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Chilean Communist Gladys Marín, 1941-2005
Chilean Communist Gladys Marín, 1941-2005
London Times
GLADYS MARÍN was sometimes known as Chile’s “La Pasionaria”. Like the redoubtable Spanish communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, she was an impassioned and indefatigable campaigner for the causes she believed in.
A supporter of Salvador Allende’s left-wing Government, she became a leader of the long resistance to the military dictatorship that followed his violent overthrow in September 1973, and felt the impact of General Augusto Pinochet’s iron fist in her personal life: her husband, Jorge Muñoz, another communist leader, “disappeared” in 1976 and has not been heard of since.By the end of her life, even Marín’s opponents conceded that she had long transcended party politics and become a national figure — a reality reflected in President Lagos’s declaration of two days of national mourning for the woman who had stood against him in the 1999 presidential elections.
The grandees of the Chilean political establishment, including Allende’s daughter, Isabel Allende Bussi, queued to file past her body as it lay in state in the old Congress building in the centre of Santiago.
Gladys Marín devoted 46 of her 63 years to the Chilean Communist Party. She joined in 1958, and in the following year met and married Jorge Muñoz, an engineer and fellow party member. From 1959 Marín was a full-time party activist. She was first elected to Congress in 1965, at 23, and rapidly climbed the party hierarchy, becoming a member of the central committee and political commission, as well as general secretary of the youth organisation. She was an enthusiastic support of Allende’s Popular Unity Government, elected in 1970, believing it to be the most democratic Chile had ever had. In the days before the 1973 military coup, the Chilean Communist Party was one of the biggest and most influential outside the Soviet bloc, and its leaders were powerful figures in Chilean politics.
The military intervention changed all that. Marín was eager to take up arms against the dictatorship, but the leadership of the outlawed party ordered her to take refuge in the Dutch Embassy, and in 1974 she went into political exile in Moscow, leaving her husband and two sons behind in Chile.
She returned in 1978 to find the party organisation in disarray. In 1980 she was instrumental in persuading the party’s exiled leaders to abandon their strategy of seeking an “anti-fascist alliance” with the Christian Democrats, and call for armed struggle against the Pinochet regime.
It became her job to work for a “popular rebellion” in Chile, and she formed a close relationship with President Castro of Cuba, who set up a training programme for Chilean communist militants in the Cuban Armed Forces. The first officers trained on the island arrived in Chile in 1983, and formed the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), under Marín’s command. An FPMR squad almost succeeded in assassinating Pinochet in 1986 and the Front was subjected to ferocious reprisals.
In the end it was the ballot box and not the bullet that removed Pinochet from power, and those who replaced him were not the communists, but the Christian Democrats and others from the centre and centre-left of Chilean politics. The Communist Party, tightly controlled by Marín, remained aloof from the new ruling alliance, refusing to acknowledge that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had changed anything and criticising successive governments for being too moderate and cautious.
As a result, when Marín replaced Volodia Teitelboim as general secretary in 1994, the Communist Party was a much diminished force in Chilean politics. When Marín stood for president in 1999, she was well beaten by the alliance candidate, Ricardo Lagos. She was undeterred, and continued her implacable pursuit of Pinochet until the very end. In 1998 she was the first person to bring formal charges against him, of murder, genocide and kidnapping. Pinochet still faces a battery of accusations but has yet to be brought to trial.
Gladys Marín may have led her party into a cul-de-sac, but her career, as the first woman to lead a political party in Chile, marked a sea change in a highly conservative society. It has opened up the real possibility that a woman will become president of Chile in the next elections.
Gladys Marín Millie, Chilean communist, was born on July 16, 1941. She died of a brain tumour on March 6, 2005, aged 63.
Chilean Communist Gladys Marín, 1941-2005
London Times
GLADYS MARÍN was sometimes known as Chile’s “La Pasionaria”. Like the redoubtable Spanish communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, she was an impassioned and indefatigable campaigner for the causes she believed in.
A supporter of Salvador Allende’s left-wing Government, she became a leader of the long resistance to the military dictatorship that followed his violent overthrow in September 1973, and felt the impact of General Augusto Pinochet’s iron fist in her personal life: her husband, Jorge Muñoz, another communist leader, “disappeared” in 1976 and has not been heard of since.By the end of her life, even Marín’s opponents conceded that she had long transcended party politics and become a national figure — a reality reflected in President Lagos’s declaration of two days of national mourning for the woman who had stood against him in the 1999 presidential elections.
The grandees of the Chilean political establishment, including Allende’s daughter, Isabel Allende Bussi, queued to file past her body as it lay in state in the old Congress building in the centre of Santiago.
Gladys Marín devoted 46 of her 63 years to the Chilean Communist Party. She joined in 1958, and in the following year met and married Jorge Muñoz, an engineer and fellow party member. From 1959 Marín was a full-time party activist. She was first elected to Congress in 1965, at 23, and rapidly climbed the party hierarchy, becoming a member of the central committee and political commission, as well as general secretary of the youth organisation. She was an enthusiastic support of Allende’s Popular Unity Government, elected in 1970, believing it to be the most democratic Chile had ever had. In the days before the 1973 military coup, the Chilean Communist Party was one of the biggest and most influential outside the Soviet bloc, and its leaders were powerful figures in Chilean politics.
The military intervention changed all that. Marín was eager to take up arms against the dictatorship, but the leadership of the outlawed party ordered her to take refuge in the Dutch Embassy, and in 1974 she went into political exile in Moscow, leaving her husband and two sons behind in Chile.
She returned in 1978 to find the party organisation in disarray. In 1980 she was instrumental in persuading the party’s exiled leaders to abandon their strategy of seeking an “anti-fascist alliance” with the Christian Democrats, and call for armed struggle against the Pinochet regime.
It became her job to work for a “popular rebellion” in Chile, and she formed a close relationship with President Castro of Cuba, who set up a training programme for Chilean communist militants in the Cuban Armed Forces. The first officers trained on the island arrived in Chile in 1983, and formed the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), under Marín’s command. An FPMR squad almost succeeded in assassinating Pinochet in 1986 and the Front was subjected to ferocious reprisals.
In the end it was the ballot box and not the bullet that removed Pinochet from power, and those who replaced him were not the communists, but the Christian Democrats and others from the centre and centre-left of Chilean politics. The Communist Party, tightly controlled by Marín, remained aloof from the new ruling alliance, refusing to acknowledge that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had changed anything and criticising successive governments for being too moderate and cautious.
As a result, when Marín replaced Volodia Teitelboim as general secretary in 1994, the Communist Party was a much diminished force in Chilean politics. When Marín stood for president in 1999, she was well beaten by the alliance candidate, Ricardo Lagos. She was undeterred, and continued her implacable pursuit of Pinochet until the very end. In 1998 she was the first person to bring formal charges against him, of murder, genocide and kidnapping. Pinochet still faces a battery of accusations but has yet to be brought to trial.
Gladys Marín may have led her party into a cul-de-sac, but her career, as the first woman to lead a political party in Chile, marked a sea change in a highly conservative society. It has opened up the real possibility that a woman will become president of Chile in the next elections.
Gladys Marín Millie, Chilean communist, was born on July 16, 1941. She died of a brain tumour on March 6, 2005, aged 63.