Carlos Ibáñez del Campo
Carlos Ibáñez del Campo was president of Chile twice, from 1927 to 1931 as the strongman of the young officers' coups of 1924 and 1925, driven out by the depression, and from 1952 to 1958 as the old general the country elected at seventy-five on a broom, the symbol he campaigned with, to sweep the parties away, which he did not. The two presidencies are the two halves of the century's argument about whether the country could be governed without them. He was a cavalry officer from Linares, the carabineros' founder, the war minister of the officers' movement that ended the parliamentary republic, and the interior minister who had the president Figueroa resign in 1927 and took the office in an election with one candidate. The first presidency was the dictatorship the country calls by his name, the opposition deported to Easter Island and Buenos Aires, the Congress chosen by the parties at his direction in 1930, the thermal Congress. There were the public works, the roads, the carabineros, the labour code and the nitrate company Cosach built on American loans that the crash of 1929 ended, with the nitrate price. In July 1931, with the students in the streets and the banks closed, he went to Argentina by train. The twenty years between were the return by every road. There was the Nazi-tinged movement of 1938 whose young men were shot in the Seguro Obrero building while campaigning for him. There were the election of 1942 he lost, the Argentine friendship with Perón, whose model the second presidency was meant to follow, and the election of 1952, which he won with forty-seven per cent as the independent above the parties, with the women's vote, cast for the first time, and the peasants'. The second presidency did none of what the broom promised. The inflation reached eighty per cent in 1955. The American Klein-Saks mission's austerity of 1955 to 1958 was the cure. The copper law of 1955 gave the American companies their terms. The general strike of 1955 and the riots of April 1957 in Santiago were put down by the army. The one lasting thing was the repeal, in 1958, of the law that had banned the Communist Party since 1948. That let Allende run as the left's candidate that year and lose to Alessandri by thirty thousand votes. He was born in Linares. He died in Santiago in April 1960, two years after leaving office. The country's politics of the 1960s was the three parties, Christian Democrat, Socialist and the right, that the broom had been meant to sweep away and that were all stronger for his having failed.
- Lived: 1877 CE – 1960 CE
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: president, general, politician
