Patricio Aylwin

Patricio Aylwin Azócar
President of Chile From: March 11, 1990 – March 11, 1994
Predecessor	Augusto Pinochet
Successor	Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle
President of the Senate of Chile From: 12 January 1971 – 22 May 1972
Predecessor	Tomás Pablo Elorza
Successor	José Ignacio Palma
Senator of the Republic of Chile From: 15 May 1965 – 11 September 1973
Predecessor	-
Successor	Position disbanded
President of the Christian Democracy From: 1965 – 1960, 1965 – 1967, 1973 – 1976, 1987 – 1989, 2001 – 2002
Predecessor	Rafael Agustín Gumucio
Successor	Adolfo Zaldívar Larraín
Information
Spouse(s)	Leonor Oyarzún
Religion	Catholic

Miguel Patricio Aylwin Azócar (b. Viña del Mar, November 26, 1918–d. Santiago de Chile, April 19, 2016) was a Chilean Christian Democrat politician and jurist. He was president of the Senate from 1971 to 1972 and President of Chile from 1990 to 1994.

Aylwin was the first democratically elected president after the Military Government. Thus, Aylwin's mandate began the first of the four consecutive governments of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concertation of Parties for Democracy).

Patricio Aylwin and Eduardo Frei Montalva in 1965.

The Christian Democratic Party was officially born into public life in 1957, after having been preceded for twenty years by the National Falange (Falange Nacional). From the beginning, it was clear its intention of being different from the Conservative Party and of rising as an alternative to the Marxist movement that was gaining more followers every day.

However, it did the latter by trying to snatch away its banners, thus transforming itself little by little, and very quickly from 1957 onwards, into a channel through which it began to express, under a supposedly Christian sign, the desire to participate in the class struggle in the Marxist style and to make its own the purpose of eliminating private property. Overtly or covertly, this party made its own the fundamental idea of Marxism, which was that the evil in people came from private property, so it was necessary to abolish it in order to bring goodness to the earth. This was what Marx had advocated in his communist manifesto.

Since the Christian Democracy could not express this idea with complete clarity, in view of the condemnations that the pontifical magisterium had fulminated against Marxism, it did so in a disguised manner. The incomprehensible theory of "communitarianism" elaborated by the "theoretician" of the party, Jaime Castillo Velasco, with which it was intended to disguise the effective communism that motivated the party. And that was evident when, in Eduardo Frei Montalva's government (from his party), he promoted the agrarian reform for which he ended the guarantee of private property enshrined in art. 10 No. 10 of the then constitution. Patricio Aylwin was a senator and president of the Senate of Chile.^[1]

Allende regime

Main article: Salvador Allende

Patricio Aylwin and Salvador Allende in 1973.

The Christian Democracy supported in the National Congress the election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile (They could have chosen in the two tied candidates at time), after he committed himself to a Statute of Constitutional Guarantees elaborated by the centrist party. The application of the revolutionary program of the Popular Unity somewhat divided the party, but the assassination of Frei Montalva's former minister, Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, led the Christian Democracy to more intransigent positions.

During the Salvador Allende regime, Patricio Aylwin was a prominent opositor^[2] being an anticommunist critic and having made an alliance with the right-wing called Democratic Confederation (Confederación Democrática, CODE).^[3] On June 11, 1973 he declared: "It would seem that the country has lost its historical identity, the defining features of its personality as a nation (...) Our traditional respect for the law, the authorities and the institutions of the State, the basis of our republican institutionality, seem like legendary memories. Now the laws are despised as hindrances, often flouted by those in charge of their execution and replaced by faits accomplis (...) a reality that has broken our democratic institutionality; a reality that seems to threaten us with the terrible dilemma of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by totalitarian imposition or to be dragged into a bloody confrontation among Chileans".^[4]

Aylwin said: "[if given the choice between] a Marxist dictatorship and a dictatorship of our military, I would choose the latter".^[5] Aylwin also said years later: "Allende made a bad government that fell due to the weaknesses of him and his followers" and

