SANTIAGO, Chile — President Salvador Allende did not leave this world quietly. With army tanks surrounding his offices in the downtown La Moneda palace, and jets overhead poised to drop bombs on him, he went on the radio for one last defiant speech.
"I will not resign," he said. "I will offer my life to repay the loyalty of the Chilean people." Then he donned a helmet, grabbed a machine gun -- and eventually shot himself.
In the three decades that have followed the military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the name of the democratically elected leftist president has been all but erased from the nation's history. But now, on the 30th anniversary of the right-wing takeover, Chile's current president, Ricardo Lagos, is bringing Allende back to the forefront of this country's political life.
Allende is being honored this week in two acts of official remembrance that, though simple and muted, have shaken Chile's establishment. A meeting room in the presidential palace was renamed after him Wednesday. And Lagos today will become the first president since the leftist leader's death to enter La Moneda palace through the door by which Allende's body was carried out on Sept. 11, 1973.
The potent symbolism has provoked anger not only from the right-wing parties and military officers who backed the Pinochet dictatorship, but also from the centrist allies in Lagos' ruling center-left coalition, who have declined to attend the official ceremonies marking the coup's anniversary.
"It doesn't seem right to us that the former adversaries of the Allende government should be asked to attend an act in honor of a government we thought was a bad one," said Patricio Aylwin, a former president, reflecting a common sentiment in the Christian Democratic Party.
Elected president in 1970, Allende ruled during a heady time in which he and his supporters imagined themselves leading their country down a "Chilean road to socialism." He nationalized industries and earned the enmity of the Nixon administration, which worked covertly to undermine his government.
About 3,200 people died in the coup and in the 17 years of right-wing authoritarian rule that followed, according to the official "truth commission" report issued in 1991 under the government of Aylwin, the democratically elected president to whom Pinochet handed power in 1990.
