Interviews with Ricardo Lagos

What I would say is that… First of all people everywhere discover how sincere you are. How much sincerity [there is] in your words. How much passion, how much you believe [in] that.

I believed it was possible to defeat Pinochet. I had no doubt. The question was how we were going to make other people to believe that. [Augusto Pinochet was dictator of Chile between 1973 and 1990.]

Number two: I had to be able to knock on the door of every house in Chile and say: “I invite [you] to say ‘no’ because one, two, three, four”.

I discovered that in democratic countries it is much more difficult to knock the door and say: “I am coming to invite you to vote for me”. It is quite different than to say [to someone] to vote against a dictator. Because it is not very humble to knock the door on your house and say: “I invite you to vote for me”.

“Because I think that I know better than you what [has] to be done in this country.” It is not very humble. I always used to say: “politician is a not a profession for very humble people”. They have to tell you why they wanted to…

But [you] better have good ideas. This is what I am trying to say. [You] better believe [in] what you are talking about. Otherwise it is a “no”. Second, I think that the way that you are going to defeat a dictatorship is extremely important to the type of political system you will have afterwards.
Because we defeated [Pinochet] with a plebiscite, then it was possible to have the transition that we had. It was not perfect. Of course it was not. But at least it was possible to have a non-violent transition.

There had been so many people killed. So many people had disappeared, etc., etc. But afterwards, in our transition we were able to have a Presidential Commission to see what happened. We had dialogue and, as a result of that dialogue, I remember that the Commander in Chief went to see me one day and said: “Mr. President, do you want to know the truth?” “Yes, I want the truth.”

“Many of those who disappeared were thrown away in the ocean. They are in the ocean.” And I remember that I asked him: “What did you put in the ocean: a human being or a body, a dead body?” And he told me: “A dead body”.

It is very [shocking], don’t you think so? But that is the way we did that transition. And this is why one day, later, we did some other things, like trying to do things in the area of the human rights violations, political prisoners, torture and things like that.
But I think that is the only way to do it. And I think [that] because we did it nonviolently then we had a non-violent transition.

And that is why it is so important what kind of instruments you are going to use. It is true [that] Chile used to be a democratic country according to our traditions… I never thought when I was studying or when I was young that I was going to be living through a dictatorship in Chile.

For me that was impossible to think about. In some other countries maybe, but not here. But you never know. And the fact is that later on we discovered that [that] was important.

Ricardo Lagos served as president of Chile from 2000 to 2006. While in office Lagos was known for pursuing free-trade agreements, improving health care and education, and addressing the crimes of General Augusto Pinochet’s military regime.

Lagos was born in 1938 in Santiago, Chile. He earned a law degree from the University of Chile in 1960 and then attended Duke University, where he received a doctorate in economics in 1966. He returned to Chile and served as director of the University of Chile’s School of Political and Administrative Sciences and was subsequently appointed secretary general of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.

Lagos was nominated by President Salvador Allende to be Chilean ambassador to the Soviet Union. But in 1973, Allende was overthrown in a military coup d’état led by Pinochet, and Lagos was never confirmed in that position.

Like many in the democratic opposition to the dictatorship, Lagos left Chile. While in exile in the United States and Argentina, he served at the United Nations as a consultant and economist at UNESCO and the International Labor Organization.

In 1978, he returned to Chile, where he became president of the Democratic Alliance, a coalition of parties opposed to Pinochet. In 1987, Lagos founded the Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia). During the historic 1988 national referendum to end the Pinochet dictatorship, Lagos was a key leader in the grassroots efforts to register voters and encourage them to vote against prolonging the military regime.

After democracy was restored, Lagos served as minister of education in the government of President Patricio Aylwin and as minister of public works under President Eduardo Frei before being elected president in his own right in January 2000.

Since leaving the presidency, Lagos founded the Fundación Democracia y Desarrollo (Foundation for Democracy and Development) in 2006 and currently serves as its president. He is also vice-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue and was UN special envoy for climate change from 2007 to 2010.

Twitter: @RicardoLagos