He was perfectly aware of the meetings of generals (mostly pro-Christian Democracy), who were preparing the military intervention, as revealed in the book "De Conspiraciones y Justicia", by Sergio Arellano Iturriaga, who in 1973 was a young Christian Democrat who served as a liaison between one of the conspirator generals, his father, and Senator Patricio Aylwin. Aylwin, when his talks with President Allende finally failed, called the young Arellano to inform him of the rupture, which implied giving the green light to the military pronunciamiento.^[6]

He he contributed to the drafting of the Congress Resolution of August 22, 1973 against Allende calling for a military intervention to restore the institutions by putting an end to the situation created by Allende.

Military Government

Main article: Military Government (Chile)

11 days after the Military Intervention of September 11, 1973, Patricio Aylwin said:

In October 1973 Aylwin declared:

In July 1984, Patricio Aylwin was one of those who led the idea of opposing the Military Government by legal-political peacefull means: "The only way out of a situation like this is through civil war (...) or through the reunion and reconciliation between the two or three Chiles that exist today in the homeland. The first is the violent solution, imposed by force. The second is the peaceful solution, achieved by the ways of reason and law. That is to say, political and juridical". He choose the latter.

In 1986 Aylwin actively participated in the creation of the "National Agreement for the transition to full democracy", and a year later, he resumed the presidency of the Christian Democracy. One of his main objectives was to restructure the party and reorganize the opposition, giving priority to "electoral political mobilization" in view of the announcement to submit Augusto Pinochet's continuity in power to a referendum and to call elections in case of negative results in this. The Military Government in 1981, when the new Constitution was promulgated, stated that in 8 years a referendum was going to be made, thus, Pinochet was fullfilling his promise.

Sí and No logos of the 1988 Chilean national plebiscite.

On February 2, 1988, Patricio Aylwin joint with other leaders created the Concertation of Parties for the No (Concertación de Partidos por el No), being its spokesman. The objective of this new political space was to organize the No campaign for the plebiscite to be held in October.^[8]

On October 5, 1988, the "No" option, which obtained 55.99% of the votes won, against 44.01% for the "Yes" option. As the country prepared for its first free presidential and legislative elections since 1973, Command for No—renamed the Coalition of Parties for Democracy (Concertación de los Partidos por la Democracia; CPD)—and the government negotiated constitutional amendments that were approved in a national referendum in July 1989, among them the revocation of Article Eight, which banned Marxist parties. Two months later the leftist Chileans living abroad returned to the country. Presidential elections were held on December 11, 1989.

The "No" Campaign and the Concertación was supported by George Soros^[9] and the organization "National Endowment for Democracy" originated from the U.S. Congress resolution H.R. 2915, helped the center-left with propaganda on television, newspapers, radio and magazines.

In the December 1989 presidential election, Patricio Aylwin won by a large margin, 55.17 %, over his closest opponent, Hernán Büchi, a former finance minister and the Military Government-endorsed candidate who obtained 29.40 % and the businessman Francisco "Fra Fra" Javier Errázuriz who got 15.43 %. The coalition also gained a majority in the lower chamber and nearly half the seats in the upper chamber.

On 1995, in a speech given to the Gulbelkian Foundation in Lisbon, Patricio Aylwin said that "the Chilean dictatorship was not that of a charismatic caudillo, like so many in the Third World, but the institutional government of the Armed Forces". He also said that during the Military Government "not everything was black", and highlighted works such as "the economic reforms of reorganization, liberalization and opening of the Chilean economy".

Inauguration

Augusto Pinochet giving the Presidency to Patricio Aylwin, March 11, 1990.

On March 11, 1990, the President of the Republic, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, handed over the Presidential sash to his successor Patricio Aylwin Azócar in a sober ceremony presided over by the newly elected President of the Senate, Gabriel Valdés. Everyone congratulated each other for this transfer of power full of symbolism.

