Diego Portales

Diego Portales gave Chile the constitution that lasted ninety years and was murdered by mutinous troops four years after writing it. He was a Valparaiso merchant who had failed at a tobacco monopoly and entered politics with a businessman's contempt for the constitutional experiments of the 1820s. He never sought the presidency and did not need it: as minister of the interior, war and the navy he ran the country from 1830, in a period afterwards called the Portalian republic. His theory was explicit and unattractive. Chileans were not ready for liberty; what they needed was an impersonal government strong enough that nobody's private virtue mattered, which he called the weight of the night. The 1833 constitution accordingly gave the president five-year terms with re-election, a veto, states of siege and control of the electoral machinery, with property qualifications for the vote. It also produced the most stable state in nineteenth-century Latin America and one with real, if narrow, legal continuity. He purged the officer corps of liberals and created the Civic Guard as a counterweight. He was seized during a review in 1837 and shot near Valparaiso, during the war against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation that he had provoked and that Chile went on to win. He is one of the very few nineteenth-century Latin American statesmen whose institutional design outlived him by generations rather than months, and Chile avoided the caudillo cycle largely because of it. The 1833 constitution stood until 1925. His own view of himself was unillusioned: he wrote that the social order in Chile was maintained not by anyone's ability but by the weight of habit.

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