Vol. 20 No. 18 · 17 September 1998
pages 36-37 | 3521 words
Diary
Richard Gott
Although I had lived for some of the previous decade in Santiago, I was not in Chile on 11 September 1973, the day 25 years ago when the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown. I was sitting in the Guardian’s old building in the Grays Inn Road when the news came in over the wires, but could not immediately fly to Chile, having a longstanding engagement to drive my family from Sussex to Yorkshire to establish them in a new home. The foreign editor threatened to send the Washington correspondent instead, so I promised I’d be on the first plane into Santiago. The Chilean military had closed the country to the outside world, and I knew that it would be some days before it opened up. They did not want too many foreign witnesses.
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[*] Victor: An Unfinished Song by Joan Jara (Bloomsbury, 288 pp., £6.99, 10 September, 0 7475 3994 4).
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 20 · 15 October 1998
From Howard Davies
‘Chile,’ Richard Gott observes (LRB, 17 September), ‘is a country that has almost entirely disappeared from the screen.’ In my world, that is far from true. The Chilean economic renaissance of the Eighties, led by Chicago School monetarists, remains an interesting case-study. More recently, Chilean privatisation of the social security system has been copied in many other countries. And Chilean-style capital controls are a hot topic wherever the East Asian economic crisis is discussed. There is less revolutionary poetry, perhaps, less glamorous socialist rhetoric, but it is hard to think of a small country which has exerted more intellectual influence on economic and social policy-making in the last two decades.
While I cannot share Gott’s interpretation of Chile today, I can support his observation that our Ambassador, Reginald Secondé, was ‘a solid supporter of the coup’. I recall meeting him in 1975, when he was asked by an ambassadorial colleague what sort of people the Junta generals were. ‘They are all dear, nice chaps,’ he said, ‘but they make every political mistake in the book.’ Ethical foreign policy, Seventies style.
Howard Davies
Chairman, Financial Services Authority, London E14