The Armed Forces and the Forces of Order, which had had to take charge of the nation in 1973, were completing their work, faithfully fulfilling their word. The country was once again on the democratic path after the Military Government had made the profound corrections that Chile required. A thriving economy and a country confident in its future was the legacy that the Armed Forces and the Armed Forces of Order handed over to President Aylwin so that he could continue, for the good of Chile, the path that Chileans had traveled with so much effort and sacrifice during the last two decades.

This correct transition had unique and original features. He who had served for 17 years as President of the Republic continued as Commander-in-Chief of the Army for the next 8 years, that is to say, the entire presidential term of Patricio Aylwin and a good part of his successor's term.

Before stepping down, Pinochet was able to appoint several new Supreme Court justices and to claim a lifetime senatorial seat.^[10]

The next day President Aylwin said "Yes, gentlemen! Yes, fellow countrymen! Civilians and military, Chile is one!"^[11]

Army's Commander-in-Chief

Pinochet as Commander-in-Chief and Aylwin as President.

Pinochet retained significant power as commander of the Army until his retirement from the military in 1998, after Aylwin's Government.

President Aylwin did not feel comfortable with this situation and told the Commander-in-Chief of the Army that his government did not think it was good for the country or for the Army that he would continue as Commander-in-Chief, but that he recognized and respected his right to remain in office.

At the end of his term, former President Aylwin, in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde, reproduced by the Santiago newspaper El Mercurio on April 30, 1994, praised the figure of Augusto Pinochet as a sort of guarantor of the period: "If Pinochet had not been there during the transition, we would have had in Chile attempts of insurrection carried out by subordinates, "painted faces" as was the case in Argentina". Later, in Japan, he declared that "during my government, General Pinochet fulfilled the task of Commander-in-Chief of the Army, subordinate to the President and respectful of the constitutional order".^[12][10]

The same year he also stated "What I have said and continue to believe is that Pinochet did not try to co-govern since I assumed the Presidency. He told me: 'As a military man, I know how to command and obey. Now you are the President and I obey you. We had disagreements, naturally, but in short, he never tried to intervene in the orientation of my government's policy, he never disobeyed. The image of General Pinochet with which I left the Presidency, of his conduct during my government, is not the one I could have feared when I took office".

He added that "beyond my political differences with General Pinochet, as a ruler I believe that his presence contributed to the fact that we did not have any episode of that nature in the Chilean transition", and that "I never saw any danger of a possible rupture of the institutions during my term of office".^[5]

Economic meassures

Aylwin, who took office in March 1990, supported Chile's free-market system but also emphasized social and political change.^[10] Aylwin's tax reform increased the corporate tax from the 10 % to which the Military Government had lowered it (and the GDP growing at double digits in 1989 under Minister Büchi's leadership) to 15 % in 1991.

Free trade deals were signed with many countries.

In Aylwin's reform to the private pension system, the Central Bank stopped protecting the titles of inversion (Decree 734 of 1994).

Pardons to Left Wing terrorists

Main article: Left Wing Terrorism in Chile

Aylwin, as soon as he became president, pardoned 79 convicted terrorists and in total pardoned 928^[13] (almost all of the one who comited bloody crimes during the Military Government^[14]) and persecuted, through ad hoc commissions, the military men he himself had summoned to defeat them.^[15][16][17] Aylwin reformed the Constitution in 1991 to make this possible, giving the President power to pardon imprisoned people. The constitutional text in force around 1990 established the inadmissibility of amnesty, pardon and provisional freedom for those prosecuted for terrorist crimes (art. 9, third paragraph of DL 3.464). This constituted a legal obstacle to the fulfillment of President Aylwin's government program, which aspired to promote "political reconciliation" in the country, and in this framework, "that no political prisoners would remain in jail" during his term of office.^[18] In order to make this norm more flexible and "allow the President of the Republic to grant the benefit of pardon for crimes of this kind [terrorist] committed prior to March 11, 1990", on December 13, 1990, the President presented the Constitutional Reform Bill on Pardon, Amnesty and Provisional Freedom.^[19]

In 1991 conservative Senator Jaime Guzmán was killed by the FPMR member, Ricardo Palma Salamanca, and also Galvarino Apablaza was involved, none of the authors are in prison.

