F or two terrible days last week, the capital of Chile turned into a bloody battleground. Planes roared in almost at rooftop level, firing rockets and sowing bombs. Tanks rumbled through the streets, tearing holes in walls with shells from their cannon. Infantrymen popped up in doorways, and the sound of their fire reverberated through the city. The principal target, the Presidential Palace, disappeared behind a veil of smoke and flames. Inside, Chile’s Marxist President Salvador Allende Gossens, 65, died in his office as a military junta took over his country.

After his inauguration three years ago, Allende had stood on the small balcony outside his office in the palace to launch a great experiment. While thousands of his supporters cheered in the plaza below, he announced a unique undertaking: he intended to lead Chile along a democratic road to socialism. Last week the balcony still stood, although the palace was a smoldering ruin. So was Allende’s Marxist vision for his country.

Week after week, as a succession of bitter strikes plunged Chile toward economic chaos, rumors had circulated in Santiago that the country was on the verge of a military coup. Even so, many Chileans dismissed the stories. True, Chile had large and well-trained armed forces. But unlike the colonels of neighboring Peru and the generals of Brazil, Chile’s officers had by and large a non-political tradition.

Instant Martyr. Chileans who thought that their country was somehow immune from military takeovers were wrong. Moreover, the coup that ended Allende’s experiment in socialism proved to be extraordinarily violent even by Latin American standards. In the flurry of fighting that accompanied the golpe (coup) and in the two days of chaos that followed, several thousand people were killed or injured. The military claimed that Allende had killed himself rather than surrender. Allende’s supporters insisted that he had been murdered. In a sense, the manner of his death was irrelevant. Almost overnight, he became an instant martyr for leftists the world over−and a legendary specter that may well haunt Latin America for years.

Allende’s downfall had implications that reached far beyond the borders of Chile. His had been the first democratically elected Marxist government in Latin America. Moderate Lathis will certainly want no more such experiments because of Chile’s experience; leftists, on the other hand, will ruefully conclude that revolution is a surer route to power than the ballot box. The U.S. was embarrassed by the coup−though Washington insisted that it had taken no part. Anti-imperialists everywhere immediately assumed that Washington was behind his downfall. At week’s end the U.S. had made no move to recognize the new government, but most observers expected an improvement in relations. The change of Chilean governments might also affect U.S. corporations; their sizable holdings had been taken over by Allende, but they now might at least be reimbursed for what they had lost by a more sympathetic government.

The coup was carefully planned and meticulously executed, reported TIME Correspondent Charles Eisendrath, who watched the action from a window overlooking the palace. Early last Tuesday morning, armored cars rolled across Santiago’s broad Plaza de la Constitucion to block the portals of La Moneda, the somber 18th century-style Presidential Palace. As army sharpshooters took up positions, at least 100 armed carabineros−Chile’s paramilitary police−jumped out of buses and double-timed across the square. Their mission, according to the secret order of the day, was “to restore institutional normality” in South America’s most democratic nation and “stop a disastrous dictatorship from installing itself.”

Allende had apparently heard ru mors; at the uncharacteristically early hour of 7:15, he had driven to La Moneda from his comfortable villa in Santiago’s Barrio Alto district. As the troops began to assemble outside the palace, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, commander in chief of the army, telephoned an ultimatum to the palace. If Allende surrendered his office, he would be given safe-conduct out of the country; otherwise he would be deposed by force. Allende refused. “I will not resign,” he declared in a very brief radio broadcast. “I am prepared to die if necessary.” He urged workers−the most loyal and enthusiastic supporters of his socialist program−to seize their factories as a sign of defiance. As Hawker Hunters of the Chilean air force swooped low over the palace, Allende made a final appearance on his second-floor balcony and waved to a small band of curious citizens whom the army had not yet shooed away.

