HOW CAN I EXPLAIN the horror of Chile? Chile today is an old woman picking through the garbage in downtown Santiago, looking for something to eat; Chile is 20-year-old Clara with her broad smile, who matter-of-factly told me that "about 50" of her friends were killed or disappeared in the coup; Chile is a ruined dream, a land drenched in sorrow and quivering with fear and desperation.

Not all of the following diary was written while I was in Chile late last year and early this year; parts of it would have implicated both my friends and myself had I been searched. I have naturally changed all the names and altered various incidental facts.

December 22--My Spanish friend Enrique and I crossed the border from Argentina today, smuggling in a recent issue of an Argentina magazine which contained an article warning us about life in Chile. The article explained that economic crisis had reduced the once gay and voluble daily life of Chile to a bitter struggle for survival. It said unemployment in greater Santiago approached 20 per cent while inflation continued at an annual rate of over 300 per cent. (These figures were confirmed in January by El Mercurio, one of Santiago's three pro-junta newspapers). We had feared we would be searched at the border, but we had the good fortune to be in the same bus as a lieutenant of the Carabineros, Chile's national police. He was smuggling in a large cache of Argentina whiskey, so we sailed right through customs.

December 23--We took some long walks through Santiago today, sweltering in the 85-degree summer heat and trying to cook up some ways to get people to talk openly with us. On almost every available wall or other open space we could see where colorful political slogans had been painted over by the junta. We ambled past La Moneda, the presidential palace half destroyed by bombs and tanks in 1973--the inside still gutted although a sign on the outside said repairs were proceeding.

An amazing number of small children were around, either begging in a straightforward way or doing its equivalent--selling old candies. The young couple we met in the central plaza were cautious, but they did say that the number of small beggars had increased greatly in the last two years. We had seen this before, in Peru and Bolivia, but we agreed that the kids here had a certain glazed look in their eyes that was new to us. Perhaps we are imagining things.

In the afternoon, we went for ice cream and the waiter lingered after noticing our foreign accents. "This is a fascist country," he said, unprompted, and launched into a detailed attack against the Pinochet government. We listened, astonished, pretending ignorance. "Were things better once?" I asked. "Yes--under Allende--and that's why they killed him," he answered.

December 24--Christmas Eve. The Chileans did all their last minute shopping today, not in the handful of fancy stores, whose owners complain in the newspapers that business has fallen off, but from a horde of street vendors stretching five blocks who were selling things like home-made wooden toy trucks and paper party noisemakers. About a million kids bubbled through the streets with their parents.

At the last minute, Pinochet announced that the unemployed would receive a special Christmas bonus--five pesos, the equivalent of 50 U.S. cents.

December 27--At about 10, after exploring Santiago all day, we went to a small bar for a few beers. In walked a beautiful little girl, about eight years old, selling aspirin, trailed by three or four smaller brothers and sisters. Her name was Silvia, and she and her charges sell in the streets from early morning until they catch the last bus home before the 1 a.m. curfew. We bought some aspirins, and she went shyly up to Enrique, put her arm around him and gave him a big kiss.

December 28--Today we met Hans, a 65-year-old leftist who was born in Austria and came to Chile in the 1930s fleeing Hitler. He and his buddies, other desperate, old and some not-so-old radicals, hand around the park which lines the Mapocho River. Hans used to put his cosmopolitan background to use in the hotel business--he speaks three languages--but the tourists are afraid of Chile these days; the hotels are empty and Hans has been out of work for over a year.

He is an amazingly warm and wonderful man who seems to know half of Santiago. A middle-aged vendor of balloons meanders by and Hans tells us, "He's with MAPU [the Christian left]." We take Hans to dinner--he had not eaten all day--and the waiter and he exchange knowing winks and oblique references; they were both members of the Socialist Party.

At night, we sit in the park again and an older man, conservatively dressed, strolls along, notices Hans and sits beside us, exchanging pleasantries in the friendly Chilean way. Emilio leans over and whispers, "They are of our line." Instantly, the man's face darkens and he begins to speak fervently. "We Chileans are cowards. We permit this criminal government to keep us down," he says. We try to reassure him that the Chileans are hardly cowards but he will not be dissuaded.

January 2--A slight case of the flu kept me in bed for New Year's Day, but Enrique went out drinking, and told me that the curfew had been relaxed to 3:30 a.m., but that there were police and soldiers with their sub-machine guns on almost every street corner. The curfew, which continues more than two years after the coup, usually begins at 1 a.m. and ends at 5:30 a.m.; anyone caught in the streets between those hours is taken directly to jail for the night.

Hans says that several months ago a military patrol stopped two acquaintances of his, one of whom made a false move. The patrol immediately shot him.

Pinochet, in his New Year's message, promised the Chileans peace and prosperity for 1976. "Every Chilean must put his shoulder to the wheel," is the junta's slogan.