Rettig Report

Main article: Informe Rettig

The "Rettig Report", was the price paid by Patricio Aylwin for the Left and Far Left to support him as a presidential candidate and, once elected, so that the Left would not return to revolutionary ways or make Aylwin's government impossible. The purpose of the Report was to alter the historical truth and its deepening came later, under the Ricardo Lagos government and through a grotesque "Valech Report", by means of which 28 thousand people obtained life pensions just for having declared themselves mistreated by someone during the military government. It was made by a commision called "Of Truth and Reconciliation" and there has been no truth nor reconciliation either, because the pardons, impunity and millionaire payments in compensation to terrorists or their relatives for having been denied their goal of establishing a totalitarian regime have not appeased them, but have made them more violent and aggressive.

The Report, had the fundamental purpose that all the dead and wounded in terrorists attacks made by the Left were now described as "victims of political violence" or "victims of private individuals acting for political motives", without ever naming the MIR, the communist FPMR, the armed PS itself, confessed by Altamirano, nor the MAPU and the Christian Left, which also had guerrilla troops. Now the attacks were attributed to nameless people. All the authors of attacks vanished in the narrative, in order to accuse the Military Government of using weapons against "opponents" or political "dissidents" for the mere fact of having a different opinion, supposedly any of them ever having seen an M-16 or a machine gun.^[7]

In 1992 the National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation was created by Aylwin, the commissions were handled almost exclusively by consulting lawyers that were in favor of the Concertación coalition.

The Rettig Report said that between September 11 and December 31, 1973, 1,823 people died as a result of the infighting, that is, 57 % of all those killed during the almost 17 years of military government. Of these, 1,522 were killed by the Armed Forces and Carabineros, and 301 by Marxist guerrillas. Then it decreased to 309 in all of 1974 and 119 in all of 1975.^[7] Between 1978 and 1990, less than two people per year disappeared due to fighting.^[20]

The discrepancy between the number of dead in that period with the more than 1,800 given in previous quotations derives from the fact that the figure added by the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation, which was formed after the Rettig Commission and in response to the claims of people who, seeing the benefits granted to the victims, also wanted to assert their cases to obtain some pecuniary retribution, was added to the previous ones.^[21]

The people of the Concertación itself, proved that this guerrilla existed and that the internal confrontation caused victims on both sides.^[7]

There was an impressive amount of statements taken in consideration in such a short time by the Rettig Commision that elaborated the report. Writing almost 98.5 statements per day, there was not even time to investigate whether the statements were false or not, to be able to discard. The declarators arrived, declared and got paid.

Contrary to what has been said and written in the Report, the judicial system exercised control in human rights matters. The accusation of the Rettig Report, claiming the contrary, is false and that is why the Plenary of the Supreme Court declared the Report invalid and biased saying it is "passionate, reckless and tendentious, the product of an irregular investigation and probable political prejudices".^[7]

In 2013, the Rancagua Court of Appeals issued a ruling that completely absolved the Carabineros who had been prosecuted for the deaths of two leaders of the illegal terrorist organization, the communist armed wing, FPMR, Carlos Pellegrin and Cecilia Magni, who had attacked a police barracks in Los Queñes, killing a non-commissioned officer of the Carabineros.

The Rettig Report had ruled that both had been imprisoned and tortured, that she had been raped and then both bodies had been thrown by the Carabineros into the waters of the Tinguiririca River. The Court's ruling says that none of this was proven and that the members of the terrorist group drowned while trying to cross the river in their escape. It has taken 22 years to disprove a slanderous lie in the Rettig Report.