Allende immediately recognized that he faced the worst crisis of his stormy three-year presidency. An hour before the military’s ultimatum, he telephoned his wife Hortensia at their villa. “I’m calling from La Moneda,” he told her. “The situation has become very grave. The navy has revolted and I am going to stay here.” Allende was right. Even before the junta’s troops surrounded the palace, the navy had announced that it had taken over and sealed off the port city of Valparaiso, 75 miles away. Marines from Valparaiso were advancing on the capital to join the soldiers, airmen and carabineros commanded by leaders of the coup.

Allende soon found himself isolated from all potential supporters. A radio station operated by his Socialist Party went silent after making a final appeal to enlisted men to disobey the orders of their officers. Another station operated by Allende’s Communist partners* in the Chilean Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition went dead. Soon the only station left on the air in Santiago was one that identified itself as “the military government radio.” Its first order: “The President of the republic must proceed immediately to hand over his high office.”

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.

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.

Castro, who had been an enthusiastic ally of Allende, charged that “U.S. imperialism had put down the revolutionary movement.” Political leaders all across Latin America voiced their revulsion at the death of democracy in Chile. Mexican President Luis Echeverria, who had provided both financial and moral support for the Allende government, recalled his ambassador and offered asylum to any Chilean who sought it, specifically to Mrs. Allende. She refused at first, but at week’s end changed her mind and accepted the offer. The Mexican government also ordered three days of official mourning, the first time it had so honored a foreign head of government since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Elsewhere in the world, there were clear signs that the Chilean President had gained instant martyrdom among radicals, alongside Patrice Lumumba of the Congo (now Zaire) and Che Guevara. In Paris, a crowd of 30,000 marched through the streets shouting, “Down with the murderers and the CIA!” In Rome, there were sympathetic work stoppages and eulogies proclaiming that “Allende is an idea that does not die.” Even moderate politicians publicly regretted that another republic had succumbed to rule by junta. The West German government, for instance, expressed its “deep dismay” and its hope that “democratic conditions will soon return to Chile.”

One country was conspicuously silent: the U.S. The Nixon Administration had been antagonistic to Allende ever since he emerged as the likely winner of the 1970 presidential campaign. Washington’s hostility increased after Allende’s new government fully nationalized copper mines and other industrial properties owned by U.S. companies and declined to pay several of them compensation. Relations between the two countries grew worse when it was revealed that multinational ITT had offered the U.S. Government more than $1,000,000 to help prevent Allende’s election, and had held discussions with the CIA on possible ways to keep him out of office.

The Nixon Administration did what it could to make life for Allende uncomfortable, mostly through financial pressure on institutions like the World Bank. In August 1971, as a result of U.S. complaints that debt-laden Chile was a poor credit risk, the Export-Import Bank refused to make a $21 million loan to Lan-Chile airline to enable it to buy three Boeing jets, even though the airline had a perfect repayment record. U.S. exports to Chile overall declined 50% during Allende’s three years.

Military Rapport. But the Pentagon remained on relatively good terms with Chile’s military brass. Last year, for instance, the U.S. extended $10 million to the Chilean air force to buy transport planes and other equipment. The military rapport was so solid, in fact, that stories were circulating in Washington last week that U.S. officials had known about the coup up to 16 hours before it took place.

White House spokesmen denied that the Administration had had any such foreknowledge. There had been many rumors−with many different dates−of a possible coup, they insisted, but nothing solid had been known until La Moneda was actually stormed. In any case, the U.S. had not moved to alert Allende on the ground that to do so would have been interfering in the internal affairs of another nation. The explanation was obviously not strong enough to dispel the suspicion that the U.S. had played some part in engineering the Chilean President’s overthrow.

Allende bore much of the blame for his own downfall. His socialist fiscal policies shattered Chile’s economy instead of helping it. Always a net importer of food, the country had to import still more because Allende’s land-reform programs reduced production. The government, as owner of the copper mines, was in deep trouble when world copper prices fell. Foreign reserves totaled $345 million when Allende took office; by the end of last year they had disappeared, and Chile was forced to plead for rescheduling of more than $2.5 billion in international debts. The country was so polarized in the end that Allende was under simultaneous attack by rightists for being too extreme and by leftists for being too timid.

