Gabriel Gonzalez Videla

Gabriel Gonzalez Videla was elected with Communist votes and outlawed the Communist Party within eighteen months. He was a Radical Party lawyer from La Serena who won the presidency in 1946 on a coalition that included the Communists, and gave three of them cabinet posts - the first Communist ministers in the Americas. The arrangement lasted five months. Coal was the immediate cause. Strikes in the Lota and Coronel pits in 1947 threatened an economy running on copper exports and Cold War alignment with Washington, and he broke them with troops and blamed the party that had helped elect him. In September 1948 he signed the Law for the Permanent Defence of Democracy, known ever afterwards as the Ley Maldita - the accursed law. It banned the Communist Party, struck some twenty-six thousand people from the electoral register, and sent others to a camp at Pisagua in the northern desert, where a young army officer named Augusto Pinochet served a tour as commandant. Pablo Neruda was a Communist senator at the time. In January 1948 he denounced the president from the floor of the Senate in a speech called Yo Acuso, was stripped of his immunity and of his seat, and spent a year in hiding before crossing the Andes on horseback into exile. Canto General, the long history of the continent, was written on the run. The ban lasted a decade and was repealed in 1958. He left office in 1952, remained a public figure on the right, and supported the coup against Salvador Allende in 1973. He died in 1980.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 1980 CE
• Nationality: Chilean
• Roles: head_of_state, politician