Eduardo Frei Montalva
Eduardo Frei Montalva was president of Chile from 1964 to 1970, the Christian Democrat who won the election of 1964 with fifty-six per cent, the largest majority the country had given anyone, with the right's votes and the CIA's money, on the promise of a revolution in liberty that would make Cuba unnecessary. He handed over to Allende, opposed the coup of 1973 and then supported it. He died in 1982 of what his family and, in 2009, a court said was poisoning by Pinochet's agents. He was the son of a Swiss immigrant. He was a lawyer from the Catholic University, one of the young Conservatives who left the party in 1938 over the encyclicals to found the Falange Nacional, which became the Christian Democrats in 1957. He was a senator from 1949 and the candidate of 1958 who came third, and the man Kennedy's people picked as the showcase of the Alliance for Progress. The six years were the reforms that Allende's were built on. There was the agrarian reform law of 1967 that let the state take estates over eighty hectares, under which thirteen hundred were taken and the peasant unions legalised. There was the Chileanisation of copper, the state buying fifty-one per cent of the Kennecott and Anaconda mines in 1967 and 1969 for a price the left called a gift. There was the Promoción Popular that organised the shanty-towns into neighbourhood councils and mothers' centres. There were the education reform that put half a million more children in school, the housing, and the inflation that did not come down. There were the strikes, the copper workers shot at El Salvador mine in 1966, the Puerto Montt squatters shot in 1969, the Tacna regiment's mutiny of October 1969, and the party's own left, which broke away in 1969 to found the MAPU and join Allende. He was barred from succeeding himself. His party's candidate Tomic came third in 1970. He voted in the Senate to confirm Allende under the statute of guarantees. Then, as president of the Senate, he led the opposition that, in August 1973, declared the government unconstitutional. The army took that as its invitation. He backed the coup in September. He expected the generals to hand the country to him, understood by 1975 that they would not. He was the opposition's voice by 1980, when he spoke at the Caupolicán theatre against the constitution's plebiscite. He died in January 1982 after an operation for a hernia at the Santa María clinic, at seventy-one. It was of a septicaemia that the exhumation of 2004 attributed to mustard gas and thallium. Six men were convicted of his murder in 2019 and acquitted on appeal in 2021. His son Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle was president from 1994 to 2000.
- Lived: 1911 CE – 1982 CE
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: president, lawyer, politician
