He was born on June 26, 1908, in Santiago. He was the son of Salvador Allende Castro, lawyer and notary and Laura Gossens Uribe. His sister, Laura Allende, was a congresswoman between 1965 and 1973; his niece, Denise Pascal Allende, was a socialist congresswoman; and his granddaughter, Maya Fernández Allende, was a congresswoman and is currently Minister of National Defense.

In 1940 he married Hortensia Bussi Soto. He was the father of three daughters: Carmen Paz, Beatriz, office secretary during his presidency, and Isabel, socialist senator.

He attended primary and secondary school at the Instituto Nacional and the Tacna and Valdivia High Schools. He finished his humanities at the Liceo Eduardo de la Barra in Valparaíso.

In 1926 he did his military service in the Coraceros Regiment of Viña del Mar. That same year he entered the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile, where he graduated as a surgeon in 1932. His dissertation was entitled: “Mental Hygiene and Delinquency”.

At the same time, he worked as assistant professor of Anatomy at the School of Medicine and the Dental School, both at the aforementioned university.

He practiced as a physician and anatomo-pathologist at the Casa de Orates and at the Public Beneficence. Between 1932 and 1936 he was a physician at the Asistencia Pública de Valparaíso and an anatomo-pathologist at hospitals in Puerto Montt. Also, between 1935 and 1936 he was the official reporter of the Medical Congress of the Municipality of Viña del Mar and presided over the Pan-American Medical Conference.

During his university days, he was president of the Center of Students of Medicine and of the Federation of Students of Chile. Later, he was director of the group “Avance”.

In 1933 he participated in the founding of the Socialist Party of Chile, in which he remained all his life. Between 1937 and 1939 he was regional secretary of Valparaíso. In the parliamentary elections of 1937 he was elected deputy.

Between September 28, 1939 and October 23, 1941, and between December 15, 1941 and April 7, 1942, he was Minister of Health, Welfare and Social Assistance during the government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda. In 1942, after finishing his ministerial work, he joined the Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, where he became vice-president and administrator.

Between 1943 and 1944, as secretary general of the Socialist Party, he had to face divisions within the party. As a result, he sought to form a permanent alliance with the Communist Party of Chile, which was first raised within the PS.

He was elected senator in the parliamentary elections of March 1945, a position to which he was reelected in 1953, 1961 and 1969, completing a parliamentary career of nearly thirty years.

In 1946, in the context of the division of socialism, he joined the Popular Socialist Party. However, between 1950 and 1951 he returned to the Socialist Party of Chile. The union of this party with the Communist Party -excluded from its legal existence as a result of the Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy-, gave way to the foundation of the People’s Front.

In the 1952 presidential elections he was a presidential candidate for the first time, sponsored by the People’s Front, obtaining 5% of the votes. That election was won by Carlos Ibáñez del Campo.

In 1956 he participated in the formation of the Popular Action Front (FRAP), an alliance of left-wing parties that lasted eight years, until 1964. He was its first president. For the 1958 presidential elections, the FRAP presented him as a candidate. However, he was not elected, although he obtained second place in that vote, with 28.8% of the votes, and Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez was elected.

Six years later, in the 1964 presidential elections, he was again a candidate supported by the FRAP. However, he was defeated by Eduardo Frei Montalva, although he obtained almost 39% of the votes.

He was president of the Senate between 1966 and 1969, and in 1969 he was one of the founders of the Unidad Popular (UP), a political alliance that brought together the entire left, plus center forces.

Presidency of the Republic

He was elected President of the Republic on September 4, 1970. In the 1970 presidential elections, he obtained 36% of the votes, so he had to be ratified by the Plenary Congress, which had to choose between the two highest majorities: Salvador Allende Gossens and Jorge Alessandri.

He achieved the definitive triumph thanks to the intervention of the Christian Democracy, which had the majority in Parliament. This party agreed to support him as long as the elected president and the parties representing his candidacy accepted the signing of a Statute of Democratic Guarantees, incorporated into the Political Constitution by means of a reform. Once this condition was accepted, on October 24, 1970, the Plenary Congress proclaimed him President of Chile, with 153 votes against 35 for Alessandri and 7 blank votes.

