“No one touches anyone,” warned General Augusto Pinochet in October 1989, two months before Chile’s first free elections since his 1973 coup. “The day they touch one of my men, the rule of law ends. This I say once and will not say again.” The old junta leader’s comment, made almost casually to reporters, cast a pall over the fiesta-like campaign atmosphere. As expected, the anti-Pinochet forces won. But the general’s warning still hangs in the air. Pinochet’s democratic successors have chosen not to call his bluff.

Pinochet’s language was unusually blunt, but the dilemma that the old tyrant’s warning created for the new Chilean republic was nothing new. One of the first questions a newly democratic nation must face is that of what to do with its old dictators. Since the French Revolution, it has been clear that the choices new democracies make—whether and how to investigate tyranny’s legacy, try its leaders, purge its bureaucrats, or touch one of its gunmen—can set the course for a nascent democratic system. But only in the past 15 years or so have nations become fully aware of what is at stake when dealing with a repressive past.

After World War II, the notion of human rights and civil liberties—previously believed to be out of reach for the citizens of most countries—was increasingly accepted by a growing number of nations. In addition, since the mid-1970s, a staggering number of countries have turned from dictatorship to elected civilian government. First came southern Europe—Portugal, Greece, and Spain. In the 1980s, the wave hit Latin America—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In 1992, El Salvador ended a war that took the lives of 75,000 civilians. In the 1980s and early 1990s, at least 15 African nations moved away from repressive one-party rule and held multiparty elections. After 1989, the Soviet bloc completed the avalanche. All are now wrestling with their repressive pasts.

There are two main reasons to confront a grim past: to heal tyranny’s victims and to alter the conditions that nurtured dictatorship in order to prevent its return. The new democracies have dreamed up a plethora of creative and often contradictory methods for fulfilling these broad obligations to past and future. They include choosing to leave the past behind and start afresh, an official apology by the new head of state, monetary reparations to the victims or their families, employment bans and purges that keep abusers from positions of public trust, truth commissions, and trials of political leaders or those who carried out torture and murder.

The instruments chosen depend on the type of dictatorial system, the types of crimes it committed, the level of citizen participation in the dictatorship, the nation’s political culture and history, the abruptness of the transition to democracy, and the new civilian government’s resources and political power. As these factors vary widely, so do the choices countries have made. While it is early to judge these choices, some general guidelines can be drawn up by comparing two large groups of new democracies: the former military dictatorships of Latin America and the former Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe.

In the two regions, both the type of the past victim and the nature of the future threat are almost diametrically opposed. Roughly put, repression in Eastern Europe was wide, while in Latin America it was deep. And in Latin America the challenge to democracy comes from military dominance of a weak civilian government, while in Eastern Europe the danger is repression by capricious government officials unchecked by law. The challenge to both continents is to deal with past abuses of power in ways that do not replicate them.

Some nations have met the challenge. Most, although they could still change course, have merely reinforced old antidemocratic habits. The lessons of Latin America and Eastern Europe might help other countries to choose their paths: nations recently emerging from dictatorship or restricted democracy, such as South Africa, Haiti, and Malawi, and nations that are ending long and brutal wars, such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, Guatemala, and Angola. Sadly, for many countries, democracy will be only a temporary phenomenon. If they do not successfully deal with a repressive past today, future opportunities may await.

The new democracies’ strategies for confronting the past depend largely on the nature of the former authoritarian regime. While comparisons between such different regions must be flawed by overgeneralization—Latin American countries can differ almost as sharply from one another as from the countries of Eastern Europe—the differences between the two areas shed much light on the problems of confronting the past.

Ideology. Communist leaders pronounced themselves the instrument of the working class, the standard-bearers of a beautiful ideal. They aimed for nothing less than the transformation of their citizens, the building of a “new socialist man.” The good socialist citizen attended May Day parades, joined Marxist-Leninist scientific study groups, voted for the party slate, and hung peace slogans in his window. In the harsher police states, he denounced suspicious activity by his neighbors or colleagues. Latin leaders, by and large, indulged in no such nonsense. They ruled because they possessed more guns. Military leaders held a highly developed anticommunist ideology, but they did not seek to impose it on the public. In Pinochet’s Chile, for example, the regime’s good citizen was apolitical—he went to work, came home to play with his children, and kept his head down. If his neighbor returned from a long absence with a shuffling gait and dead eyes, the good citizen noticed nothing.

The nature of repression. The nature of the typical state crime in the two regions also differed. In Latin America, the generals crushed dissent with murder, torture, and forced disappearance. This intense repression was focused on a small percentage of the population. Even the 9,000-plus Argentines who disappeared in the “dirty war” against the left were a small slice of the nation. These crimes, while sponsored by the state, had clear authors. In tiny Uruguay, former political prisoners sometimes ran into their torturers on the street. Mothers in Argentina often knew the names and whereabouts of their disappeared children’s military kidnappers. And torture and murder were illegal according to then-extant laws.

While Stalinism in the U.S.S.R. itself was violent and sustained on a scale unimaginable in Latin America—7 million executed, 5 million dead of government-induced famine, 15 million sent to the gulag—Communist violence was much reduced in Eastern Europe. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Communist regimes kept power mainly through corruption and coercion. Citizens and apparatchiks who behaved correctly won privileges, and those who did not lost them. Violence was seldom necessary. (The great exception was Albania, which was still shooting its poets in the late 1970s and was staunchly Stalinist until 1990.) In Eastern Europe, state repression was far more diffuse than in Latin America—few people suffered physical harm, but almost everyone suffered some deprivation. While the outspoken went to jail, one did not need to be politically active to suffer the regime’s wrath. Millions who exhibited insufficient Communist enthusiasm lost their jobs, their children’s schooling, their weekend cottages, or their passports. All except the most privileged endured travel restrictions, lack of privacy, shoddy goods, shortages, and constant lies. All lived smaller lives in nations where all things were measured by political loyalty. This repression was not illegal, but the very foundation of the system. It was perpetrated not by an individual, but a whole government. Tapping a telephone or sending a family into internal exile can only be done with the support of an entire bureaucratic apparatus. Indeed, it required the collaboration of virtually the whole populace.

Cooperating with tyranny. Another difference between the two types of dictatorship is that Eastern Europe’s Communist dictatorships sought public participation, while Latin America’s right-wing military dictatorships sought public silence. In Latin America, although many influential people endorsed the ideologies that gave rise to murder and torture, one can point to a few hundred men who committed the actual crimes. The Eastern bloc dictatorships were conspiracies of all of society. Just as almost everyone was a victim of Communism by virtue of living under it, almost everyone also participated in repression. Inside a Communist regime, lines of complicity ran like veins and arteries inside the human body. Even the most natural responses of self-preservation were also, in a sense, acts of collaboration. The eighth-grade history teacher who taught students of the glorious march of the proletariat and its vanguard, the Communist Party; the journalist who wrote positive articles because she knew she would be fired for writing negative ones; the millions who fooled their leaders into thinking they were beloved by granting them their votes and cheering at party rallies—all were complicit. Their complicity was hidden, even from themselves, by that fact that every ordinary citizen behaved the same way. It seemed normal. But such “normal” collaboration kept the regime alive. “The question we must ask isn’t what some `they’ did,” said Jan Urban, a Czech journalist and dissident. “It’s what we did.” The horror of Communism was in the sum of the parts. In short, the East European dictatorships were criminal regimes, while the Latin American dictatorships were regimes of criminals.

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