Pro Pinochet Marchers Terrify Embedded Blogger in Santiago, Chile

I like going to the rich part of Santiago Chile because it fills me with a sense of inner, suburban peace. Pinochet died on Sunday, and the parade of supporters honoring the General hadn’t come up yet. Like any Catholic Sunday, the streets were willfully empty, tranquil. Gentle breeze made the baking December Sun feel distant except for the bright squinting glare of the pavement. The sidewalks of the main Avenue with lined with robust elms that rustled in the breeze, I could almost smell their glittering darkness, holding well the mystery of an emerald riverbed, forgotten childhood, silent Youth, the boundless Chance of eternal Summer.

It’s here I get the feeling that Chile isn’t just rich, it’s filthy rich. I can’t help but enjoy the bath of wealth that pours forth from everywhere, the serenity that besets itself upon me, the beatific heart-smile that radiates from my being – there’s just no room there for an ironic smirk at the way these trees look like blown-up toothpick tinsel landscaping from the architectural model of the deep tinted glass paneled high rise financial center (surrounded by a mote, done in very good taste) looming up behind the trees.

On the day Pinochet died, I escaped the grime and poverty of central Santiago and traveled to the upscale neighborhood Las Condes, where the air is cleaner. But even here they don’t seem safe from the typical Latin flare for clusterfuck – all the shoestores in the shoestore part of town, all the bicycle shops in the bicycle shop part of town, and all the glass paneled high rise banks with hydroponic gardens on their roofs and tasteful motes with hyperartistic corporate fountain architecture in…Las Condes. Block after block -- it’s crazy!

We’d already spent a few hours baking in the sun and confetti of Plaza Italia, so the dehydration…a bar was open, we sat down, ordered two beers and a plate of French fries. Drenched in oil, but crispy at the same time, and three different sauces! Man, those were the best fries ever!

Anyway, the pro-Pinochet marchers were coming up fast, so we tried to shake the last of the confetti off ourselves (which was useless, we couldn't get it out of our hair), scarf up the last of those delicious fries and wash them down with the last (like, the fifth) toast to the General, which by then I believe it had degenerated to unsolicited sodomy in Hell.

Embedding myself amidst the protestors was, in a word, frightening. I felt scared. People screaming out their love and support of the general, man driving by, stopped his car, put his feet on the driver’s seat, clutched the roof with one hand and with the other hand waved a flag of Chile, screaming frantically his love for Pinochet to the jubilant cheers of the marchers.

At one point my girlfriend (who's Chilean) pulled me aside, told me that she was really, really frightened. She’d overheard people talking about a group coming up behind, in which violent Pinochetistas were swearing they'd attack any anti-Pinochet “infiltrators”. We still had confetti in our hair.

At that point, I hadn't heard reports of violence toward journalists, but I did feel weird taking pictures and videos. I think I told her to keep smiling and giving the thumbs up, like I was doing.



We never saw any violence, but there were some extra-tall, black clad spikey folk who really did give me a fright. No photos, they told me. Another one leered menacingly for quite a while. And later, at the military academy Escuela Militar where the marchers ended up, the nazi skin folk gave the famous salute, here they go:



Or go to Youtube to watch the video.

Here's a shot of the Escuela Militar, where over 60,000 have come to see Pinochet's body.



But the most frightening, I suppose was the general shock I felt towards their fanaticism. The framed pictures of Pinochet, the neon stickers, the baseball caps of Pinochet, the poster that spanned three lanes “Mi General”. And their collection of protest cant ranged from the relatively benign I-love-you-General-Pinochet kinda stuff and “As long as Chile exista there will always be Pinochetistas" to “dirty, faggoty Marxist pigs” stuff and delved into the really hideous with one that went something like “we killed the desaparecidos just for the fun of it."



Speculation on when and how Pinochet's corpse would arrive varied from right then, in a helicopter to ningún idea. But we stood with the press in front of the gate that held back the Pinochetistas.