Few Chileans were neutral about the President. Although their lavish lifestyle was only marginally diminished, the rich−5% of the population controlling 20% of its resources−despised him for seizing the property from which their wealth had come. The middle class, squeezed by inflation and plagued with shortages, was bitter and unreconcilable. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Chileans left the country. Others who remained kept one-way airline tickets at hand just in case.

Still, Allende had plenty of admirers. Some were not even socialists, but sympathetic liberals who hoped that he could succeed in bridging the gulf between the poor and the wealthy. The poor, peasant and worker alike, idolized him. “I would be a hypocrite if I were to say that I am President of all Chileans,” he once observed. They listened in awe as “Chicho” addressed them.

Allende slept only five hours a night and spent most of his waking hours wording. “To work for the people is really a pleasure,” he once said grandiosely. Allende impressed visitors as a crisp administrator. He was a hard man but not a ruthless one. An American diplomat who knew him remarked that “when it comes to leaning on people to do something, Allende makes Lyndon Johnson look like a piker.”

Despite his Marxist beliefs, Allende savored the good life. He drank Scotch, liked golf and was fond of good wines. In addition to his family home, he reportedly had a hideaway to which he would take cronies−and women−and barbecue steaks for them. Allende was a sophisticated but casual dresser who favored turtleneck sweaters even at work. In fact, he was reportedly wearing a white turtleneck when he died. After the fighting died down last week, the military government televised a film showing Allende’s imposing wardrobe and shelves of imported liquor and foods. The implication was hard to miss: while his supporters had been queuing up, Allende had engaged in the kind of hoarding he railed against.

Allende’s family dated back to the early days of Chile. His physician grandfather was a Masonic grandmaster and the founder of the first nonreligious elementary school in predominantly Roman Catholic Chile. Allende’s father was a notary who died while his son was serving one of many prison terms for socialist activity. Allende was allowed to attend the funeral. At the graveside he delivered an impromptu speech pledging himself to seek freedom for the people and social justice. He became a doctor but gave up medicine for politics. He campaigned doggedly until, on the fourth attempt, he was finally elected President.

Once in office, Allende moved swiftly to change the economic face of the country. His Christian Democratic predecessor, Eduardo Frei, had already introduced agrarian reforms and pushed government participation in industry. But Allende inaugurated a far more sweeping program of government ownership and operation, beginning with total ownership of the giant copper operations, whose U.S. owners had been woefully slow in training Chileans for more important, better paying jobs. Cement, steel, electricity and telephones were also nationalized, along with both foreign and domestic banks. Labor unions were given control of new plants that went up in belts around Santiago, close by tidy neighbors of the middle class. With the government’s tacit consent, peasants seized huge estates owned by absentee landlords, and in their zeal even took land from small farmers.

In office Allende made at least two crucial political mistakes. One was to forget−or at least ignore−the fact that he had entered office as a minority winner. In the tumultuous 1970 election, Allende led the two other candidates, but gained only 36.3% of the popular vote. According to the constitution, the Chilean Congress was called on to choose the winner. It followed tradition by selecting Allende, the front runner. He thus became President even though nearly two thirds of the voters preferred other men. But he ruled as though he had the nation behind him.

March of the Pots. Allende’s second mistake was to assume that the middle and upper classes would placidly accept his “Chilean road to socialism” so long as all things were done constitutionally. They never did. “If we have to burn half of Chile to save it from Communism, then we will do it,” threatened Roberto Thieme, leader of an extremist right-wing organization called Fatherland and Liberty. More moderate opponents were less outraged but equally adamant against Allende’s plans to broaden state controls. Opposition parties, controlling both houses of Congress, fought him all the time he was in power.

Some of the strongest opposition came from Chilean women, perhaps the most liberated in Latin America. As occasional meatless days became regular meatless weeks, they organized a “March of the Empty Pots” in 1971 to dramatize the rising cost and increasing shortages of food. The sound of spoons banging against empty pots became a symbolic klaxon of protest. The signal would suddenly begin in one quarter of Santiago and ripple all across the city, to the chagrin of the government. Two weeks ago, after Allende’s supporters staged a massive rally in Plaza de la ConstituciÓn to celebrate the third anniversary of his election, 100,000 women turned out a day later for a counterdemonstration. They were dispersed with tear gas.

