One Coup, Two Losses

Pablo Neruda died of cancer twelve days after the 1973 coup, but the ransacking of La Chascona happened first, while he was still alive. Soldiers broke in, burned his books, and diverted the property's stream so it flooded the house, leaving the floors under mud. When his widow, Matilde Urrutia, insisted on holding his wake there anyway, mourners had to lay wooden planks over the wreckage just to carry his coffin inside. What was meant to intimidate turned into the opposite: his funeral procession, held in plain sight of soldiers patrolling the streets, became one of the first public protests against the new dictatorship.

On the morning of September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende gave his final address from inside La Moneda while Air Force jets bombed the building around him. He refused calls to resign or evacuate, telling the country over the last working radio signal that he would pay for his loyalty with his life. Within hours the palace had fallen and Allende was dead — by his own hand, according to an autopsy carried out decades later after his remains were exhumed. The palace visitors walk through today was rebuilt afterward and carries almost no visible trace of that morning.