After 1992, Margot Honecker lived in
Santiago, Chile, In January 1993, Erich Honecker's trial in Berlin, which some felt had by that stage already descended into farce, was cut short because of the rapidly deteriorating health of the accused. He left Berlin for the last time on 13 March 1993, bound for Chile. He died of
liver cancer at the age of 81 on 29 May 1994 in Santiago. His body was cremated. In 1999, Margot Honecker failed in her legal attempt to sue the German government for €60,300 of property confiscated following reunification. In 2001, her appeal to the
European Court of Human Rights failed. She received a survivor's pension and the old-age pension of the German old-age pension insurance federation of about 1,500
euros, which she regarded as insolently sparse. In 2000,
Luis Corvalán, the former General Secretary of the
Communist Party of Chile, published the book
The Other Germany – the GDR. Discussions with Margot Honecker, in which Honecker speaks about the history of the GDR from her perspective. In the book, they discuss the myths that have arisen about the GDR since the fall of Communism, but also the shared history between Chile and GDR, since the Honeckers received 5000 Chilean refugees fleeing from the Pinochet junta. On 19 July 2008, on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Honecker was awarded the "Rubén Dario" order for cultural independence from President
Daniel Ortega. The award was in recognition of Honecker's untiring support of the national campaign against illiteracy in the 1980s. To the day she died, Honecker continued to defend the old East Germany and identified herself as a hardline Communist. In October 2009, Honecker celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the GDR with former Chilean exiles who had sought asylum in East Germany. She participated in singing a patriotic East German song and gave a short speech in which she stated that East Germans "had a good life in the GDR" and that many felt that capitalism has made their lives worse. In 2011, author Frank Schuhmann published a book entitled
Letzte Aufzeichnungen – Für Margot (
Final Notes – For Margot in English) based on the 400-page diary kept by Erich Honecker during his stay in
Berlin's Moabit prison beginning in July 1992. The diary was given to the author by Margot Honecker. She felt that there was no need for people to climb over the
Berlin Wall and lose their lives. She suggested that the GDR was a good country and that the demonstrations were driven by the GDR's enemies. "The GDR also had its foes. That's why we had the
Stasi," she said. In a 2012 interview with
Das Erste, Honecker labelled Mikhail Gorbachev a "traitor" for his reforms and called the defectors of East Germany "criminals and terrorists." She said that the Federal Republic of Germany, the
European Union, and the
United States would collapse. ==Death==