Carlos Ibáñez del Campo

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Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, 1927

Carlos Ibáñez del Campo as President in the 1950s

Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (born November 3, 1877 in Linares , † April 28, 1960 in Santiago de Chile ) was a Chilean dictator, military, politician and President of Chile .

Life

Ibáñez attended school in Linares and in March 1896 joined the Escuela Militar in Santiago de Chile, the main cadet institute of the Chilean army reformed on the Prussian model , which he left as a lieutenant as planned after two years . He was assigned to the elite cavalry regiment of the Cazadores ( hunters on horseback ) stationed in Santiago . In 1903 a military assignment led him to El Salvador as a trainer . During his time there, a war broke out against Guatemala , in which the Chilean advisors were instructed to remain strictly neutral. Ibáñez resisted and took an active part in the fighting that earned him the rank of colonel in the Salvadoran army . In 1907 he married Rosita Quiroz y Ávila, who came from an aristocratic family in El Salvador.

In 1909 Ibáñez returned with his family to Chile, where he attended the military academy to continue his officer career at home. In 1916 he was promoted to major , served as adjutant and took over the management of the Escuela de Carabineros police school, which he had been building up since 1912 . His wife died in 1918. Ibáñez was appointed prefect of police for the province of Iquique in northern Chile. In the election campaign for the presidential election of 1920 he supported the victorious candidate Arturo Alessandri Palma , who, after the sales crisis caused by the First World War , which had hit Chile hard, sought a radical change of policy while disempowering the ruling liberal elite. Alessandri appointed Ibáñez del Campo director of the cavalry school in Santiago de Chile.

In the congressional elections of March 1924, the Alianza Liberal won in both chambers, so that President Alessandri had to rule against the parliamentary majority and was practically incapable of acting. At the same time, the Chilean army rose up in a pronunciamiento against the low pay, lack of equipment and poor opportunities for advancement. The Army High Command appeared in the Senate to make clear the discontent of the Army; On September 5, 1924, representatives of the military committee ( Junta Militar ) met with President Alessandri and managed to get the latter to appoint a new government cabinet, which also included General Luis Altamirano . Under the pressure exerted by the military, the laws to improve army equipment suddenly passed the Senate very quickly. Alessandri was forced to resign and fled to the United States embassy. He spent the following months in Europe without officially resigning from his position.

General Luis Altamirano became the new Vice President and Minister of the Interior, dissolved the Congress and thus held the power of government with his government junta completely in his hands. Differences soon arose between the government junta under Altamirano and the military junta under Ibáñez. Altamirano sent Ibáñez to Europe and did not allow him to return until the end of the year.

The army's dissatisfaction did not end with the new government: on January 23, 1925, there was a coup, the cavalry school under Ibáñez and two hunting squads stormed the Moneda , the presidential palace of Santiago. Ibáñez took over the post of War and Navy Minister. On March 20, 1925, Arturo Alessandri returned to the office of President at the urging of Ibáñez and other representatives of the army and against the resistance of the Navy, but kept all ministers of the previous cabinet, including Ibáñez as Minister of War. Together, Ibáñez and Alessandri initiated the new constitution of Chile of 1925, legitimized by referendum in August , which transformed the country back into a presidential democracy and restricted the power of parliament that had been widespread since the civil war of 1891 . The possibility of a parliamentary opposition was blocked, the press and the trade unions were intimidated by its elite units. In the presidential elections of October 1925, Ibáñez - as a strong man and representative of the interests of the army - wanted to run for office himself. Alessandri urged him to give up his ministerial post if he ran for president. But Carlos Ibáñez refused, whereupon all other ministers in the cabinet resigned and the alienation between him and Alessandri increased.

This made Ibáñez the only remaining minister, which meant that practically every action taken by the president would have required his signature to be valid. Alessandri had lost his entire cabinet and depended on the goodwill of the only minister whom he had also asked to resign. This situation seemed intolerable to him and he too resigned. With this, Ibáñez had triggered a state crisis long before the elections with his presidential candidacy and holding on to his ministerial post.

On December 23, 1925, Emiliano Figueroa Larraín was elected as the new President of Chile. As Minister of War, Ibáñez remained the real strong man behind a president who was barely able to act, even in the new cabinet. When the Minister of the Interior resigned in February 1927, Ibáñez also took over this office and thus further weakened the position of the President, who finally resigned on April 7, 1927. Carlos Ibáñez took over the government as Vice President. In the elections for Figueroa's successor, Ibáñez came up with the program to finally meet the demands of the “revolution of 1924”. On July 21, 1927 he was named President of Chile.

Thanks to the high copper prices, the economic situation was favorable and allowed him to launch an extensive program of public investments. In 1927 he merged the existing mounted militia ( Carabineros ) with the civil police forces of the municipalities and provinces to form the Carabineros de Chile , the barracked gendarmerie of Chile, which has since formed the Chilean protective police and was subordinate to the army until 2011. During his term of office, the republic was divided into twenty-six new provinces on the basis of the 1925 constitution. In 1928 he founded the Chilean Air Force and the airline Línea Aérea Nacional de Chile ( LAN Chile ) . Under Ibáñez's presidency, characterized as a left-wing authoritarian, the state played a leading role in the economy and in social affairs, which went hand in hand with a significant expansion of public services and their bureaucracy. US banks provided loans of $ 300 million.

In terms of foreign policy, Ibáñez achieved a normalization of relations with Peru and Bolivia, which found expression in the railway line between Arica and the Bolivian La Paz or in the Treaty of Ancón (with Peru).

The great economic crisis of 1929 hit Chile hard. Unemployment reached enormous levels and large parts of the population went hungry. The students from the Universidad de Chile went on strike and their fellow students from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile even took up arms. A general strike exacerbated the situation and forced Carlos Ibáñez to resign on July 26, 1931. He went into exile in Argentina.

In 1938 he returned to run again in the upcoming presidential election. The election campaign came to an abrupt end on September 5th after an attempted coup by the National Socialist Movement in Chile , in which Ibáñez was not involved.

On November 4, 1952, Carlos Ibáñez moved back into the Moneda after he had clearly won the presidential election with 46.8% of the vote. Cautious attempts at a more liberal economic policy, which his advisers suggested to him, soon failed. His efforts to extend the right to vote for all citizens were more successful.

In 1958, at the end of his tenure, he handed the Moneda over to his elected successor, Jorge Alessandri , the son of his former ally Arturo Alessandri, and withdrew from political life. He died two years later.

Awards (selection)

• 1953: Special level of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1954: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic

literature

• Marco Antonio León León: La crisis del Partido Conservador en Chile. Un estudio a través de Política y Espíritu. Segunda parte: El conservadurismo bajo Ibáñez, 1953-1958 . In: Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia en Chile . ISSN  0716-1662 . Vol. 13 (1995), pp. 155-180.
• Luis Vitale: Chile, tres claves del Siglo XX: Arturo Alessandri, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, República socialista . Libros del Retorno, Buenos Aires 1988.
• Carlos Ibañez del Campo , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 26/1960 from June 20, 1960, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

See also: History of Chile

Web links

• Educación de la Fundación Chile (Spanish)
• Newspaper article about Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Leslie Manigat : L'Amérique latine au XXe siècle - 1889–1929 . H146. Éditions du Seuil , Paris 1991, ISBN 978-2-02-012373-0 , pp. 356 ff . (première édition 1973 aux Éditions Richelieu).