For the first time in the history of the western world, a Marxist candidate reached the presidency of the Republic through the ballot box. He held office between November 3, 1970 and September 11, 1973.

During his government he tried to establish socialism through the democratic path or Vía Chilena al Socialismo (Chilean Way to Socialism). In July 1971, Congress approved the Law for the Nationalization of Large Copper Mining. In the economic aspect, a policy of accentuated redistribution of income and reactivation of the economy was established. The Agrarian Reform Law, approved during the presidency of Eduardo Frei Montalva, allowed him to make rapid progress in the expropriation of large estates. He took the first steps to build the social property area of the economy, using legal procedures that did not question the legality of the existing system, although some called them “loopholes”.

In the field of international relations, the UP government reestablished bilateral relations with Cuba and relations were initiated, for the first time, with China, North Korea, North Vietnam and East Germany.

In July 1971 he visited Salta in Argentina, and between August and September he visited Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Between November and December 1972 he toured Mexico, the United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Cuba. In May 1973 he attended the inauguration of President Héctor José Cámpora in Argentina.

Towards mid-1972, a deep economic crisis accelerated, which was expressed in the increase of inflation and productive stagnation, with consequences of shortages of basic goods in important sectors of the population. Inflation levels experienced a sharp rise, from 22.1% in 1971, to 260.5% in 1972, reaching 605.1% in 1973.

At the international level, Allende’s government was framed within the Cold War and the confrontation between capitalism and socialism at all levels, which was expressed in the strong influence of foreign countries in the Chilean process. While the United States actively supported the political and social opposition to the government, countries such as Cuba supported the Popular Unity.

In the 1973 parliamentary elections, the opposition grouped in the Confederation for Democracy, an alliance formed by the Christian Democratic Party and the National Party, did not reach the two-thirds of the votes required to remove the President from office. The government alliance obtained 43% of the votes.

In the following months, the political crisis worsened, which was expressed in the military uprising called “tanquetazo”, on June 29, 1973, and in the failure of the government-opposition talks in August.

On September 11, 1973 his government was overthrown in a military coup led by the Armed Forces and the Carabineros aided by the CIA. He committed suicide that same day during the attack on La Moneda Palace.

“Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seed which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have strength and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.”

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  • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
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    I’m not crazy for thinking it’s fucked to have to cook for like 250 people by myself, right? Even with industrial cooking equipment and all that, and it being buffet style? like, idk. It’s a lot of fucking work. It’d be easier if I could cook some shit earlier but even then I’d need more prep time and most things can’t just sit in a warmer all day without turning to dogshit. So I come in to work and basically have like 3-4 hours to prep and then a 1-3 hour crunch time of cooking everything depending on what’s being cooked. I can mostly get it done on my own but if I’m really really busy, and 250 people is REALLY REALLY BUSY, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY NEED TO EAT IN AN HOUR AND A HALF RATHER THAN 2.5 HOURS LIKE NORMAL, I can’t prep ahead for the next day unless I stay really late, like, last person in the building late. So sometimes I get behind on prep and need help getting things ready to cook, but it’s because I’m behind from dealing with the workload of the days I’m on my own. And even if there isn’t much to “prep” like for today’s menu, like, cooking all of it in the window before service and panning it out and dealing with it is just a lot of fucking work for 250 people. And I needed help for part of it but didn’t realize it until it was too late because fuck me, I didn’t realize the one time the front of house supervisor, who was the only person around who could help me, asked “do you need any help before I start working on these salads” would be the last time I would fucking see him for 50 fucking minutes. But I needed help getting rolls on sheet pans and I needed help cutting more carrots because I knew the quantity of vegetables the morning dude prepped wouldn’t be enough because these people keep eating 5x as much vegetables as normal (while still eating everything else) and they still keep prepping the same shit

    and while I needed all this help I burnt myself kinda badly on my arm, twice, trying to hurry to get things out of an oven, and because I had nobody around me who could just help me fucking take things out of ovens I couldn’t apply first aid and run cold water over it to maybe stop my skin from fucking sloughing off later and I almost had a breakdown over how fucked that feels, to feel like I can’t even take a few minutes to run fucking water on my arm because there is so much for me to do

    and then the dining director guy comes in while I’m in this state and at least finally gets me the help I need but in the process is all “can you handle this” despite me doing this job for a fucking year now and like starts talking about time management shit like about what I “could have gotten done earlier” and it’s like,

