BobHarris.com - Chilean TV coverage of Pinochet's death

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Juan Cole

Chilean TV coverage of Pinochet's death

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Wednesday, 13 December 2006

Been watching TV Chile on the satellite. I've been curious to see what Chilean TV news coverage of Pinochet's death looks like.

Pretty damned amazing, I have to say, when you consider they're still pulling themselves out of brutal dictatorship. My Spanish is still pretty rough, so I'm not getting everything they're saying, but the visuals aren't hard to follow.

They just did a piece about the Orlando Letelier bombing, for example. They used a supremely cheesy TV movie clip of a car explosion as an illustration, which was odd, but then cut to actual footage of the wreckage. A few seconds later, they're showing a computer screen whose web browser is set to this page, yesterday's posting of declassified documents by the National Security Archive.

When some of these reporters were children, a broadcast like this, even if it were possible, would probably be enough to get you killed. Now that they have freedom, they're using it. Hard.

What's most interesting, though, are the bits of programming which aren't about Pinochet -- and yet still are. I'm trying to grok just how the years of dictatorship must color daily life, even now.

Like the sports report, for example. Tonight, Colo Colo, a Santiago team, is playing Pechuga from Mexico in the South American Cup. Fans cheer outside the gates excitedly, people wave flags, it looks a lot like a U.S. sports report. Then you learn that Colo Colo is closely identified with Pinochet and his supporters, and that the game will be held in the National Stadium, which Pinochet's men used in 1973 as a torture and death camp for 40,000 prisoners.

Hell of a subtext. I believe I would be cheering for Pechuga.

Then they showed clips of previous matches held in the stadium, a highlight reel almost exactly like any other. Except the blurry 1970s video clips were a constant reminder that the ground where these games were played had been recently sprinkled with blood.

And yet these folks are willing themselves into a functional liberal democracy.

I feel something strangely akin to hope.