Jorge Alessandri
Jorge Alessandri was president of Chile from 1958 to 1964, the engineer and paper-company president, the son of the president Arturo Alessandri, who won the election of 1958 by thirty thousand votes over Allende as the candidate of the right and of the independents. Having governed six years with the manner of a bachelor who walked to work from his flat on the Alameda, lost to Allende in 1970 by forty thousand and did what the constitution required, which was to let the Congress choose. He was born in Santiago, took his engineering degree at the University of Chile, was finance minister for his father's successor in 1947 and 1948, and ran the Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones, the paper company, and the confederation of industry. That was the base the right chose him from as the man of the managers rather than the parties. The six years were the first attempt at the country's stabilisation by the market. The exchange rate was fixed to the dollar in 1959 and the escudo introduced in 1960. The tariffs were cut, the foreign credits taken. The inflation was brought from thirty-three per cent to five in 1961 and back to forty-six by 1964 when the credits ran out and the peg broke. There was the earthquake of May 1960 at Valdivia, the largest ever recorded, which destroyed the south and whose reconstruction took the rest of the term. There were the housing programme of the DFL 2 that built the middle class's suburbs, and the first agrarian reform law of 1962, mild enough that the left called it the flowerpot reform, passed because the Alliance for Progress required one. There was the Alliance's money, since Kennedy had decided that Chile was where the alternative to Cuba would be shown. There were the parliamentary elections of 1961 and 1963 that took his majority away. He handed over to Frei in November 1964. He went back to the paper company. He stood again in 1970 at seventy-four as the right's candidate against Allende and Tomic, came second by thirty-nine thousand votes. He offered, in the seven weeks before the Congress voted, to resign at once if the Congress chose him so that a new election could be held in which Frei could stand, which the Christian Democrats refused. That was the last constitutional way out anyone proposed. He was president of the Council of State that Pinochet created in 1976. He chaired the drafting of the constitution of 1980, and resigned from the council when the junta changed the draft. He died in Santiago in August 1986, at ninety, unmarried. He was the last president of the old right, whose paper company the Allende government had tried to buy and could not. The country understood that the paper was the newspapers.
- Lived: 1896 CE – 1986 CE
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: president, engineer, businessman
