2023-09-10 04:00:25
In a few hours, Salvador Allende will die by shooting himself in the head, but at 9:45 a.m. on September 11, 1973, the President of Chile still looks like a fighter. The army launched a coup. Entrenched in his palace of La Moneda, in Santiago, he descends into the courtyard with the faithful. He is 65 years old. The helmet is crooked and the strap dangles, the tweed jacket is held by the bottom button, the sweater is incongruous, the step is hesitant, but the right hand firmly grips an AK47 automatic rifle held on the shoulder. A gift from Cuban Fidel Castro. His gaze fixed on the sky. He sees the Hawker Hunter fighter planes passing very low. This is where the military bombings will come from.
Read also (1973): Article reserved for our subscribers A testimony on the last hours of the Moneda
We see and feel all this in a photo that has become iconic, widely distributed and published over the last five decades – newspapers, books, exhibitions, conferences, documentary films… The American magazine Time selected it in 2016 among his 100 most important photos ever taken. Historians have dissected it and compared it with five others, taken a little before and a little following, the whole constituting a mine of information on Allende’s last hours. Six images, then, but this one crushes the others, to the point of being commonly nicknamed “Allende’s last photo”.
It must be said that it shows what we never see, the key moment, where history changes, the moment when a democratically elected man falters in the face of a coup d’état in a continent which was then fond of it. . The cliché has become a symbol of resistance. But also the helplessness of a leader caught between a radical left wing preferring “guns to vote” and a right ready to fuel economic disorder with the support of American President Richard Nixon, who described his Chilean counterpart as “son of a bitch”.
There is also the character Allende. The entire European left is fascinated by this great bourgeois who took power through the ballot box and exercises it through reform, as opposed to the Cuban-style revolution. This left is closely observing the three years of the Popular Unity government, particularly in France, where socialists and communists are looking for each other. So, seeing this trained surgeon with a machine gun…
“A Mitterrand with a gun in his hand”summarizes Robert Pledge, director of the Contact photo agency, who interviewed Allende in 1971. Mr. Pledge, now aged 81, well sums up the global emotion at the time of the 1973 coup d’état. asks him how he learned it himself, and he has this answer: “I was in a telephone booth on 5th Avenue in New York. It was the first time in my life that I cried for political reasons. »
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