Juan Esteban Montero Rodríguez

Juan Esteban Montero Rodríguez

Juan Esteban Montero Rodríguez ( February 12, 1879 - February 25, 1948 in Santiago de Chile ) was a Chilean politician . He served as President of his country in 1931 and 1932 .

Life

Montero was born to a wealthy conservative family and attended the Jesuit college in Santiago. He studied law at the Universidad de Chile until 1901 and taught there after completing his own studies. Montero married Graciela Fehrman, with whom he had four children.

He joined the Radical Party early on, of which he was a militant wing; In 1920 he had to defend himself by a court martial against charges of conspiracy. President Arturo Alessandri appointed the lawyer to the commission that should work out constitutional reform for Chile. The new constitution that was created in this way was passed by referendum in 1925.

In 1931 the country plunged into political chaos as a result of the Great Depression; President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo set up a "national salvation" cabinet, including Montero as interior minister. On July 26, 1931 Ibáñez had to resign; he appointed Pedro Opazo , the Senate President, as Vice-President, who quickly assembled a cabinet under the leadership of Montero and resigned the following day.

As the unelected incumbent president, Montero was confronted with enormous expectations of the citizens who expected a swift return to constitutional normality. In addition, it was necessary to master the consequences of the global economic crisis, which hit Chile with great force.

In the following debates about the legitimacy of his government, Juan Montero was seen as a figure of personal integrity on the one hand, and on the other hand he governed without a democratic mandate, even though he had promised a return to democracy. On August 19, 1931, he therefore announced his resignation to Congress, which, however - as an expression of a vote of confidence - did not accept. Montero did not want to run for the upcoming presidential election while he was ruling in a quasi-dictatorial manner: he quickly transferred the office of Vice President to his Interior Minister Manuel Trucco .

From the presidential elections on October 4, 1931, Juan Esteban Montero emerged as the clear winner with more than 60% of the vote. On November 15 he took office again as Vice President and on December 4 he was sworn in as President-Elect before Congress.

In the face of empty coffers, Montero initially relied primarily on private welfare aid, voluntary support from the citizens and on the waiver of wages by state employees in social policy. Despite remarkable efforts and great willingness to make sacrifices, large circles of the Chilean population remained worried: For example, Minister of Social Affairs Wilson declared that around 130,000 people in Chile had to live in miserable circumstances without the state being able to help them adequately.

In April 1932 the government had to set up a foreign exchange control commission to prevent the steady outflow of the central bank's gold reserves and to get inflation under control. Since mid-December 1931, the desperate economic situation led to renewed political instability; Rumors circulated in Vallenar and Copiapó about a communist-directed revolt that promptly broke out on Christmas Day with the attack by communist insurgents against a barracks of the Carabineros de Chile . The state reacted with great severity, the military stormed the communist party office in Vallenar and killed everyone present, a total of 21 people.

With this incident, the Montero government lost a lot of popular trust; Criticism increased, strongly fueled by military circles around Carlos Ibáñez, who wanted to see the ousted ex-dictator again in the Moneda , the Chilean presidential palace, and from supporters of the conservative Alessandri, the failed predecessor of Ibáñez. Along with these conservative forces marched the forces of the left who wanted a Marxist revolution in Chile.

Desperate, Montero announced a clearly left-wing program that shocked the conservatives and liberals. On the night of June 2, 1932 met in San Bernardo several officers , including Air Force Colonel Marmaduque Grove , with conspiratorial intent. The government learned of this meeting and dismissed Grove from his position as Head of Air Force Training in Chile.

This led to the uprising of sections of the army who sided with Grove and against the government. With the rest of the armed forces being neutral at best, no one stood ready to defend the constitutional government; on June 4, 1932, Montero was deposed by a military junta under General Arturo Puga, Colonel Marmaduque Grove, who rose to become Minister of Defense, the lawyer Eugenio Matte and the journalist and ex-diplomat Carlos Dávila .

After his dismissal, Montero turned his back on politics and taught law at the university again. He died in Santiago on February 25, 1948 at the age of 69.

Web links

• Biography (spanish)