Gabriel Terra
Gabriel Terra was president of Uruguay from 1931 to 1938, the Colorado who was elected under Batlle's constitution and overthrew it on 31 March 1933, with the police and the fire brigade, in the self-coup that the country calls the March dictatorship. It lasted, in its mild way, until 1942. He was a Batllista who had been a minister under Batlle and had never liked the colegiado. That was the nine-man council that shared the executive with the president. The depression made the case. The wool and beef prices had halved, the council and the president blocked each other. He dissolved the council and the parliament together, arrested the opposition's leaders. He drove the former president Baltasar Brum, who had shot himself in the street rather than be arrested, into the grave that the country still visits. The constitution of 1934 was approved by a plebiscite the opposition boycotted. It abolished the council, gave the president the powers Batlle had wanted to take from him, and divided the Senate between the two factions that had made the coup, his own Colorados and Herrera's Blancos. That was the pact the country's politics ran on for a generation. The seven years were not what the coup's enemies had feared. There were the exchange control and the industrial protection that started the country's factories, and the Rincón del Bonete dam on the Río Negro begun in 1937, the largest in South America. There were the state's oil and cement monopolies kept, and the pensions and the labour laws left alone. There were the diplomatic relations broken with the Soviet Union in 1935 and with the Spanish republic in 1936, and the friendship with Mussolini's Italy, which the country's Italians liked and the country's democrats did not. There was the exile of the Batllistas to Buenos Aires, from which they came home in 1938 to lose the election to his brother-in-law Baldomir. Baldomir then, in 1942, made a coup against the constitution of 1934 and restored the one before it. He was born in Montevideo. He studied law and was a professor and a banker, the minister of industry who wrote the state insurance bank's law under Batlle. He was the man who was shot at in the street by a Batllista in 1935 and hit in the arm. He died in September 1942, the year his constitution was undone, at sixty-nine.
- Lived: 1873 CE – 1942 CE
- Nationality: Uruguayan
- Roles: president, lawyer, politician
