Gonzalo Fuenzalida remembers September 11, 1973 – the day the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet – like it was yesterday, reports FRANCE 24.
A 17-year-old student at the time, Fuenzalida left his high school when teachers said the military coup was imminent and was only 50 metres from La Moneda presidential palace when soldiers overran the capital of Santiago. “I never ran so fast in my life,” he recalled.
Fuenzalida is among the thousands of Chileans who were forced to flee their country in the wake of Allende’s overthrow and death, and who eventually settled in France. They are commemorating the 40th anniversary of the coup this year from their adopted home with a mixture of longing and sorrow.
“On the way home I saw soldiers hit women and shove children with a violence I was unfamiliar with. I could feel the fascist fear spreading across the city,” Fuenzalida recalled. The horror eventually reached his own family: his father, an Allende supporter who lived in northern coastal town of Iquique, was arrested and summarily tried. He was executed on October 30, 1973. “That’s the date the dictatorship started for me,” Fuenzalida said.
He remained in Chile for a few years after the coup. Sometimes he defied the military curfew to paint political slogans in the streets, but he felt powerless in the face of Pinochet’s military might. “We were trying to fight with buckets of paint against machine guns,” he lamented.
Fearing for his life, he left for France in June 1979, and worked for years as a tourism professional. In 1999, he opened “Tierra del Fuego”, a restaurant in the Paris 10th district that serves traditional Chilean dishes. “I don’t know if I did the right thing. But that’s the way things went,” he said.
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.