    I’m sick of feeling like it’s a me problem, and a my time management problem, when I think it’s a there’s a lot of fucking work problem, and there’s a I should be able to sit down more than once a fucking day problem. It’s not my fucking fault. I could have grilled some of this shit yesterday but guess what, we didn’t have it. And EVEN THOUGH I HAD HELP, she spent half the night helping the dishwashers while I had to get shit done, so I couldn’t have anyway, but still, it’s not my fault they get shit the day of. And they fucked up the schedule for the person who helps me (SOME DAYS, like I magically don’t need help 3 days a week) and she SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE tonight, which again isn’t my fault.

    I like this job and can handle it when it’s chill but feeding 250 people whose eating habits you can’t fucking predict is really not chill

    • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      250 people is an absurd amount for one person to cook for. The kitchen I work in probably feeds about 250-300 people in a day, and there are two chefs and at least two kitchen porters on during the day, sometimes more, and a dishwasher, and that’s, like, only manageable, it’s not super comfortable.

      • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        and now I have to get 6 hours of sleep and do BREAKFAST FOR DINNER and I really do not want to do that because I do not want to cook eggs for 250 people and I do not want to cook vegan pancakes for 250 people who like 1/3rd will be like OH YEAH GIVE ME THAT SHIT and have to deal with cooking all the other shit too. I haven’t had to do breakfast for dinner by myself before and the person who helps out 2 days a week usually cooks the pancakes and eggs and honestly even just dealing with all the god damn bacon by itself is such a pain in the fucking ass idk how I’m going to deal with all this bullshit. I guess I will TIME MANAGE my ass onto the deep fryer frying both tater tots and french fucking toast while I’m using the flattop grill to make literally… like, I think literally 12 gallons of eggs based on what I calculate they will eat based on the morning guy’s shit, while also somehow using that SAME GRILL to SIMULTANEOUSLY make vegan pancakes for 250 fucking people because who the fuck knows how many they’ll actually eat

        just fucking kill me like fuck I don’t want to deal with this

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      You’re not crazy that is fucked :(

      Fucking hate when management shows up when you’re drowning just so they can lecture you about “time management” like YOU ARE LITERALLY WASTING MY TIME THIS IS YOUR FUCKING FAULT THAT I’M STUCK WITH THIS SITUATION

      I am glad they at least got you someone to help that day, sometimes. Logic of the market and profit is so fucking twisted. Some places I worked had the most obvious policy of understaffing and overworking (like yeah everywhere does this to some extent, absolute surplus value etc etc), because its so fucking horrible to finish work early? Not have to give 130% effort, day after day, just to stay afloat? If we lived in a just society and someone higher up than me told me something like “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” I would be able to put up a big-character poster calling them a disgusting bourgeois-brained reactionary freak and destroy their entire career

      Also sorry if this incoherent, I am just absolutely brain-melted today

      Stay safe, I have also injured myself trying to keep up with shit. Idk your situation but usually it’s really not worth it

      I hope tomorrow is one of your chill days meow-hug

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        “Lean and mean” staffing. It’s intentional. Caught on in the 80s or 90s, running everything with just enough staff that it usually doesn’t collapse the business.

        • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          5 days ago

          Yeah :(

          Fucking sucks, especially in industries where demand is naturally quite variable and unpredictable sometimes so some days the business actually does collapse, at least on a local level, after everyone runs around for hours and hours putting out fires (not literally) until the whole thing comes to a halt and management has to come and formally shut things down… then the most important thing happens: they start assigning blame…

          But the worst part is your coworkers blaming everyone else around them constantly (except management usually) for why it’s like this rather than the system which constantly reproduces these problems. “Oh, that person is just lazy and doesn’t do any work.”, “Oh, it was the fucking morning crew who fucked it all up” [they weren’t there, they have no idea what actually happened], “We’re drowning because this person didn’t come into work today” [okay so? if an entire workplace goes to shit because someone got sick or something it’s not their fucking fault]

          This is upsetting me for some reason lol

      • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Thank you <3 at least it’s only a month before this particular thing is over and it’s back to regular school year business. I need slow sundays and fridays again, not 250 every night