Mónica Madariaga

Mónica Madariaga

Mónica Madariaga Gutiérrez (born January 25, 1942 in Santiago de Chile , † October 8, 2009 ) was a Chilean politician .

Life

Mónica Madariaga, a cousin of the future general and dictator Augusto Pinochet , studied law at the Universidad de Chile after attending school and entered the public service as a legal advisor after graduation .

Shortly after the military coup of September 11, 1973, in which the army under General Pinochet overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende , she became legal advisor to the military government and recommended that Pinochet sign official documents under the title "Supreme Leader of the Nation".

As a result of the trust the military leadership had in her, she was appointed Minister of Justice in 1977 and held this post until 1983. During her term of office, the controversial Amnesty Act was passed in 1978 , which was ratified in a referendum a year later . This law provided impunity for acts committed by the military regime in the period from the military coup in September 1973 to the official lifting of the state of emergency in March 1978. However, she later stated that the draft of the legal text came from the then Interior Minister Sergio Fernández Fernández . While the validity of the amnesty law was quickly questioned, it was an integral part of the 1980 constitution .

After a brief tenure as Minister of Education, in 1983 she became Permanent Representative of Chile to the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, DC Outside of her home country and the military government, she said she saw for the first time the true extent of the oppression of the people of Chile. In a 1985 interview with the opposition magazine Analysis, she said that she had lived in a “government bubble” that described all opposition as “treasonous, dishonest and, of course, communist ”. In the interview, she also asked for forgiveness from the families of the victims of human rights abuses under Pinochet. As a result, she herself was called a “traitor” and was also dismissed from her position as permanent representative at the OAS.

In the referendum held in 1988, which provided for the transition to democracy , she sided with the opposition , which called for an end to military rule . She was the only prominent member of the government who later admitted and publicly apologized for the human rights violations during Pinochet's rule. After the transition to Chile , she worked as a professor . She was first rector of the Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello and then dean of the law faculty of the Universidad de Artes, Ciencias y Comunicación (UNIACC).

Despite this now academic career, she never completely retired from political life, but ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for the Senate of the National Congress in 1997 and was also a frequent guest on political talk shows . Madariaga, who tended to belong to the right-wing political spectrum, was nonetheless a supporter of the center-left government of current President Michelle Bachelet . This supported her in particular in their cancer prevention campaigns, especially since she had been suffering from breast cancer for many years .

Ultimately, she remained a divisive figure in Chile's political life until her death and last caused controversy in the run-up to the presidential elections in December 2009. She publicly stated that she helped the 1982 candidate Sebastián Piñera , who was ultimately elected as president, to avoid fraud charges when he was director of the collapsed bank of Talca .

Web links

• The Telegraph: "Monica Madariaga"