Pedro Aguirre Cerda

Pedro Aguirre Cerda as President

Monument to Pedro Aguirre Cerda

Pedro Aguirre Cerda (born February 6, 1879 in Pocuro near Los Andes , † November 25, 1941 in Santiago de Chile ) was President of Chile from 1938 to 1941 .

Life

Origin, studies and academic career

Aguirre was born the seventh of eleven children to a modest farmer. (The information about the date of birth diverges between the sources as well as those about the social environment of his origin. While on the one hand February 6, 1879 is given as the date of birth, another source cites November 23, 1879 as the date of birth and describes his Parents as a family of lawyers.) Nevertheless, he managed to study Spanish and law at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago . In 1910 he traveled to France to deepen his knowledge of administrative law by studying at the Sorbonne . On his return he was appointed professor at the Instituto Nacional in 1914 .

Political career

His entry into the Radical Party and a Masonic lodge meant a departure from the conservative Catholic milieu from which he came. In the parliamentary elections in 1915 he won a seat in the House of Representatives, in 1921 he was elected Senator for the Concepción region . In 1916 he married his cousin Juana Rosa Aguirre.

In 1918, President Juan Luis Sanfuentes Andonaegui appointed him Minister of Justice and Public Education, which was of particular concern to him. He improved primary education and the pay of state teachers. During this time, the Aguirre couple made friends with the writer Gabriela Mistral , who dedicated her first book to them.

During the first term of office of President Arturo Alessandri Palma , Aguirre became Chile's Interior Minister for just eight months. During this time there were severe social unrest, the suppression of which forced him to resign. He returned to office in 1924, but gave up when the military under Carlos Ibáñez del Campo launched a coup and established a dictatorship. Aguirre fled to Europe for a year.

After his return in 1925 he began to work again as a university professor and ran a law firm. Despite his withdrawal from active politics, the military government forced him to leave the country again in 1927, and so Aguirre returned to Europe, where he wrote a book on the agrarian reforms he believed Chile needed. In 1930 he was able to return home from exile, but continued to stay away from politics. In 1934 he was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of a faculty for trade and industrial economics at the renowned Universidad de Chile, and he worked as its dean for the next two years. Cerda became the first president of the Chilean company Copec .

In 1937, various left-wing groups founded the Frente Popular alliance together with the Radical Party . Aguirre was skeptical of this plan, especially because he mistrusted the communists. Nevertheless, Aguirre triumphed in the internal party primaries for the presidential candidacy of the Radical Party against Juan Antonio Ríos Morales and was soon afterwards proclaimed a candidate for the Frente Popular .

The 1938 elections were marked by great internal political differences. Opponents of the center-left candidate Aguirre were the conservative Gustavo Ross and Carlos Ibáñez del Campo , the ex-dictator who ran for the National Socialist Party. Both Aguirre opponents wanted to establish a dictatorship based on the German or Spanish model in Chile, but were deeply divided and fought each other to the knife. When rumors of an impending coup d'état by some regiments loyal to Ibáñez began to circulate, supporters of the National Socialist Movimiento Nacional-Socialista de Chile quickly occupied several public buildings in Santiago on September 5, 1938. The uprising was bloodily suppressed; the leaders of the National Socialists, Jorge González von Marées and Carlos Ibáñez surrendered to justice; Ibáñez was forced to withdraw his candidacy.

Under these circumstances the election had become a duel. In the end, Aguirre was just one step ahead: 50.46% of the voters voted for him, while his opponent Ross received 49.53% of the vote.

Presidency

See also : History of Chile

Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who himself came from a poor family, met the hopes of the petty bourgeoisie and farmers above all. Combating poverty was a major concern of his policy, his wife Juanita was an active social worker, and the presidential couple made regular Christmas gifts to the poor.

The beginning of his presidency was shaken in January 1939 by a severe earthquake that struck the small south of the country. The government demanded the reconstruction of the destroyed infrastructure. But the improvement of the Chilean school system was also one of the tasks that Aguirre had set himself.

With the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Second World War , Chile took in numerous refugees who had to flee from the victorious fascists in Spain and from Hitler's Wehrmacht .

Before he reached halfway through his term in office, Pedro Aguirre fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis , for which no drug was known at the time. He died on November 25, 1941. Aguirre was hailed as Presidente de los Pobres (President of the Poor), and his death caused national consternation, despite having taken office under such controversial circumstances.

The Aguirre Passage , a strait in Antarctica , is named after him .

literature

• Luis Palma Zúñiga: Pedro Aguirre Cerda. Maestro, estadista, gobernante . Editorial Andrés Bello, Santiago de Chile 1963.
• Abraham Quezada Vergara: Pedro Aguirre Cerda. O la trayectoria de un ideal educativo . Editorial USACH, Santiago de Chile 2011. ISBN 978-956-303-126-3 .
• Jorge Aguirre Silva (ed.): Pedro Aguirre Cerda - ejemplo de chilenidad . Santiago Chile 1992.

Web links

Commons : Pedro Aguirre Cerda  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Pedro Aguirre Cerda in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Reseña Biográfica Parlamentaria (Spanish) on historiapolitica.bcn.cl, accessed on March 11, 2012
2. ^ Eberhard Hackethal in Biographien zur Weltgeschichte , VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1989, p. 28f
3. ↑ Copec: History  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.