The falsehood of the Rettig Report's classification of people as "detainees-disappeared" has also been debunked since it has been proven that some of them are alive or that they disappeared without any intervention by State agents.^[22]

The "disappearances" that had been denounced in the 70's and 80's, totaled, as of October 5, 1988, 600, contained in a publication of the Archbishopric, whose authors were Claudio Orrego and Patricia Verdugo. Later, the 1991 Rettig Report raised them to 979 and the Reparation and Reconciliation Commission increased them to 1,102. The Government claimed to have no information on these cases. But then it has been proven that the remains of people whose whereabouts are known, plus those who have been "reappearing", which are six (that is, they are not technically "disappeared") is greater than 1,102. As this has not been done in decades of Center-left governments, is it politically more profitable to continue talking about "the disappeared".^[23]

The basis of the Report was in the Archives of the "Vicariate of Solidarity of the Archbishopric of Santiago". The head of the archives of the Vicariate was at the same time a senior communist leader of the armed wing of that party, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, José Manuel Parada.

This proves that there is no impartiality in the archives of the Vicaría -and therefore of the Rettig Report- if they were prepared by a high-ranking communist-terrorist leader. Parada very skillfully infiltrated the Archbishopric. First he worked as a driver for the Vicariate. Then, making good use of his personal gifts, he worked his way up until he was put in charge of the historical heart of the organization, the Archives. He took advantage of this position to recruit elements for the FPMR, as the guerrilla Alfredo Malbrich Labra confessed to the security forces in 1986: imprisoned on the occasion of the internment of the arsenals from Cuba by the Communist Party, he confessed that in 1979 he had gone to the Vicarage and there Parada had recruited him for the FPMR.^[24]

Indigenism

See also: Indigenism

'Mapuche' separatist flag created in 1991 by a separatist indigenist organization in the south of Chile.

During the 1989 Presidential campaign, Aylwin promoted the signing of an agreement with representatives of the various indigenist organizations, known as the Nueva Imperial Agreement. In it, Aylwin promised to give the constitutional recognition to indigenous peoples, to create a National Corporation for Indigenous Development and to promote their "development and integration while respecting their culture". The indigenist organizations, for their part, pledged to support the future Concertación government and to channel their demands through the participation mechanisms created by the government.

On July 27, 1990, by Supreme Decree No. 30,6 the Special Commission on Indigenous Peoples (CEPI 1990-1995) was created. This commission proposed three legal initiatives: a bill creating CONADI, constitutional reform regarding indigenous peoples and the ratification of the globalist ILO Convention 169.

In institutional terms, National Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) was founded in 1993 as part of the indigenous policy established by Law No. 19,253, and its first national director was José Bengoa Cabello.

The constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples was rejected on the Congress because it was going to generate separatism, and thus was denied by the opposition, the ILO Convention 169 was not signed until 2009 by Chile, however, the CONADI started to recognize indigenous people as different from other Chileans, thus, promoting the narrative that was going to help separatism in the South of Chile.

Liaison exercise & the Boinazo

The case known by leftist as "Pinocheques" was a judicial case in which Augusto Pinochet Hiriart, son of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, was being investigated after receiving a payment of 971 million pesos (three million dollars) from the Army, following the sale of the armaments factory "Valmoval", which was part of the Army. But a Chamber of Deputes investigative commission examined every detail of that sale and concluded that the transaction had been convenient for the Army. The involvement of a relative so close to the Commander-in-Chief, was a lack of delicacy, but there was no evidence of malice or fiscal damage.^[25][26]

The Army expressed its dissatisfaction with Aylwin's on two key occasions, the "liaison exercise" (ejercicios de enlace) in December 1990 which was treated as a routine military maneuver, was actually an expression of the Army's rejection of the possible request for Pinochet's resignation by the Minister of Defense, Patricio Rojas. This possible request would have been motivated by the judicial investigations of officers and by attacks by parliamentarians on the Commander-in-Chief and the Army.^[27]

And on May 28, 1993 ocured the "boinazo". On that day the headline "Pinochet's son's checks case reopened" appeared on "La Nación" Newspaper. After the press release, the building of the Armed Forces - a few steps away from La Moneda - was surrounded by soldiers with war uniforms, painted faces and black berets.

