Biography

María Isabel Allende Bussi (US: , UK: , Spanish: [isaˈβel aˈʝende] ; born 18 January 1945) is a Chilean politician and the youngest daughter of former Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens.

A member of the Socialist Party and daughter of former president of Chile Salvador Allende and Hortensia Bussi, Allende served as a deputy from 1994 to 2010 and in March 2010 she became a Senator for the Atacama Region. On 28 February 2014, she was selected as president of the Senate, a position previously held by her father in the 1960s, making her the first female president of the Senate in Chilean history. 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.

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's father Salvador Allende, the first Marxist president elected in the Americas, and sitting president at the time of the coup, killed himself rather than surrender to coup plotters led by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. The military coup launched a bloody 17-year dictatorship. Isabel obtained political asylum in Mexico, with her mother and her sister Beatriz, where she spent sixteen years in exile, before returning to Chile in 1989, in the final stretch of the military regime.

Her first marriage, with Sergio Meza, did not last for long, but they had a son, Gonzalo. Gonzalo (1965-2010) was an activist in the "No" movement leading up to the 1988 plebiscite and a founder of the Party for Democracy. With her second husband, Romilio Tambutti, she has a daughter named Marcia (b. 1971).

Other members of the Allende family have played important roles in Chilean politics. Her niece Maya Fernández, also a member of the Socialist Party, is Minister of Defense under President Gabriel Boric, since March 2022. Gay rights activist Alejandro Fernández Allende is her nephew.