SANTIAGO, Chile -- Was it like this, too, during the dictatorship?
This side street in Vitacura, a leafy residential neighborhood that runs from the crowded center toward the dry-banked edge of the Andes, is idyllic in early evening. Dog walkers. Silence.
Was it like this during those 17 years when General Augusto Pinochet and his military might threatened, and killed, to stay in power?
Answers to such questions -- about the nature of a place and the feel of its recent history -- can prove elusive for a traveler, particularly one just passing through.
In Santiago, so much is new, arrived since 1990, when Pinochet left office and democracy returned to this pulsing, pleasant capital set between the mountains and the sea. Yet so much is the same. The leaf-laden trees, to be sure, were there, and the older walkers of dogs, too. So were the concrete buildings in the city center and even the names, such as Avenida 11 de Septiembre, given to a street not for the day the towers fell in Manhattan, but for the day the socialist government of Salvador Allende fell to a coup, and Pinochet, in 1973.
Foreign visitors not linked to Chile, its people, or its past, often skirt Santiago en route to cruise ships, or beaches, or rugged adventure at the ends of the earth. Yet it is a fine capital, full of dense, cramped neighborhoods, mile after mile to the south, but also bustling, bohemian districts that welcomed the poet Pablo Neruda, and calm, moneyed avenues.
In the City of Enterprise, a modern development tucked at Santiago's northern edge beneath green slopes, a ring of low buildings houses companies selling technology, ideas, bagels, and more. After navigating through it, Julio Canalez, 52, a taxi driver from the working-class neighborhood of Maipu, said:
''I admire the Pinochet regime because I lived through the period of Pinochet and of [Allende before it] and I suffered much during the first. We had money, but nothing to buy. During Pinochet, if you were not involved in politics, you had nothing to fear. If you were involved, well, yes, you had something to fear."
Canalez drove along Avenida El Salto as it paralleled the slopes of Cerro San Cristobal south toward the government palace, La Moneda. At a wide street corner midway to the city center, Chile's president-elect, Michelle Bachelet, stood at a market stall and bought a bouquet of red flowers.
Across the street, in among the concrete tombs in Santiago's General Cemetery, rows of chairs sat ready for a ceremony commemorating the death of Tucapel Jimenez, a union leader assassinated in 1982. Bachelet took a seat alongside Jimenez's son, now a deputy in parliament, and other leftist leaders once again holding power in Chile. A white-bearded priest strode to a podium to remember Jimenez.
''They made him disappear during the dark days of the dictatorship," the priest said. ''But he's still lighting our commitment."
Canalez watched and smiled as reporters clamored to question Bachelet about the ministers she would appoint to her new government. Then he drove toward the main exit, passing along the way a monument to less celebrated victims of the regime that killed more than 3,000 Chileans and tortured tens of thousands more. Long columns of names were carved into the towering wall. Across the top, an inscription read: ''All my love is here and has been stuck to stones, to the sea, and to the mountains."
Elsewhere in the city -- among the business elite walking the skyscraper alleys near La Moneda, or the hipsters idling in cafes along the boulevard passing the facade of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, or especially the seafood restaurants catching tourists beneath the vaulted ceiling of the central market -- memory also seemed locked in stone, if anywhere. In the words of one young educated woman, upon hearing mention of Pinochet, 90, who lingers under house arrest, his fate with the nation's judges: ''That is in the past."
While the government continues to deprogram a military long powerful, Chile's economy, one of the strongest in Latin America, fuels change. So the people, particularly the young, turn out to listen to rock 'n' roll in Bellavista and sip
It is normal, of course, for a new generation to want to make its own way, to reject internal suffering and international alienation, to enjoy the good times at hand. And it can be that easy.
Consider a Sunday summer evening in February, when U2, the world's biggest rock band, returned to Chile for the first time in eight years to play a concert in Santiago's Estadio Nacional.
Hours before the concert was to begin, thousands of revelers in sweatshirts and well-cut jeans, in stylish sneakers and T-shirts with English slogans, poured into the low bowl of the stadium. Those in the stands chanted to those below on the field. The fans on the field chanted back.
Meanwhile, in a room beneath the stands, Bachelet stood at a podium and presented an award from Amnesty International to members of U2 for their work denouncing military regimes in Latin America and promoting human rights. Things had come full circle; it was in those very rooms beneath the stadium stands that Pinochet's forces had tortured and killed political opponents in the early days after the coup.
Onstage, after soft twilight had given over to black sky and pulsing concert lights, video images linked Allende and Pinochet and Uncle Sam. Between rock 'n' roll chords, Bono, U2's lead singer, talked of a new day: ''If there were any bad spirits in this stadium, they are gone. New memories release these spirits and build lives."
Near the back of the packed field, Ernesto Aguirre, a young father and structural engineer who helps design the skyscrapers reshaping Santiago's profile, danced.
''We are starting over. It has been only 20 years," Aguirre said, ''but I like the starting point."
Contact Tom Haines at thaines@globe.com. 
