Miria Contreras

MIRIA CONTRERAS was for many years the mistress of President Salvador Allende of Chile and his close political collaborator.

Miria ("Payita") Contreras, political secretary: born Taltal, Chile 1928; Secretary to Salvador Allende 1960-73; married 1950 Roberto Ropert (one son, one daughter, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved); died Santiago 22 November 2002.

Miria Contreras was for many years the mistress of President Salvador Allende of Chile and his close political collaborator.

Born in 1928 to a lawyer and staunch freemason and his wife in the northern Chilean town of Taltal, then three days' voyage by boat from the capital, she was sent to a Catholic convent school in Santiago already bearing the nickname of "Paya" or "Payita" by which she was known. (It apparently came from her infant demands to be taken to the beach, playa, a word which she was too young to pronounce correctly.)

She hoped to go to university but her parents' illness left the family in difficulties. She had to find a job. She met Roberto Ropert, an engineer and a man of the moderate left, and at 22 married him with all the formality of a white wedding in church. They went on to have three children, Isabel, Enrique and Max. In the 1950s the two became friends with their close neighbours Salvador Allende, an aspiring politician of the Socialist Party, and his wife, Hortensia ("Tencha"), who were also the parents of three children: the two couples were constantly in and out of each other's houses.

The Allende and the Ropert marriages began to fail, though both couples – for the sake of their children and out of affection and respect for their spouses – initially decided not to opt for the easy option of a civil annulment (which is sometimes accompanied by a more difficult religious annulment). This was, and remains, the only way of ending a union in a country where there is still no divorce and it would have been simple for the couples indifferent to the rules of the Catholic Church.

Payita began to work for Allende, who in 1958 had fought his first unsuccessful presidential campaign as the candidate of the left and who was to fight another in 1964 when, with much aid from the US government, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva, won. She shared his political ideals of democratic socialism but never joined any political party. She became his closest confidant, acting as his driver and helping him with his speeches – a love affair was to last till his death on 11 September 1973. In the last seven years of his life when I was at times allowed into Allende's domestic circle, I noticed the calming influence she always played on a man capable of volcanic tempers.

When he eventually became President in 1970, Payita moved into the Moneda palace as his diary secretary, a quiet but powerful presence occupying an office adjacent to his while Tencha had hers in another wing of the building. Payita even arranged the purchase of a house for the Allendes in Calle Tomás Moro and helped them move into it. Roberto as a government supporter took a job in a government building corporation.

Eventually Payita and Roberto did formally separate and she bought a house at El Cañaveral between the capital and the Andes. Here the President would spend most weekends enjoying her cooking and her advice on how to control the six restive parties in the government coalition. Her relations with the President's wife were certainly not warm but both women conducted themselves with great dignity, avoiding public squabbles.

The morning of Augusto Pinochet's putsch, clearly predictable to those of us who were in Santiago, saw Allende arrive rapidly in his office, from where he delivered his last two speeches on radio. Payita was in the Cañaveral house but was driven quickly in her small white Renault by her son Enrique, now 20, to be by the President's side. Having sought him fruitlessly in the Tomás Moro house, she ordered a group of presidential guards to accompany her and her son to the Moneda.

As she got to the palace the insurgents seized Enrique. She was never to see him again. On 20 September at the morgue her sister Mitzi was to identify his corpse which, like so many others, had been pulled from the River Mapocho. His bore six gunshot wounds and severe bruising and was early evidence of the terrorism which Pinochet, with much Western approval, was to maintain for 17 years. Roberto was meanwhile held prisoner in the National Stadium, unable to attend his son's funeral.

As the fire caused by tank rounds and aerial bombardment caught hold of the Moneda Allende ordered the women to leave but Payita hid in a basement. She was eventually forced out. As she was searched in the street outside the soldiers tore up papers she was carrying. Eerily prefiguring the regime's subordination of Chilean interests to foreigners, the soldiers destroyed the original of Chile's act of national independence she had been trying to rescue.

With Swedish help Payita found her way to the Cuban embassy and later to Havana, where she worked for the Cuban airline. She returned to Chile in 1990, continuing a very private and dignified life interrupted only by her action in 2000 against Pinochet for her son's murder. Contemptible Chilean judges and pressures from the dictator's allies in Chile, Europe and the United States ensured that her attempt to punish a terrorist act failed.

Hugh O'Shaughnessy