NEW HOPE FOR CHILE?

The office of General Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile and currently heading the last of the military regimes of South America, is situated very close to the room of La Moneda Palace in which his predecessor, the Marxist Salvador Allende, met his death on September 11, 1973. Appropriately enough, Allende’s room is to the left, Pinochet’s to the right, of the main entrance.

Controversy still rages as to the exact cause of Allende’s death. The international Left—to whom Allende has become something of a folk hero on a par with Patrice Lumumba and that teen idol, but abysmally inefficient guerrilla leader, Che Guevara—now hold that Allende died heroically under Pinochet’s bullets, still clasping the submachine gun given him by his friend Fidel Castro. There has, however, never seemed tometobe much reason to doubt the original version, given by Allende’s doctor and broadcast by the BBC at the time, that the “Comrade President” had committed suicide with the said weapon, as the insurgent troops entered the rocket-blasted palace. The manner of Allende’s death might seem a technicality of little enough consequence, were it not that the legend-making efforts of the Left exemplify the hostility, superbly orchestrated, that has greeted every act of the Chilean government since.

AH

About the Author

Alistair Horne

Sir Alistair Horne’s Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year is published by Simon & Schuster.

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The office of General Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile and currently heading the last of the military regimes of South America, is situated very close to the room of La Moneda Palace in which his predecessor, the Marxist Salvador Allende, met his death on September 11, 1973. Appropriately enough, Allende’s room is to the left, Pinochet’s to the right, of the main entrance.

Controversy still rages as to the exact cause of Allende’s death. The international Left—to whom Allende has become something of a folk hero on a par with Patrice Lumumba and that teen idol, but abysmally inefficient guerrilla leader, Che Guevara—now hold that Allende died heroically under Pinochet’s bullets, still clasping the submachine gun given him by his friend Fidel Castro. There has, however, never seemed tometobe much reason to doubt the original version, given by Allende’s doctor and broadcast by the BBC at the time, that the “Comrade President” had committed suicide with the said weapon, as the insurgent troops entered the rocket-blasted palace. The manner of Allende’s death might seem a technicality of little enough consequence, were it not that the legend-making efforts of the Left exemplify the hostility, superbly orchestrated, that has greeted every act of the Chilean government since.