Surrounded in the Palacio de la Moneda, Salvador Allende received an ultimatum from the coup soldiers: if he left the Palace, they would take him abroad by helicopter. Allende had publicly sworn that he would only leave La Moneda dead or at the end of his term. He would never accept that ultimatum. He knew of cases of former Latin American presidents who were victims of military coups that ended his life abroad (of which João Goulart was one).
I lived then two blocks from the Palacio de la Moneda, many times I ran into Allende walking through the center of Santiago de Chile. But this time, they woke me up again, like in the first coup attempt in July 1973, with the noise of the planes. Arriving at the Plaza de la Constitución, I could see Allende in the small window of the Palace, from where he gave his speeches, surrounded by the military coup leaders. Allende shot with his AK rifle, which Fidel had given him, and with his helmet, which the miners had given him.
Allende rejected the ultimatum, made the women and children leave. Among those who left was Beatriz Allende, known as Tati, the president’s great interlocutor among her daughters, who was pregnant. Allende continued to resist until British-made fighter jets bombed the Palacio de la Moneda. The smoke produced by the bombings was the image of the end of the painful end of democracy in Chile.
Beatriz Allende went to Havana with her two children, Maya among them. It was there that, passing through Cuba on missions for the Chilean resistance, I met and became friends with Tati. It was there that I met Maya, who was seven years old. Tati, always troubled by the death of her father, feeling guilty for having left the Palace, ended up committing suicide on the fourth anniversary of the day of her father’s death, with a shot similar to the one her father had taken his own life.
I started walking with Maya, especially on the beach closest to Alamar, the neighborhood where she lived, as well as most of the Latin American colonies: Chilean, Uruguayan, Argentine, Brazilian. I remember that on one of those walks along the beach in Santa María del Mar, playing with Maya in the sea, she pulled on a little silver chain that I had, which I dropped and I couldn’t get it back. It was a little chain that María Regina had given me, my partner who had stayed in Buenos Aires while I traveled to carry out tasks in Cuba. I never saw María Regina again, because she was kidnapped by the Argentine dictatorship and disappeared forever along with Edgardo Enríquez, leader of the Chilean MIR.
I left Cuba and stopped having contact with Maya. I returned to Chile a couple of times, the last time in 2019, when I met Gabriel Boric and some of his colleagues, who now govern democratic Chile. But I could never find Maya again. I corresponded with her on whatsapp. Now, with great joy, I see her, appointed Minister of Defense of the Chilean government, reviewing the troops and then going to pay tribute to her grandfather, Salvador Allende, also known as Chicho, before entering the Ministry for the first time .
The next time I return to Chile I will look for her at the Ministry of Defense. At least to personally remind him of these experiences and give a hug to dear Maya, daughter of Tati and Minister of Defense of the democratic government of Chile.