Luis Corvalan: biography and family

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:46

Luis Corvalan (photo posted later in the article) is one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Chile. His support was crucial to the rise to power in 1970 of Salvador Allende, the first elected Marxist head of state in the Western Hemisphere. He died in Santiago on July 21, 2010 at the age of 93. The Communist Party of Chile announced his death with "deep sorrow".

Allende's ally

The party, which became the largest communist organization in Latin America, was the main pillar of the left-wing coalition led by the doctor and socialist leader Allende. Without the support of the Communists, his narrow victory in the presidential elections in 1970 would have been impossible.

Allende, who nationalized Chile's industry during his leadership of the country, committed suicide after being overthrown in a military coup in 1973. Corvalan, his close adviser, fled after the coup. His only son was tortured but refused to reveal his father's whereabouts.

70th Anniversary Gift

Later, the leader of the HRC was found and imprisoned. For three years, slogans sounded around the world: “Free LouisCorvalan! Finally, on December 18, 1976, he was exchanged at the Zurich airport for Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.

Brezhnev, whose 70th birthday was celebrated the next day, insisted on this gift. The Chilean was his ideal Latin American communist and a firm ally of the USSR.

Corvalan comes from a peasant background. He became one of the most prominent communists in South America, leading the Chilean Communist Party for three decades. He strictly followed the party line established in Moscow, even to the point of supporting the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And when the same line increasingly called for greater cooperation with non-communists, Luis Corvalan responded with ideological maneuvering. "We don't put all the Christian Democrats in one basket," he said at the HRC convention, referring to organizations to the right of the Marxist coalition.

Critic Allende

Corvalan was critical of the socialist president's economic management and distanced himself from the enthusiasm of many coalition allies for a Cuban-style armed revolution. Not afraid to look like a conservative economist, he said that Allende's decision to raise wages for workers without increasing labor productivity caused inflation to rise.

Luis Corvalan felt confident enough to criticize the President in person, saying that he had sunk into clichés and started repeating himself. Allende "showed signs of stagnation," journalist Corvalan wrote in 1997, adding that "popularthe movement has gone further than him.”

The breadth of his views narrowed significantly when it came to the interests of the CPSU. After a visit to China in 1959, he praised that country's approach to Marxism. But when relations between China and Russia soured in 1961, Corvalan denounced Maoism.

He was elected general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile in 1958 and held this position until 1990.

Luis Corvalan: biography

Luis Nicolás Corvalan Lepes (he later dropped the last letter of his mother's surname, becoming Lepe) was born on September 14, 1916, in Pelluco, near Puerto Montt in southern Chile. He was one of six brothers and sisters. His mother worked as a seamstress. When Louis was 5, his father abandoned the family. The boy learned to read with the help of his mother's friend who lived next door.

Corvalan studied to be a teacher in Toma and received a teaching diploma in 1934, but even earlier, in 1932, he found work as a writer and editor in the communist newspapers Narodny Front, Centenary, etc. In his The idea of Chile was to be run by the people and be for the people.

The Communist Party was banned in 1947 and Luis Corvalan ended up in a concentration camp in Pisagua. After the legalization of the HRC in 1958, he was elected to the city council of Concepción and twice as senator for the province of Newble, and Aconcagua and Valparaiso.

Luis Corvalan: family

The future leader of the HRC married Lily Castillo Riquelme in 1946 in Valparaiso. They were bornfour children: son Luis Alberto and three daughters. The son died of a heart attack in Bulgaria at the age of 28. A wife and two daughters, Viviana and Maria Victoria, survived Corvalan.

Key ally

In the 1970s, the Communist Party of Chile had about 50,000 members, making it the largest part of Allende's coalition after the Socialists. Corvalan's party was seen as the representative of all communist forces in South America, and his electoral success was admired. And he foresaw its growing influence. By the 1970s, the CPC already had 20% of the votes. Its members included such prominent people as the poet Pablo Neruda, the writer Francisco Coloane and the songwriter Victor Jara.

Still, local communists were considered moderate and Corvalan boring. “His pedantic speeches, monotonous suits and old-fashioned hats seemed ill-advised to inspire Chilean youth,” the New York Times wrote in 1968.

And Corvalan began to change his image. He began to wear bright ties, smiled at the cameras and posed with young communist girls in miniskirts.

Junta

The Pinochet Putsch of September 11, 1973 put an end to the efforts of the Popular Unity government. Thousands of people were killed, arrested and tortured. After the government of Allende was overthrown and Corvalan fled, the military authorities, pursuing him, arrested his son Luis Alberto. He was tortured but remained silent.

According to the Chilean press, Corvalan managed to escape thanks to his wife and daughters.

Bdetention

But Corvalan was soon found and imprisoned. In October 1973, his execution was delayed by a fierce debate at the United Nations. The Chilean delegate insisted that the verdict had not yet been passed. Corvalan was later found guilty of treason.

In 1974, while he was being held in a Chilean prison on Dawson Island in the Strait of Magellan, the Soviet Union awarded Corvalan the International Lenin Peace Prize and stirred up a scandal demanding his release in various international forums.

The bully was traded

The United States, acting as an intermediary, agreed to exchange it. Mr. Bukovsky, who documented that in the Soviet Union non-conformists were sent to Soviet psychiatric hospitals, was released by the Kremlin and settled in England. Luis Corvalan was also released from the dungeons.

Freed, Luis Corvalan, the children and his wife went to Moscow and began to live there as dignitaries. According to some reports, he underwent plastic surgery and returned to Chile incognito in the 1980s to organize resistance to the government. According to the surgeon, Luis Corvalan before and after plastic surgery are two different people. His nose was thinned and his eyelids lifted.

Corvalan reappeared publicly in Chile in 1989 when General Augusto Pinochet lost the election, and worked for years on a memoir that was never completed. During forced emigration, he collaborated with VolodyaTeitelboim and other exiled leaders of the CPC to restore the almost destroyed Communist Party of Chile. In the USSR, Corvalan faced harsh criticism from the CPSU for the failure of the government of Popular Unity. As one party functionary put it, Lenin taught that it is not enough to make a revolution, you need to know how to defend it.

Chilean way

Don Lucho, as Corvalan's associates called him, had long advocated a peaceful path to socialism through elections and within the framework of the constitution. His internal conflict lay in the fact that during the three years of the Popular Unity government, he could not decide to leave the generally recognized constitutional path and arm the people to defend the communist gains. But as he once colorfully put it, horses are not changed at the crossing. One cannot suddenly move from working within the framework of the constitution to armed struggle, although in 1973 many leftists insisted on this. Luis Corvalan was still convinced that, in the conditions of Chile, a people's government could only succeed if it received the support of an absolute majority of the population advocating "progressive change." And this meant attracting a large number of voters to Christian democratic beliefs. It was unrealistic at the time.

Pledge of unity

The Communist Party of Chile suffered from a split, because under the dictatorship of Pinochet, part of it remained underground, and the leadership was in exile. After a long analysis and internal criticism in 1980, the party led by Corvalanembarked on a policy of "mass popular uprising". In an attempt to overthrow the junta, acts of sabotage, raids on banks and power outages were organized. And in 1983, the armed wing of the party, Manuel Rodríguez's Patriotic Front, was formed, which in 1986 made an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Pinochet. As a result, five bodyguards were killed. A significant merit of the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia is that his party, although greatly weakened by the coup, remained united.

Luis Corvalan has written several books, including The Government of Salvador Allende, Communists and Democracy and memoirs.