“I will not resign! I will pay with my life for the loyalty of the people.” It is still shocking to hear Salvador Allende’s voice in his last speech, broadcast live on Radio Magallanes after ten in the morning on September 11, 1973. The speech of the great avenues. Shortly after, the martyred Chilean president would commit suicide in his office in La Moneda with the same rifle with which he had participated in the useless defense of the government palace, bombed by four Hawker Hunter planes of the air force, as well as the presidential residence. Tomás Moro street, in Santiago.
Tomorrow marks fifty years since those words, motivated by the coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet, commander in chief of the army. Allende did not resign and paid for it with his life, after rejecting the exit into exile that the military offered him after demanding “unconditional surrender.” Although in an audio of the communications intercepted that day from the coup plotters, Pinochet is heard telling another officer: “The offer to take him out of the country is maintained, but the plane falls, old man, when it is going to fly.”
Half a century later, the Allende myth lives on. The socialist president knew that with his speech he would go down in history and become a symbol of resistance against authoritarianism, not only in Chile but also in other countries, especially in a Latin American continent plagued by dictatorships.
The Chilean military regime left more than 3,000 dead – of which a thousand are still missing – and a total of 40,000 retaliated, including imprisoned, tortured or exiled.
Like every September 11, the rebuilt palace, the statue of Allende located in one of the corners of La Moneda or the side door of number 80 Morandé Street – where the president’s lifeless body was taken – will become tomorrow place of pilgrimage and offerings.
History has wanted the commemoration of the fifty years to be led by Gabriel Boric, the most leftist president the country has had since Allende. At 37 years old, Boric is the only Chilean president born after 1973 and in recent weeks he has had to face an increase in polarization due to this anniversary.
The social outbreak of 2019 led Chileans to decide in a referendum the following year to end the Constitution of ultra-liberal principles bequeathed by Pinochet in 1980 and draft a new Magna Carta, in principle progressive in nature. There was nothing to predict that this turn to the left would generate a conservative reaction as strong as that experienced in recent years with the rebirth of an extreme right that unapologetically vindicates Pinochetism. This reactionary wave is led by the Republican Party of former presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, which controls a third of the seats of the Constitutional Council, the constituent assembly that is currently carrying out the second attempt to draft a new Magna Carta, after a first project rejected in a plebiscite in 2022.
Kast and the legislators of his party have carried out statements and episodes in recent weeks that tend to bombard the commemoration promoted by the Boric Government; always supported by Chile Vamos, the right-wing opposition coalition of which the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) – a party of Pinochetist origin – or National Renewal (RN) are part.
In this sense, the latest reactionary episode occurred last Wednesday, when several right-wing parliamentarians left the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies during the tribute to three legislators arrested and disappeared during the dictatorship. Among the current deputies is the communist Lorena Pizarro, who for many years presided over the Group of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees and who responded to the opposition insult. “Perhaps in other countries the deputies, even if they were not from the parties affected by the extermination, would have stayed to pay tribute,” said Pizarro, daughter of the communist leader Waldo Pizarro, arrested and made to disappear by the dictatorship in 1976.
In this context of polarization, it is seen as an achievement that Boric got his four living predecessors to sign a declaration in defense of democracy on Thursday, including former conservative president Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), taking into account that The party that brought him to power was RN, one of the opposition parties. In addition to Boric and Piñera, the socialists Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) and Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010 and 2014-2018), and the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle (1994-2000) signed the declaration. In the text, the signatories commit to “care for and defend democracy, respect the Constitution and the rule of law” protecting “those civilizing principles from authoritarian threats, intolerance and contempt for the opinion of others,” and also to the “defense and promotion of human rights.”
However, Piñera will not be tomorrow at the official acts that will take place throughout the day in La Moneda and in the adjacent Plaza de la Ciudadanía, to which international leaders have been invited. “I am not going to La Moneda because the climate that has occurred this week, with so much confrontation, so much division, did not make it possible,” Piñera declared. Only Bachelet will attend, since Frei is out of the country and Lagos is recovering from a fall. Among the foreign leaders who have confirmed their attendance are the presidents of Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and the Prime Minister of Portugal, António Costa. Several former presidents will also be there, such as the Spanish Felipe González or the Uruguayan José Mujica.
The myth of Allende is still alive but that of Pinochet is being resurrected. A survey by the Activa Foundation published this week indicates that 32.8% of Chileans believe that the coup was necessary and 30.8% blame Allende himself, president of the Popular Unity government, who wanted to promote the military uprising. a socialist reform agenda without having a parliamentary majority. However, 51.3% reject the figure of Pinochet, but 39.2% are also against Allende. And furthermore, 56% say they have no interest in the 50th anniversary of a coup that, with the support of the United States of Nixon and Kissinger, put an end to three years of illusions in what was the first democratically Marxist government chosen one.
“Surely Radio Magallanes will be quiet and the quiet metal of my voice will not reach you. It does not matter, they’ll keep hearing. I will always be with you,” Allende said in his historic speech, where the malls forever became synonymous with freedom. “Keep knowing that, much sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open for the free man to walk through to build a better society.”