The principal cause of Allende’s downfall was his inability to settle a series of crippling strikes−staged not by leftist labor unions but by the President’s implacable middle-class enemies. Earlier this year, workers at El Teniente, the world’s largest underground copper mine, marched out on a 74-day strike for higher wages that cost the government nearly $75 million in lost revenue.

The unrest spread. Three weeks after the copper strike was settled, the powerful truckers (most of the country’s commerce travels by road) went out on strike again. They had first struck in October, complaining about a lack of spare parts and the government’s increasing trucking operations. This time they charged that Allende had reneged on agreements made last fall to ease both situations. The new strike cost Chile nearly $6 million a day as food supplies dwindled, fuel vanished and crop shortages loomed because seeds and fertilizer could not be delivered.

While most of the country survived on short rations, the truckers seemed unusually well equipped for a lengthy holdout. Recently, TIME Correspondent Rudolph Rauch visited a group of truckers camped near Santiago who were enjoying a lavish communal meal of steak, vegetables, wine and empanadas (meat pies). “Where does the money for that come from?” he inquired. “From the CIA,” the truckers answered laughingly. In Washington, the CIA denied the allegation.

Meanwhile, the political polarization of Chile continued, with Allende seemingly unable to do much about it. The truckers’ protest triggered sporadic strikes by doctors, shopkeepers and bus and taxi drivers angered by ballooning inflation (300% in the first six months of this year) and meager incomes. To prevent chaos, the President tried to make peace with the opposition Christian Democrats. Nothing came of the dialogue because the party was badly split. One faction urged support for the government. Another, led by ex-President Frei, was determined to help topple it by withholding cooperation.

In an effort to reduce right-wing opposition and frighten the truckers, Allende persuaded commanders of the armed forces to come into his Cabinet. That was a serious error, since it politicized the military, which had tried to stay above the crisis, into pro-and anti-Allende factions. The result was a charade of revolving-door politics.

Less than ten days after he had been appointed Public Works Minister with responsibility for settling the truckers’ strike, Air Force General Cesar Ruiz Danyau resigned, charging that he had not been given enough authority. Anti-Allende factions within the military then forced General Carlos Prats Gonzalez, the army’s commander in chief, to resign as Minister of Defense. He was replaced by General Pinochet, now president of the junta.

The reunited Christian Democrats greeted the coup with jubilation. They issued a junta-approved statement deploring the violence but offering support for Chile’s new leaders. The party statement went on to note that the Christian Democrats were certain that power would be returned “to the sovereign people” as soon as “the burdensome tasks of the junta have been completed.”

Tragic History. Later in the week, the new Interior Minister, General Bonilia, promised that Chile would be returned to civilian rule, but did not say when. Most observers assumed that the military would be in power quite some time−long enough, at any rate, to try to wipe out whatever vestiges of Marxism remain in the country.

Democracy has all too often been the victim of South America’s tragic history of violence and upheaval. Today fully 70% of its 200 million people an subject to some kind of military rule. In many cases the officers ousted leftist or populist leaders, such as Brazil’s Joao Goulart or Guatemala’s Jacabo Arbenz, who had tried to change their nation’s rigidly oligarchic structures. Allende is the latest in this line of ambitious but unsuccessful reformers.

Chile’s military junta succeeded in its basic goal, getting rid of Allende, but the real question is: At what cost? As a spiritual inspiration to leftists, Allende may prove to be more potent dead than alive. On the other hand, his overthrow may convince radicals that a violent revolution, repressing all dissent, is the only sure way to socialism. Certainly this “decent, godless man” will never be forgotten by the poor of Chile, who regarded him as a secular savior. Which means that the next time a popular Marxist leader appears in Chile, his path to power may not be quite so peaceful.

* One building attacked by troops in the first flurry of fighting was Communist Party headquarters in Santiago, shown on TIME’S cover with an Allende banner across its facade.