Hortensia Bussi, the widow of President Salvador Allende of Chile and a woman of outstanding character in her own right, died in her sleep in Santiago on June 18 and was buried amid much popular grief last Saturday.
Popularly known as “Tencha”, she survived the United States-backed putsch by General Augusto Pinochet of September 11 1973 and witnessed the burial of her husband in an unmarked grave in Viña del Mar. Four days later, she went into exile in Mexico to continue the fight against the brutal right-wing military dictator.
Born in 1914 to a merchant seaman and his wife, she lost her mother when she was four and had a difficult childhood. She became a young socialist and by 1939 was in love with Allende, a doctor and rising parliamentary deputy about to be made health minister.
Never one to hide her opinions, she early on asked her future husband: “Why did a man like you become a freemason?”
Their first child, Carmen Paz, was due, so Allende and Tencha decided to marry in 1940, taking the precaution of giving false addresses which would facilitate the annulment of the marriage if found necessary in a country which did not then admit divorce. They had two more daughters, although in 1953 she lost the male child which both of them desired.
She served for 15 years as librarian at the national statistics office and was a life-long Scrabble enthusiast. She was unfailingly welcoming to foreign journalists like me coming to visit her husband.
For years she stoically put up with her husband’s relationship with Miria “Payita” Contreras. After he was elected president, she took responsibility for the network of mothers’ centres he set up. She returned to Chile in 1988, announcing: “I’m not bringing rancour or vengeance”.l
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