La Nación's investigation reported the decision of the State Defense Council to send to justice the case involving the Pinochet family, for a supposed crime of "tax fraud". This generated the annoyance of the Commander-in-Chief, not only because of the investigation, but also because of the link that he attributed between the media and the Aylwin government.

Aylwin later said refering to Pinochet: "He did not believe me that we do not dictate the headlines of the newspaper (...) [Pinochet was seeking] to put pressure in relation to the investigation of human rights violations".

This was the most complicated moment that the administration of Aylwin had to go through and the weakest point of the Army-government relations after the Military Government. When the events occurred, the President was in Denmark on his way to Moscow. For this reason, the Minister of the Interior, Enrique Krauss, had to face the situation as Vice President.

"In spite of all that tension, trust was gradually rebuilt, and with the passing of time the institutions assumed the role that corresponded to them in accordance with the institutional framework", he said later.^[28]

The "boinazo" consisted of a reinforcement of the guard of the Armed Forces building by a special group of commandos, carried out during a meeting of the Corps of Generals that lasted eight hours. The cause was similar to that of the previous episode. Given the lack of communication between the Executive and the Army, they sought to avoid what the military branch considered to be a campaign against them.

Territorial disputes with Argentina

During Aylwin's government, the territorial disputes with Argentina were treated differently, the Concertación wanted to solve the issues diplomatically, even if this meant to renounce to historic territorial claims. Aylwin met with Argentine President Carlos Menem in 1991 and they reached an agreement on the Southern Patagonian Ice Fields that wasn't ratified by the Congresses of both countries. However in 1994, the territory known as Laguna del Desierto, disputed since 1965, was submitted to arbitration with Latin American judges. The judges in 3 to 2 favored Argentina and Chile lost the dispute because of the approachment of the government.

1993 Election

Since Chile's 1980 Constitution doesn't allow consecutive reelection, the Concertación supported Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (son of Frei Montalva) as the center-left candidate, he won with 57.98 % of the votes against Arturo Alessandri Besa from the Independent Democratic Union who got 24.41 %, former Pinochet's Minister and José Piñera who got 6.18 %.

Thus, the Concertación Governments continued and Frei Ruiz-Tagle was inaugurated on March 11, 1994.

After the end of his administration, Aylwin continued his active public life. In 1994, he created the "Justice and Democracy Corporation", which sought to promote youth training programs, as well as to provide professional advice and research assistance related to the country's problems. He also played an important role on international affairs, as he was elected to chair the Latin American and Caribbean Commission on Social Development and participated in United Nations organizations.

Among the activities carried out there was the writing of an unpublished book, whose writing began in 1974, on the political responsibilities in the thousand days of Salvador Allende's government, which contains relevant documents and historical passages. He also wrote the book published in 1998 "El Reencuentro de los demócratas" and several chapters of an unpublished book that covers and analyzes his years as spokesman of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, being presidential candidate and President of Chile.

In 2001 he was appointed by President Ricardo Lagos to head the "Historical Truth and New Deal with Indigenous Peoples" Commission. In July of that year, he temporarily assumed the presidency of the Christian Democrats. In January 2002, he announced his farewell to public activity, however, he always attended the acts and events to which he was invited, as long as his health allowed him to do so.

He was recognized and named doctor honoris causa by national and international universities, such as the University of Concepción, Georgetown, Notre Dame and La Sorbonne. He was also distinguished with the J. William Fulbright Award for International Understanding for his role in Chilean Politics.

The last years of Patricio Aylwin's life were spent peacefully with his family. It was common to see him walking around his neighborhood, attending mass and spending time with his friends. He passed away on April 19, 2016 and was bid farewell by citizens and the political world with a state funeral.^[29][8]

• 1988 Chilean national plebiscite