Allende remembered 51 years after the coup in Chile

Santiago. Chile commemorated the 51st anniversary of the civil-military coup that on September 11, 1973 overthrew the government of socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens, who died that day by committing suicide in the La Moneda Palace, the seat of government, thus fulfilling his promise not to capitulate to the coup plotters and to pay with my life for the loyalty of the people.

Despite the passage of time, the wounds and pain caused by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, which according to official records caused more than 40,000 direct victims, including deaths, disappearances and torture, remain open from that day on and for the next 17 years.

Some 3,300 people were killed, of which some 1,200 remains remain unaccounted for, and it is not known exactly when and where they were dumped, although it is known that many ended up being thrown into the ocean from army helicopters off the coasts of Valparaíso and San Antonio.

As happens year after year on this date, in the streets, cemeteries and sites of historical memory – the clandestine barracks where torture and massacres took place – there were feelings of homage, pain and contemplation. The history documented and/or transmitted verbally from generation to generation, by the victims or their families, continues to hammer at the present of this country.

The photographic records of the military attacking La Moneda by land and air; of Allende inside it together with a handful of women and men who faced them; the palace burning with the Chilean flag swaying in smoke and flames until it burned; the corpse of the president on an armchair with his head smashed in or carried on a stretcher covered by a blanket, all of that has remained forever.

And while part of the coup-plotting right has made a my fault Regarding all this, there are still sectors that minimize and/or justify it. Just yesterday, the head of the Pinochet-supporting Independent Democratic Union (UDI) deputies, Gustavo Benavente, alleged that “making a my fault in the face of facts that have already been determined by justice, it makes no sense,” referring to the crimes of the dictatorship, and that We have a single consensus, at least in the UDI: the 11th was an absolutely inevitable exit, there was no other possibility..

President Gabriel Boric, in a ceremony at La Moneda, mentioned that These walls witnessed how betrayal and infamy were imposed with blood and fire over the dignity of a people.adding that We remember with admiration President Salvador Allende Gossens, and the Chileans who, together with him, that day defended democracy, the Constitution and the laws..

He expressed that No political crisis, however complex, is resolved by bombing, killing and disappearing one’s own compatriots; the extermination of compatriots for thinking differently, the end of democracy and the bombing of its main symbol, is never the only alternative.adding that Human rights violations began at that moment zero and are inseparable from the coup d’état of that day..

As always happens on this date, citizens retired early to their homes, in anticipation of the usual night protests that usually occur in many neighborhoods of the capital and other cities on these dates.