The family of Salvador Allende, the most important left-wing family of the last century in Chile, was successively struck by the tragedy of history and death.
On September 11, 1973, in the midst of the La Moneda bombing, Allende took his own life.
Then Beatriz Tati Allende, the revolutionary daughter of the president, went into exile in Cuba after the coup and died in 1977, just four years after the democratic collapse in Chile. His daughter, Maya Fernández, current Secretary of Defense in Gabriel Boric’s government, was six years old. The little one, Alejandro, barely four.
Then Laura Allende, the president’s sister, who committed suicide in 1981 as a political gesture against the dictatorship, fell ill with terminal cancer.
And Gonzalo Meza Allende, aged 45 at the time of his death, son of the youngest of Allende’s daughters, current Socialist Party Senator Isabel Allende Bussi. The eldest grandson of the President, he committed suicide in 2010 due to depression and the family suffered a dramatic loss for the fourth time.
Today, Tuesday, August 22, 2023, as Chile seems gripped by the memory of 50 years, the authorities reported the death of a third person due to the bad weather front hitting the south-central zone of Chile: an 86-year-old In In the municipality of Coihueco in the Ñuble region, an old man drowned “who would have fallen into an estuary”, as Interior Minister Carolina Tohá announced very early on. Prosecutors assured: “He climbed a small hill to connect some hoses, because he had no water, he slipped and fell face down in a creek.” And although he had little water, he would have drowned.
He was Héctor Hito Sepúlveda Sepúlveda, the local press reported, married to the President’s eldest daughter, Carmen Paz, and was a member of the Allende family for 30 years. During the UP government he was with François Mitterrand and Fidel Castro and lived closely with power. After returning from exile in 1991, he retreated to the mountains of southern Chile, where he lived as a hermit for decades. There, in his retired world, Hito has died.
“Today I am an absolute recluse”
When the journalist signing this chronicle visited his home in 2012 and his life was told for the first time, he had the beard of a wise old man: white, long, wild. With tousled hair and bright eyes, the old man leaned out the door of a simple wooden house in an uninhabited Andean region in southern Chile where not a soul lives. Although he appeared to be 100 years old based on his looks, movements and hunched back, he was born in March 1937. Héctor Sepúlveda Sepúlveda, then 75 years old, was not used to being called by his name: he preferred to be called Hito, the nickname that had accompanied him since childhood.
To see it, you had to travel about 450 kilometers south of Santiago and reach San Fabián de Alico, a farming town of 3,500 people in the Biobío region, and sink into the bowels of the Andes. The visitor had to announce himself with shouts and horns, and if he was lucky, after a few hours someone would hear the noise from the inner hills and help cross the Ñuble River in a wooden air cart and offer to cross it.
The interior of the house was cold and dark, and once its sole occupant was christened Lord of Shadows by a relative. Héctor Hito Sepúlveda lived extremely frugally: he slept on a curved mattress with no blankets or sheets showing, most windows had plastic instead of glass, and the main room was an eclectic mix of old newspapers and tree trunks that served as chairs. Counters with tools, half-dry towels, books. There was enough electricity for a few lightbulbs, but not for the refrigerator or the TV. The man, who cooked unaided and washed his clothes and dishes, spent most of his time alone. He spoke little, had little contact with his family and refused to leave the place where he had arrived two decades ago unaccompanied.
He did not always lead a reclusive and anonymous life: 50 years ago, in 1973, when he was still new to wearing second-hand clothes and had dedicated himself to mechanics at the age of thirty, he belonged to the Allende family. Married to Carmen Paz, with whom he had three children, he was a privileged witness of the Socialist President’s arrival in La Moneda in 1970, receptions for high-ranking visits, weekends at the Presidential Palace of Cerro Castillo, and the power , before the Fear behind closed doors of the impending coup, of the intimate pain after the president’s suicide, of flying to Mexico with his widow and daughters, and of the long years of exile in the Mexican capital.
– “The mental exhaustion of my return to Chile in 1991 only increased here. “Today I’m an absolute recluse, lonely, but I feel lucky,” he said calmly in 2012. But he was not a frugal man. He wasn’t suspicious. He spoke as if he had been waiting for someone to listen to him for a long time.
Héctor Sepúlveda, son-in-law of Salvador Allende, in 2012.RR. HH
Has nothing to do with politics
Salvador Allende and his wife Hortensia Bussi had three daughters.
