Friends in Need

The title conjures up lighthearted, even ludicrous, images of an elderly man in a grey Chilean general’s uniform, weaving his way through the tourist-packed arteries of London’s neon heart. But Pinochet in Piccadilly (Faber and Faber; 280 pages), British journalist Andy Beckett’s examination of the economic, political and social links between Britain and Chile, is no pleasant day out in a democratic capital.

For Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the former Chilean dictator, there will be no more trips to Piccadilly or, indeed, anywhere in Europe. As both arms buyer and tourist over the years, Pinochet loved to visit London, home of his good friend Margaret Thatcher. His was not the garish Piccadilly of ordinary tourists, but that of wealthy conservatives — retired colonels and such, who shop for books and fine tailoring and stay at select gentlemen’s clubs, sipping old whisky with like-minded right-wingers. In 1999, Pinochet made one trip too many and found himself under house arrest for 16 months, facing the threat of extradition to Spain to face torture charges over the treatment of Spaniards and others in Chile.

Before Beckett, a writer for the left-leaning Guardian and other newspapers, takes readers along on Pinochet’s British visits — mostly in his final chapters — he conducts an entertaining historical tour of British-Chilean relations, beginning in the early 19th century. Yet, colorful as these tales of nitrate magnates, early tycoons, anti-Spanish agitators, mercenaries and others are, they seem off the point. Beckett purports to unveil, in the words of his subtitle, “Britain and Chile’s hidden history.” But how much of what he relates actually has been hidden, in any deliberate sense? Much of his information has been pulled together — well — from personal interviews and a wealth of published material. History has been hiding in plain sight. This is strikingly seen, for example, in Beckett’s enterprising visit to Rolls-Royce workers in Scotland who, just days after Pinochet and his fellow military chiefs seized power in 1973, had refused to service the engines of eight British-made Hawker Hunter fighter jets like those used to attack Chile’s presidential palace. The standoff at the engine plant near Glasgow lasted five years.

Apart from his discussion of Chile’s covert assistance to Britain during the 1982 Falklands War with Argentina — for which Thatcher was deeply grateful to Pinochet — Beckett’s focus on political symbiosis seems narrow. “You could say,” he writes, “that Britain and Chile have acted as each other’s political subconscious.” It is arguably true that British businessmen gave Chile “its first harsh taste of international capitalism” and that, 100 years later, Pinochet’s “refinement of the recipe” ended up “passing the flavor back” in the form of free-market Thatcherism. But Beckett takes no more than a fleeting glimpse at the U.S., which played a central role in the coup in which Chile’s democratically elected Marxist President, Salvador Allende Gossens, died. Chile is still coming to terms with the horrors that followed. While Pinochet, now 86, has been deemed — in both Britain and Chile — too ill to face trial, activists still call for Henry Kissinger to be prosecuted. U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the coup, he was widely quoted as saying: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Beckett does emphasize, however, that the monetarism that became Chile’s economic creed under Pinochet, and Britain’s under Thatcher, was imported from the University of Chicago. Economist Milton Friedman, who was to become a guru to future Thatcher adviser Alan Walters, “rejected the socially conscious economics that had dominated the thinking of democratic governments since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” writes Beckett. Under Pinochet and Thatcher, emphasis on the rough-and-tumble of the free market “had unpleasant implications for the trade unions, the poor and the other left-wing or vulnerable interest groups to whom British politicians had been paying increasing attention since the Second World War.”

It was, as Beckett notes, two members of that postwar political generation who were critical to Pinochet’s arrest in London. Jack Straw, then the Home Secretary, had visited Chile as a left-wing student in the late 1960s. And Prime Minister Tony Blair, while stressing that the extradition question would be decided solely on legal grounds, found Pinochet “unspeakable” and Allende a “hero.” Pinochet liked to say that no blade of grass moved in Chile without his order. In Piccadilly, the neon signs flash, heedless of his existence.