On Sept. 11, 1973 democratically elected President Salvador Allende ousted by Augusto Pinochet seized power in a CIA-backed military coup. Chilean novelist
Isabel Allende talking:
“Thirty-six years have gone by since the military coup, and for the last twenty this
country has had democratic governments, but there are still scars and, in some cases, open wounds. People dont talk about the dictatorship much. Those who suffered it try to forget it, and for young people its ancient history.”
it is ancient history. In Chile, many people objected that part of my book. “It had nothing to do with the story; why did you have to tackle that? I mean, who cares? That happened so long ago. Why cant you forget?” Because I dont think you should forget the story of your country. So, its very important. Why do we remember the Holocaust? Because for generations people have kept it alive. We should keep alive our history, too, so that we dont go back and do again the same thing.
September 11th, 1973, which was also a Tuesday, amazingly. And that was the day of the military coup.
I saw the bombing of the palace from four blocks away. And I was the first one in my family to learn that he had died, because I had a TV program, and the producer of my program was married to a fireman. And the company that put down the fire in the palace washe was in that company, so they took the body out. And she called me immediately and said, “Im sure hes dead. They retrieved the body from the palace.” So I called the stepfather, who was ambassador to Argentina, to tell him. And in Argentina they already knew. All the information was censored in Chile, but the news were already abroad.
I was fired from everywhere. So I couldnt do my TV program. And I was working in a magazine; very soon I was fired, too. So it wasit was hard. But my husband, who was Christian Democrat, he continued working, and he was doing very well, because during theimmediately, the economy changed, and things started to become privatized, and it was a boom of the economy for capitalism, for the people who had some business, and he was working for a building company.
Neruda wasreceived the Nobel Prize in 1971. By 1973, he was very, very ill, but not dying. He had a cancer. And so, he moved to his house in Isla Negra, a beach house. And a month before the coup, I visited him in his house. And he was walking around, and we had lunch. He was doing fine. Then, the day of the coup, they raided his house, and they say that that really made him much, much sicker than he was. I mean, that was a horrible shock for him when he saw that all his friends were either arrested or in hiding. He was a communist. He had been almost a candidate to the presidency also, so he was a political man. And couple of days after the coup, they rushed him to Santiago in an ambulance to a private clinic, and he died 11 days after the coup. They say that he hadhis condition had worsened because of the coup, and that was it.
There was a very small, almost intimate funeral, because nobody dared show up. I mean, all his friends were leftists; they were all in hiding. I went to the funeral, and I was standing right behind the Swedish ambassador, almost holding his jacket, because I knew that if all the soldiers that were aligned along the road were going to shoot, they were not going to shoot the ambassador. So there I was hiding under his coat, practically. And it was a very emotional moment, because people were silent, they were terrified. And then the procession was passing near a construction, and one of the workers in the construction shouted, “Pablo Neruda! Presente!” And then another one said, “Salvador Allende! Presente!” And the funeral became also Allendes funeral, the homage that people could not pay to Salvador Allende.
The former president of Chile, Frei, died in very mysterious circumstances. He was in the hospital being operated on, and he was telling his family, “Take me out of here. Theyre killing me. Theyre killing me.” And he was poisoned. And now it has been proven that he was killed. And the dictatorship killedplaced bombs in Washington. They killed people in Washington, in Italy, in Argentina. My parents were living in Argentina. They were threatened. They had to escape from Argentina. So, my brother, who was in the Soviet Union, lost his passport, his nationality, everything. So the brutality extended its tentacles everywhere. And Pablo Neruda was a very important leftist figure, revered by everybody, as a poet and as a man.
source democracynow.org
Isabel Allende, best-selling Chilean writer and one of the worlds most renowned novelists. Her latest book is called Mayas Notebook: A Novel.