The eldest daughter is Carmen Paz, the least known of the Allende-Bussi sisters, who to this day lives in Santiago and maintains strict privacy. She has kept a low profile since she was little, staying in the background during her father’s parliamentary and presidential campaigns. Of the three, it was the only one not in La Moneda on 9/11. “For Carmen Paz, a lover of simple things, politics will always be a source of unhappiness,” wrote Eduardo Labarca in his sentimental story Salvador Allende (2007). “Fortunately, none of Chicho’s grandchildren are involved in politics,” she told the author in 2004.
Labarca’s book tells of one of the first episodes of misfortune experienced by the young Allende-Bussi couple: the problems that Carmen Paz faced when she was born in the Santa María Clinic in January 1941. “Tencha needs help and the doctor uses tweezers. There is nervousness, the maneuver is dragging on. The girl is finally born. Medical error? Congenital problem? Carmen Paz, the daughter, reacts to stimuli with a certain muscular atony. Salvador Allende appeals to the best pediatricians and neurologists. “The diagnosis of partial hemiplegia is not long in coming,” says Labarca.
Héctor Hito Sepúlveda came from a family with little political ties. His mother, the daughter of a renowned Santiago doctor studying in Germany, left the capital in the first half of the 20th century to raise a family of six children on her husband’s, cousin’s, farm near Chillán. He lived his whole life in this place and died at the age of 100. “My father’s branch had several thousand hectares in this area. However, it was marginal land and not for production, which was formerly known as poor latifundismo. We lived modestly,” Sepúlveda recounted in 2012 while offering the visitor bread and salt on a tray as a token of gratitude.
His grandfather’s inheritance allowed him to keep 400 hectares of land on which his simple wooden house was built next to a stream. And why don’t you sell part of your land? Wouldn’t it allow you to build a house and improve your standard of living? “My lifestyle is my decision,” he replied with conviction.
Had it not been for his mother’s decision to send him to study in Santiago at the age of six, he probably would never have come across the family of Salvador Allende Gossens, who by then was already a renowned socialist senator and presidential candidate in the 1952, 1958 and 1958 elections 1964 was.
Some cousins from the capital, friends of the Allende-Bussi sisters, introduced him to Carmen Paz. First the meetings in Santiago and later the holidays on the farm in the south. “We started dating and eventually got married in the late 1960s,” Sepúlveda said. He had studied mechanics at the State Technical University, motivated by the fascination that machines had always held for him.
Salvador and Tencha’s other two daughters later married, but they did so with militants: Beatriz with Renato Julio, leader of the Socialist Youth and history student, and Isabel with Sergio Meza, a socialist of celebrated oratory who was nicknamed Chemicals . Of Allende’s three sons-in-law, Sepúlveda was the only non-political.
“He caught me and never took me anywhere or anything. He respected my individuality as a simple man, as a mechanical engineer, as a farmer. He never pressured me, although one day he said to me, “Make up your mind, comrade.” Because I wasn’t in the military. And I joined the Socialist Party. But I never went to the cores. I am here precisely because I have not participated in this life. Everyone told me that Don Salvador valued me within my traits because I was consistent. It was a line and didn’t come into play. A friend told me during the UP government that they would appoint me to a position at the Agricultural Trade Company and I said, “You’re crazy.” What am I doing?”
The Allende-Sepúlveda marriage took place in the Church of Los Leones with Providencia, was celebrated in the house on Calle Guardia Vieja where Senator Allende lives to this day and was attended by the best of the Chilean political class, according to Hito Sepúlveda who said: “By this point, the estrangement between Don Salvador and President Frei Montalva, whom the Allende sisters called Uncle Lalo, had already taken place. It is this hostility that largely explains the coup,” Hito recalled.
The big absentee, however, was Rafael Sepúlveda, the groom’s father: “He was a country man and he was genuinely concerned, as if he had foreseen everything that finally happened in 1973.”
Salvador Allende and his daughters Carmen Paz, Isabel and Beatriz Allende in 1950.RR. HH
the banishment
“On September 11, we were in hiding at the home of some of Carmen Paz’s friends when we learned of Don Salvador’s death. He had said they would never get him out of La Moneda alive, that he would not turn himself in. But the most terrible thing was not the physical departure, but the disappearance of his political project. This is true death, the most painful part of his absence…”
Eleven years ago he said: “I was a sympathizer and still believe in socialism to this day. I’m reading Orlando Figis’ book The Russian Revolution for the third time. And he recalled: “The day before the coup I saw Don Salvador for the last time. He was very nervous, I had never seen him like that before. I knew what was coming…”
Hito recalled, “There was talk of regimental support. “But… what information could I have? Very little. The only relevant thing was what Tati had told me days earlier: “The coup is coming very soon.” We don’t know the outcome. But it’s a matter of hours: Monday, Tuesday… Guys, hide, you have nothing to do, don’t interfere.” Tati’s words were instructions from Don Salvador, because she was the private secretary and had superior intelligence.”
At that time, in 1973, the couple already had two children: Carmencita, around four years old, and Andresito, one year old, who still could not walk.
The eldest daughter, Carmen Beatriz Sepúlveda Allende – christened in honor of her aunt Tati – was born in 1968, two years before the presidential election that brought her grandfather to La Moneda. At the age of seven months he suffered an intestinal accident, which led to a circulatory accident during an operation, as Eduardo Labarca describes in his book. “(…) The girl is marked by a hemiplegia on the right side. Terrible luck again, cruelty of fate: mother and daughter united by a hemiplegia of different origins and on opposite sides of the body.
After the bombing of La Moneda, Sepúlveda arrived at the Mexican Embassy on the instructions of Mexican President Luis Echeverría. There was his wife, their two young children and the rest of the family, except for his sister-in-law Tati, who had taken refuge with her husband at the Cuban diplomatic headquarters. But at first he had no luck: “They told me: ‘No, just go to the consulate.’ I was already very scared, very scared, when Ambassador Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá said to me: “Don’t worry, you would take the first plane…”.
The trip to exile took place on Saturday September 15, 1973, the day of Mexico’s independence. Héctor Hito Sepúlveda hardly remembers the flight to Mexico City: “I only remember the feeling of great sadness that the death of Don Salvador brought with it. But I don’t remember tears. The Allende family did not cry…”.
In Mexico City, the Sepúlveda-Allendes soon realized that their exile would last for many years. “One day my sister-in-law Tati came to visit me from Cuba and said, ‘This is going to take a long time.’ And he came with money to buy a car that belonged to Carmen Paz and for the apartment we bought in a place called Villa Olímpica, which consists of 29 buildings.” Sepúlveda, who during the UP government (1970- 1973) in charge of an industrial refrigeration project, started working at the Productos Pesqueros Mexicanos company. And if there was a lack in the end, he said in 2012, his mother-in-law Tencha, who died in Santiago de Chile in 2009, helped them: “In the context of what it can be like to be in exile, we had a wonderful life. We were protected from the regime, spoiled, protected by power…” Sepúlveda recalled.
Members of the Chilean Armed Forces prevent access to the Palacio de la Moneda, where Chilean President Salvador Allende took refuge during the September 11, 1973 coup d’état. Horacio Villalobos (CORBIS)
Back then, Carmen Paz bought a house in Tepec, in the state of Cuernavaca, not far from the Mexican capital, where the family met at the weekend. It was a house with banana trees, guavas, a spacious living-dining room and a large piece of land. Chilean exiles still remember the days when Hortensia Bussi received her friends and played Scrabble “to train the neurons”. Don Hito never learned.
In 1976 his third son was born: Pablo Salvador Sepúlveda Allende, the youngest grandson of the late President, who many years later, around 2009, was the partner of María Gabriela Chávez Colmenares, Hugo Chávez’s second daughter. Hito, already in a monastery at the end of the world, has never had any relationship with the Venezuelan government.
Along with his wife, Carmen Paz, Sepúlveda returned to Chile after the rest of the family. He can’t remember the month, but it was in 1991. At that time he was already 54 years old: “I went into exile at 36. My world ended and I had to start from scratch in Mexico.” When we settled back in Santiago in old age, I started looking for work opportunities with people I knew from the first democratic administration. But they sent me to talk to children! Political officials in their 20s. What can I tell you? And what can I tell them? There came a time when my son Andrés, seeing me suffering, said to me: “Dad, go away, go better.” And I came out on the field. I left this world in fear.”
At this time he separated from his wife and moved away from the Allendes and civilization.
He was not afraid of death: “Because of my rural background, death is not as terrible for me as it is for city people. Every day you fall, you get kicked by a horse. people, animals die. Death is still part of life here, we have not lost cohesion,” said the man of humble origin who drowned in the middle of the mountains in August 2023, a few days before Chile marked the 50th anniversary of the democratic collapse that marked the country and his own life.