9/11 - The Day Everything Changed, in Chile - NYTimes.com Military jets bombed the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, in the 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende's government. IF I am alive today, if 40 years later I am able to tell the story of the Chilean coup of Sept. 11, 1973, it is thanks to the blind generosity of my friend Claudio Jimeno. I remember him now as I saw him then, when I said goodbye without knowing it was goodbye, not knowing he would soon be dead and I would survive, neither of us knowing that the military would kill him instead of me. Claudio and I met in 1960 as freshmen at the Universidad de Chile, where his toothy grin and shock of black hair had earned him the nickname of Conejo (rabbit), which was to follow him till the day he died. He was dating Chabela Chadwick, a chemistry student, and when I started going out with Angélica, who would later become my wife, the four of us would join our enthusiastic classmates for dances and beach picnics and, especially, for protest rallies. For what most united Claudio and me and our girlfriends, beyond sharing heartaches and doubts and hopes, was a fierce thirst for social justice in a continent of frustrating poverty and misdevelopment. Like hundreds of thousands of other Chileans, Claudio and I were fervent supporters of the Socialist Salvador Allende, who - at a time when guerrilla warfare was raging across Latin America - believed that a nonviolent revolution in our country was possible and proclaimed that we could create a more just and sovereign society through peaceful and democratic means. Our dream seemed to become reality when, 10 years later, Allende won the 1970 presidential election. Dreams and reality, however, do not go hand in hand that easily. By mid-1973, Allende's government was under siege and was threatened with the increasing likelihood of a coup. When Fernando Flores, a member of the president's staff, asked me to serve as his cultural and press adviser, I did not hesitate. One of my most urgent responsibilities was to sleep once every four nights at La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, keeping watch so that I could communicate any emergency immediately to Allende. The other nights rotated among three other advisers, one of whom was Claudio Jimeno. When I discovered I was slated to spend the night of Monday, Sept. 10, at La Moneda, it was the most natural thing in the world to exchange shifts with my old buddy. Claudio offered to take my turn and give me his stint on Sunday, the 9th, so that I could show my 6-year-old son, Rodrigo, the gallery displaying the portraits of the presidents of Chile and allow him, before his mother came to pick him up, to experience the palace as night fell, the magic of a thousand lights coming on. Claudio's kindness did not surprise me. In those perilous times, we watched our kids playing without being sure we'd see them again the next day, so each hour with them was priceless. Claudio looked forward to some quiet time at home with Chabela and their two children that Sunday. And thus it was that Claudio Jimeno would be the one to answer the phone at dawn on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1973, and learn that a military coup headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet was in progress. And it would be Claudio who called Allende, and Claudio who fought by his side at La Moneda. It was Claudio who was taken prisoner and then tortured and then became one of Chile's first desaparecidos, never to be seen again. I woke up that morning next to my beloved Angélica and tried to but could not make it to La Moneda, and now four decades later, I find myself here, commemorating my friend and what was lost and what was learned, recalling, because Claudio cannot, how we kept hope alive in the dark. Here I am, unable to visit Claudio Jimeno's grave because, to this day, his executioners refuse to reveal where they buried his shattered body. My friend's fate prefigured what was in store for Chile. Ahead of us were decades of repression and dread, of sorrow and struggle. Even when we managed to finally defeat the dictatorship, our transition to a full democracy was severely constricted. Pinochet's sinister Constitution, approved in fraudulent elections in 1980, is even now the supreme law of the land, making urgent reforms exceptionally difficult to carry out. Ariel Dorfman is the author of the novel "Death and the Maiden" and, most recently, a memoir, "Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile."