Santiago Chile ? Thirty years after Chilean President Salvador Allende died in a U.S.-backed right-wing coup, new books, political tributes, court cases and press revelations are prompting Chileans to reassess the man and the 1973 coup that began the 17-year dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Chile is tense as the Sept. 11 anniversary approaches. Protests next week have been banned, and young leftists challenged the government Wednesday with a surprise demonstration in the La Moneda presidential palace. They want Chile to match neighbor Argentina and revoke the amnesty laws that protect former military rulers from prosecution. Police made numerous arrests as the raucous demonstration spilled onto Santiago’s streets.

In Valparaiso, Chile’s Congress on Wednesday paid its first homage to Allende, a career legislator and a socialist who was narrowly elected president on Sept. 4, 1970. His daughter Isabel presides over Chile’s lower house of Congress. Only last month she confirmed what historians had long contended: that her father committed suicide as Pinochet’s forces approached the palace, using a rifle that his friend Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had given him some time before.

On a talk show this week, Isabel Allende said that only now were Chileans honestly assessing her father and Pinochet’s abuses.

“Nobody said there was a coup. There weren’t murders; there were excesses. For years it was like this. Nobody was detained or disappeared,” she said. “Today, people know there were murders and gross violations of human rights. People know it was the policy of the state.”

The Nixon administration, fearful that Chile would become a communist beachhead under Allende, helped end his three-year rule. President Bill Clinton, and later Secretary of State Colin Powell, apologized for the intervention, which is the subject of a new book, “The Pinochet File,” by Peter Kornbluh, a Washington investigator.

Ricardo Lagos, Chile’s first socialist to be elected president since Allende, called a rare news conference with the foreign news media Wednesday to stress the significance of the upcoming anniversary.

“He was a quality person. You felt like you were in the presence of something special,” Lagos said of his friend and former political comrade.

Pinochet dominated Chilean politics for almost three decades, which explains why Allende’s record and place in history seldom were discussed. A truth commission found that 3,198 people died in political conflict during Pinochet’s rule.