Controversy
Many Allende supporters have always presumed that he was assassinated by the forces staging the coup. On 28 September 1973 (only two weeks after Allende's death), Fidel Castro told a Cuban crowd in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución that Allende had died in La Moneda wrapped in a Chilean flag, firing at Pinochet troops with Fidel's rifle. Over the coming decades, the Cuban leader would continue to make public addresses using this version of events. The theory was the basis of Robinson Rojas' 1975 book The murder of Allende and the end of the Chilean way to socialism. It claimed that the Chilean president had been killed by Pinochet's military forces while defending the palace.
With the end of the military junta in Chile in 1988, the view that Allende committed suicide has become more accepted as different testimonies confirming the details of the suicide have become available in news and documentary interviews. Likewise members of Allende's immediate family including his wife and his daughter, have never disputed that it was a suicide. In 2008 a Chilean doctor Luis Ravanal published an article in the magazine El Periodista stating that Allende's wounds were "not compatible" with suicide. Asked to comment on Dr. Ravanal's hypothesis, the Chilean congresswoman Isabel Allende, the President's daughter, said that the suicide version is the correct one.
In late January 2011, a Chilean judge ordered the exhumation of Allende's corpse as part of an inquiry into his death. After examining the remains, a team of Chilean medical experts confirmed the official verdict of suicide, that he died after shooting himself with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro. The shots tore the top of Allende's head off, killing him instantly, because the rifle had been set to automatic fire.
However on May 31, 2011, Chile's state television station reported that a top-secret military account of Allende's death had been discovered in the home of a former military justice official. The 300-page document was only found when the house was destroyed in the 2010 Chilean earthquake. After reviewing the report, two forensic experts told TVN "that they are inclined to conclude that Allende was assassinated."
Read more about this topic: Death Of Salvador Allende
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