PROVIDENCIA-A VERY MODERN AREA OF
BEAUTIFUL SANTIAGO
The rest of the year 1972 went by speedily and uneventfully; I had a lot of work to do, and a lot to study to catch up with, due to my continuous absences from class. All of my teachers understood my special situation, and when an exam was due and I was absent, they would set a new date for me to take it. They knew I was a good student, a few of them, especially the younger ones, were very supportive and had no complain about my continued and extended absences. By now I was attending the sixth level at the School of Economics, the last one previous to the presentation of a thesis which would be reviewed, studied and evaluated by a School Committee appointed by the School’s Board, prior to obtaining my diploma as an Economist.
In February 1973, school was over; I was able to dedicate more time to work. The busy season at The Firm had started early in January, and all of us at The Firm had to work long hours to make sure our clients would receive their audited financial statements and Tax Reports on time, and prior to the corporate and tax reporting dead lines at the end of March. Many times we had to work over 16 hours a day to make sure our dead lines were met. I was deeper and deeper into the tax area but was still very much involved in the auditing area too.
By the end of April, the busy season in The Firm was over, we had satisfied our clients’ needs and met their deadlines, and everybody at the office was relaxed and happy. Soon the training programs for the year would start and almost all the staff would be going somewhere outside of the country on training for at least three weeks. For young people coming from a lower middle and middle class as we were, travelling abroad with all expenses paid by the company was something everyone excitedly looked forward to. At the beginning of May the new promotions were announced, I had been promoted to the level of Senior-3, almost a manager, and in addition, I had been officially put in charge of the Tax Division, which by now was already billing around 15% of the whole office’s billings. Our staff, at that point, consisted of 15 auditors and one tax man (me). The numbers spoke for themselves; my division was becoming more and more important within The Firm and the most profitable too. In mid May I was sent to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for another Tax Managers and Partners meeting which took place at the old and well known Copacabana Hotel, right on the famous beach of the same name, where by just crossing the streets one was able to admire the beautiful and famous “garotas du Copacabana”. It was a week of great training and superior acquaintance with the cream of the cream of the tax people in The Firm from all over Latin America. At the end of the training program, I went to Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile on holidays, and had planned to meet in the latter city with my friend and classmate at the U, Celso Santacruz who was coming from a training session in Lima, Peru. We planned to spend a couple of weeks in Santiago to see what we could see of Chile, since this was going to be our first time there.
LA MONEDA (GOVERNMENT) PALACE IN
SANTIAGO DE CHILE
Celso and I arrived in Santiago de Chile in the middle of the worst economic and political crisis this beautiful country had gone through in its 153 years as a an independent republic. The Marxist government of President Salvador Allende, which had taken over in 1970, had dramatically changed the rules of the country’s economy. It had nationalized the mining and the banking industries as well as all major privately owned businesses and industries; it had started an aggressive program of redistribution of land ownership, causing, as a result, a severe downturn in the country’s mining, agricultural and industrial output, this was causing severe shortages of almost every kind of goods in the market, especially of food and clothing. The Allende government was so disastrously managing the country’s finances, that by 1972, the fiscal deficit of the Chilean Government had reached 6% of the country’s GDP, and by mid 1973 it had gotten so much worse as to reduce its GDP by 30% compared to the prior year. Chile’s economy was in a free fall. The country had reduced its foreign currency reserves to only one month worth of imports while food shortages caused skyrocketing inflation and unemployment rates began to rise to the point of sky rocketing.
Allende, known to be a moderate socialist, had been elected by congress in 1970, after obtaining only a 36% of the popular vote, but he got caught between an extremist left strongly supported by Fidel Castro and his communist Cuban government, which pushed for a full turn to soviet style communism, and a confronting political right which wanted to maintain the status quo. Inflation had closely followed a severe devaluation of the Chilean currency, causing a vicious circle of more money printing provoking more inflation, inevitably followed by additional devaluations and more money printing and so on and so forth. The government tried to control inflation by setting artificially low prices for food and other personal goods, but this caused the disappearance of those goods in the open market only to “reappear” in the black market at much higher prices. Preposterous as it may seem, as an important economic analyst would say, in this chaotic economy the price of an egg sometimes was higher than the price of a hen. There was no wine in the market when before the crisis, Chile was the largest producer and exporter of wine in Latin America. It was chaos at its best, and it was getting worse by the day.
Visitors as we were, and looking for adventure, we took advantage of the chaotic situation of the Chilean economy and exchanged our dollars in the black market at rates that were 20 times as high as the official rate of 60 Escudos for one Dollar. That made us, the hard currency holders, almost millionaires compared to the common Chilean in the streets (whose income was shrinking by the day due to the inflation), and allowed us to enjoy the status of reach people when mixing with young people of our age, some of them Ecuadorian students on scholarships in Chilean Universities and their young Chilean peers. As a result, we ended up having a real good time while witnessing one of the more dramatic economic and political times in Chilean History.
By the time Celso and I arrived in Chile, the Chileans were clearly divided between strong supporters and strong opponents of the Allende government, there was no middle ground. Thousands of civilians were almost openly carrying light guns and they knew it wasn’t for games. There were no midfielders, a violent confrontation, a civil war, was evidently coming, and indeed, it came only three months later when the Army, under the command of General Pinochet, deposed President Allende, who, as official History says, killed himself as the army troops entered the Government palace, making his government's fall inevitable.
Historians are divided regarding the last moments of President Allende’s life. Some say he killed himself with a rifle that was handed to him by Cuban President Fidel Castro as a personal gift when visiting Chile only a few months before Allende’s fall; some say he was killed by the troops as they were entering the Presidential Palace; some others say President Allende was killed by CIA agents infiltrated in the Army, and, finally, there are others who say Allende was actually killed by a one of his body guards, a Cuban Army officer who was married to one of Allende’s daughters. Connected or not to the latter version, two years later, Allende's daughter committed suicide in Habana where she was living as an exile. Also, for historical records, a sister of president Allende, who was also living in Habana as a political exile, killed herself too, by jumping from the tallest hotel building in Cuba when, as some historians say, she found out that her brother Salvador Allende was killed by Cuban Agents acting under direct orders from Habana. As the story goes, Castro never wanted Allende to survive and tell the story of the high level of influence his regime had in the fallen Chilean government.
When my friend Celso and I left Chile at the end of May 1973, we had mixed feelings. On one side, we felt good about our holidays in a place where we ate like Romans and drank and danced as Cossacks on holidays, while on the other side we were sad to have witnessed some of the events leading to an inevitable clash between Chileans, because at that point, a peaceful political settlement was already out of the question and a civil war seemed all but inevitable. There is still a lot of controversy about the causes, the protagonists and the victims of the events starting on September 11, 1973.
THE IMPRESSIVE ANDEAN MOUNTAINS IN CHILE
Historians say that over two thousand five hundred people were killed in the events following the fall of Allende, most of them civilians followers of the Marxist regime, but, the fact of the matter is that today, 37 years after those events and less than two generations afterward, Chile is a completely different nation, a nation just about to jump into the first world, a country where Chileans of all social and economic classes live and work in peace, a country which is no longer discussing whether is good or bad to be opened to the world, a country which is light years ahead of every other country in Latin America in its quest for social and economic justice, while freedom has been preserved for every one of its 17 million citizens. Was it worth the price Chile had to pay? I leave that to the Chilean History to tell.
In my next post: GETTING MARRIED, A TOUGH DECISION TO MAKE
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