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At Santa Ines cemetery, Mrs. Allende, torn between sorrow and fury, picked some flowers and laid them on the coffin. "Salvador Allende cannot be buried in such an anonymous way," she said in a hard voice to the gravediggers. "I want you to know at least the name of the person you are burying."
Meanwhile, the junta moved rapidly to consolidate its rule. In a hasty ceremony at the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School−named in honor of Chile's founding father−a military government that included two right-wing civilians for political window dressing was sworn in. Ominously, the new leaders took an oath of allegiance not to Chile's constitution but to the junta. General Pinochet headed the Cabinet as President of the junta. Its other members: Admiral Merino; General Gustavo Leigh Guzman, air force commander in chief; and General Cesar Mendoza Duran, director general of the carabineros. The most important portfolio in the new Cabinet−Interior−went to Army General Oscar Bonilla.
The military shut down all of Chile's airports and closed the borders to Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. A state of siege was imposed throughout the country, and Santiago was subject to a round-the-clock curfew. Violators were warned that they would be shot on sight. While the army struggled to rid Santiago of leftist snipers, householders kept their heads down because itchy soldiers fired whenever a window went up too fast. There were rumors that pro-Allende army units were in command of the southern part of the country. By week's end, the military officially declared that life in the capital was returning to normal. But a stringent curfew remained in effect, the airports stayed closed, and all communications with the outside world were censored.
There were stories that some soldiers had bayoneted prisoners to death without reason, while others, armed with lists of pro-Allende suspects, were making door-to-door searches in Santiago. Anyone found at home was summarily shot. In broadcasts, the names of 70 prominent Socialist and Communist politicians were read off; all those on the list were ordered to surrender at once.
At least one of the wanted men, Socialist Party Secretary-General Carlos Altamirano, was said to have been "accidentally" killed during the fighting. There was yet another report that at least 3,000 people had been put aboard a prison ship off the coast. Among the alleged internees: Communist Poet Pablo Neruda, 79, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and Chile's former ambassador to Paris.
Although many, if not most of its future goals were unclear, the junta made unmistakable its determination to change the leftward course of Allende's foreign policy. One of its first acts was to break relations with Cuba, which Allende had recognized soon after his inauguration, in defiance of the Organization of American States ban. A few hours after Allende died, 150 Cubans were hustled to Santiago's Pudahuel airport and put aboard a plane for home. Among them was Allende's daughter Beatriz, who is married to the first secretary of the Cuban embassy.