of national mourning.
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