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A Mexican journalist in Santiago, Manuel Mejido, managed to interview 15 of the people who claim to have last seen Allende alive. According to his account, the President assembled close friends in the palace and told them: "I will not abandon La Moneda. They will only take me out of here dead." The group included ten members of the security force and 30 youths of a private guard known as el Grupo de Amigos Personales (the Group of Personal Friends).
General Pinochet's call was followed by one from the navy commander, Admiral Jose Toribio Merino Castro, who repeated the ultimatum. "I will not surrender," Allende declared. "That is a course for cowards like yourself."
As an attack on the palace became imminent, Allende gathered his remnant of supporters in one room of the palace. "Gentlemen," he said, "I am staying." He asked everyone to leave; no one did. Allende then ordered the women to go to the office of the palace major-domo and told the men to take up combat positions. There was a 20-minute attack by infantry and tanks. During a brief truce, General Pinochet again called the palace, giving Allende 15 minutes to surrender. Once more the President refused. When the attack halted, the women in the palace−including one of Allende's daughters, Beatriz, 31−left for safety.
At noon, a pair of Hawker Hunters attacked the palace with bombs, rockets and tear gas. An hour and a half later, infantrymen entered La Moneda by a side door; their officers gave Allende ten minutes to surrender. "All of you go down without weapons and with hands up," the President told the handful of aides who had stayed with him. "Go and surrender to the army. I will be the last to leave." Then, according to Mejido, Allende shot himself.
Mrs. Allende had listened to her husband's final radio broadcast. "At noon, Salvador did not answer the telephone at La Moneda," she said. "When I managed to get through to La Moneda, it was security agents or carabineros who answered." Meanwhile the air force was also attacking the house at Barrio Alto. "Between attacks−the planes returned to their base to reload−there was ferocious shooting. The residence was all smoke. The last telephone call I made to La Moneda, I had to use the telephone lying on the floor."
Not until the next day was Mrs. Allende told that her husband was in a military hospital, wounded. When she went to see him, she learned that he was actually dead. She told newsmen that he had probably killed himself with a submachine gun presented to him by Cuba's Fidel Castro. But rumors spread that Allende had been shot 13 times−the widow later saw his coffin but never his body−and that he and four aides had been killed in cold blood. The rumors fed the rapidly growing legend of Allende the Marxist martyr.
The same day the body of Allende was trucked to a military airport near Santiago and put aboard a plane bound for the city of Vina del Mar, where the President's family maintained a crypt. Mrs. Allende was allowed to accompany the corpse, as were his sister Laura, two nephews and an aide.