In the early afternoon of Sept. 11, 1973, with Chile’s presidential palace in the pall of a coup d’tat’s smoke and gunfire, President Salvador Allende, the world’s first democratically elected Marxist President, bid his country farewell in a radio address and, after ordering the palace defenders to surrender, entered the Independence Hall alone.
What happened next is the subject of myth and mystery. The official version, cobbled together from bits and pieces of testimony, and an autopsy conducted under extreme duress by two doctors — one of them a gynecologist — says the 65-year-old Allende placed an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro under his chin and pulled the trigger. But discrepancies surrounding the autopsy and absence of multiple witnesses have made the tale of his suicide difficult for many to accept.
After 38 years of heated debate, a team of domestic and international forensic specialists will attempt to shed light on what is perhaps the defining event of contemporary Chilean history. On Monday, Allende’s body will be exhumed under court order, upon the request of Allende relatives, to set straight once and for all if indeed he did pull the trigger, paying “with my life the loyalty of the people,” becoming a martyr. Or was he murdered by General Augusto Pinochet’s troops in a bloody coup?
To be clear, says Isabel Allende, the President’s daughter and now a Chilean Senator, the family “has no doubt about the suicide of my father,” explaining that it was a decision he made to die with dignity rather than surrender. Above all, the exhumation is an opportunity to clear up lingering doubts and conduct an official investigation, which has never been done, and place his death in the context of the violence on that day. “In a sense, Allende is the first disappeared, he’s the first victim whether he kills himself or not,” said Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean novelist who served as cultural adviser to the President. “It really was his death that inaugurates the time of terror, of lying and of hiding the truth in Chile.”
On one overcast fall afternoon, 74-year-old Juan Rebolledo, groundskeeper at the General Cemetery, lazily piles fallen leaves into an aged wicker basket, the same task he’s performed thousands of times before. Rebolledo remembers the wonderful fountain at Patio 40 that Allende’s mausoleum replaced, watching as the line of visitors has slowed to a trickle. After a life spent among the dead, he questions the value in disturbing Allende’s remains. “If it were my family, I would let the dead rest,” Rebolledo says.
Then again, the autopsy is more about the living than the dead. If you have something from the dead, a message, there is a chance at closure, at least to move on in some way, according to Dorfman. As jets bombarded the palace and tanks closed in, Allende may have offered such a message in his final radio address. “These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice and treason.”
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