Isabel Allende (politician)


Isabel Allende Bussi is a Chilean Socialist Party politician and the daughter of former president of Chile Salvador Allende, and his wife, Hortensia Bussi. From 1994 to 2010 she was a deputy and in March 2010 she became a Senator for the Atacama Region. On 28 February 2014, Allende was selected as president of the Senate, as of 11 March 2014, making her the first woman president of the body in Chilean history.

Biography

She went to the Maisonette College, and unlike her sisters, was initially attracted to the Catholic Church and received her first communion. In 1962, at the age of 17 she began studying sociology, and joined the university's socialist brigade. Five years later she accompanied her father to the congress of the Socialist Party in Chile.
Her first marriage, with Sergio Meza, did not last for long, but they had a son, Gonzalo. With her second husband, Romilio Tambutti, she had a daughter named Marcia.
On 11 September 1973, the day of the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, Isabel was the last person to enter the presidential palace. After the military began to bomb the presidential palace, and the outcome was already clear, her father ordered the women to leave.
Isabel obtained political asylum in Mexico, with her mother and sister, where she spent sixteen years in exile, before returning to Chile in 1989, in the final stretch of the military regime.
On returning to her homeland, Allende began a successful political career; after Chile's return to democracy in 1990, she was elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, serving as its President between 2003 and 2004, becoming the second woman to do so after Adriana Muñoz.
On 16 December 2010, her son Gonzalo Meza Allende committed suicide after suffering depression.