Allende's Last Day

Mystery has surrounded the last moments of Chile's late President Salvador Allende Gossens ever since his violent death during a bloody rightist coup that toppled his three-year-old Marxist regime (TIME, Sept. 24). Last week an unidentified former aide of Allende's released photographs of the President taken inside the besieged presidential palace on the morning of the coup. He is seen in the company of his guards wearing a metal combat helmet and carrying a Soviet-made automatic rifle given to him by Cuba's Fidel Castro. Fascinating though they are, the photos do not resolve the questions about how Allende died. The military junta that now runs Chile claims that Allende committed suicide by killing himself with his rifle. But Allende's widow, Hortensia Bussi de Allende, now living in exile in Mexico, disputes that. Although she originally accepted the suicide theory, she now insists that her husband was shot by the junta's soldiers.

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