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Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy

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1948 Chilean law banning the Communist Party

A caricature of Joseph Stalin during a pro-Allied rally in Santiago, 1943

The Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy (Spanish: Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia, Law No. 8,987), commonly known as the Damned Law (Ley Maldita), was a law enacted by the National Congress of Chile on 3 September 1948 at the initiative of President Gabriel González Videla. The law outlawed the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and banned 26,650[1] people from the electoral lists, eventually removing more than 28,000 citizens from the voter rolls entirely.[2] It amended an existing state-security statute, Law No. 6,026 of 1937, enacted under President Arturo Alessandri.[3]

The law banned the expression of ideas which appeared to advocate "the implantation in the republic of a regime opposed to democracy or which attack the sovereignty of the country."[4] Passed amid the onset of the Cold War and the wave of McCarthyism in the United States, it excluded the PCCh from Chilean political life for a decade.[5] It remained in effect until 1958, when it was repealed and replaced by the State Security Law.

Background

Earlier anti-communist efforts

Proposals to outlaw the Communist Party predated the 1948 law. A ban was first discussed in 1932 under the provisional socialist government of Carlos Dávila, which accused the party of instigating unrest, but the plan lapsed after Congress was closed.[6] During Alessandri's second presidential term, amid a climate of rebellions and attempted coups, Congress passed the State Security Law of 1937 (Law No. 6,026).[6] A further bill to outlaw the Communist Party was introduced in 1941 but was vetoed by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda as a conciliatory gesture.[6] Despite the anti-communist rhetoric of his successor, President Juan Antonio Ríos, Chile opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1944, largely because of the wartime alliance between the Soviets and the United States.[6]

González Videla and the Communist Party

President González Videla (right) with U.S. President Harry S. Truman during his 1950 state visit to Washington

Before the 1946 presidential election, González Videla, the Radical Party candidate, had openly allied himself with the Communist Party, which had grown into a significant force in the labor movement and helped secure his narrow plurality victory.[3] His first cabinet, formed in November 1946, included Radical, Liberal, and Communist ministers, honoring a campaign commitment.[3] The alliance proved difficult to sustain internationally as tensions rose between the United States and the Soviet Union, while Chile also sought foreign financing for government development plans.[3]

Following municipal elections on 6 April 1947, in which the PCCh became the country's third-largest political force, the Liberal ministers resigned and González Videla reshuffled his cabinet; although the Communists retained regional governorships, the governing coalition began to fray.[3] Sectors of the Socialist and Radical parties accused Communist officials of election interference, and a faction of Radicals had already broken away in 1946 to form the Radical Democratic Party in protest at the alliance.[3] Labor unrest intensified through 1947, driven both by the Communists' withdrawal from government and by a foreign-currency shortage, while the United States pressed for a complete break with the Communists.[3]

In August 1947, a new cabinet that included Jorge Alessandri as finance minister and Admiral Immanuel Holger moved to confront a wave of strikes, including postal and telegraph workers, Santiago transport workers (a strike that ended with several deaths), state railway employees, and coal miners in southern Chile and at Chuquicamata in the north.[7][8] Unrest peaked in the mining zones in September 1947 and was suppressed with the intervention of the armed forces, including the internal exile of Communist leaders to Pisagua.[7] Historians disagree on what ultimately drove González Videla to pursue the ban; some point to the president's difficulty reconciling the party's role in government with its tradition of street agitation, others to the broader onset of the Cold War, while some argue that domestic political factors, rather than U.S. pressure, were decisive.[3][9]

Provisions

On 19 April 1948, the president submitted a bill titled "On the Permanent Defense of the Democratic Regime," requesting special powers from Congress to control communist agitation expressed through the labor movement. The bill was supported by the Liberal, Conservative, and Agrarian Labor parties, most Radicals, and part of the Socialists; it was opposed by the Communists, a Radical minority, part of the Socialists, and the National Falange (forerunner of the Christian Democratic Party).[3]

As enacted, the law canceled the legal registration of the Communist Party and struck its members, and those merely suspected of involvement, from the electoral rolls.[3] Communist mayors and councilors lost their posts immediately, while sitting deputies and senators could be disqualified only after a court ruling, which affected some but not all of them.[3] Similar sanctions applied to hiring and appointments within municipal government and at all levels of public education. The law also banned all Communist organizing, propaganda, and associated activity, penalized gatherings or acts that disrupted productive activity, and, as a consequence, effectively confined the legal right to strike to the private sector; those who cooperated with or carried out acts contrary to the law were likewise punished.[3]

Implementation

Registration and disenfranchisement

On 4 September 1948, the day after Law No. 8,987 was published in the Diario Oficial, the director of the Electoral Registry, Ramón Zañartu Eguiguren, canceled the Communist Party's registration.[10] On 21 December 1948, the Diario Oficial published the list of sitting legislators, councilors, and public officials with declared Communist affiliation who were struck from the electoral registry,[11] and beginning two days later the government began publishing lists of ordinary citizens removed from the rolls, totaling 28,394 people.[2]

Some Communists sought to circumvent the ban by running as members of nominally separate parties. Deputy Víctor Galleguillos Clett was elected while affiliated with the Authentic Socialist Party and was re-elected in 1953, becoming one of the few PCCh figures to remain active in national politics during the ban; José Oyarce and Sergio González Espinoza also entered Congress under the legal cover of socialist parties.[12] Other elected Communists, such as Juan Lamatta and José Avendaño, never took their seats after Chile's electoral tribunal ruled they were Communists and annulled their votes.[13][14] The party did not regain seats won outright until the 1957 parliamentary election, through the Labor Party and the Socialist Party, and its members had to wait until the law's 1958 repeal to formally rejoin the PCCh.[12]

Detention, repression, and exile

The detention center in Pisagua, used during Carlos Ibáñez del Campo's dictatorship in the late 1920s (and which would be used again during Pinochet's dictatorship), was re-opened to imprison communists, anarchists and revolutionaries, although on this occasion no detainees were executed. A pro-communist miners' strike in Lota was brutally suppressed;[15] demonstrations against the legislation subsequently led to the declaration of martial law and were successfully repressed.

Prominent communists such as senator Pablo Neruda fled into exile. Neruda, who had joined the Communist Party in 1945, condemned the crackdown in a Senate speech on 6 January 1948 known as "Yo acuso" ("I accuse"), in which he read out the names of miners and their families held at Pisagua.[15] After the government sought to strip him of his senatorial immunity and initiated impeachment proceedings against him for allegedly defaming the country abroad, Neruda went into hiding in February 1948 and lived clandestinely for more than a year, during which he completed his epic poem Canto General, before escaping on horseback into Argentina in March 1949.[15] González Videla also broke diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states.

Political consequences

The law produced internal divisions in nearly every legally constituted Chilean party. In González Videla's own Radical Party, a dissenting minority opposed to the anti-communist policy split off to form the Doctrinaire Radical Party, while the separate Radical Democratic Party, though anti-communist, withheld full support for the measure.[16] The Socialist Party split between supporters and opponents of the ban, with opponents forming the Popular Socialist Party; some later rejoined the Socialists and allied with the outlawed Communists through the National People's Front, while the separate Authentic Socialist Party, which also opposed the law, created the National Democratic Front to help Communists run for office.[16] The Democratic Party split into pro- and anti-law factions ahead of the 1952 presidential election, and a social-Christian faction of the Conservative Party that opposed the persecution of Communists broke away to form the Social Christian Conservative Party, aligning with the National Falange; the remaining, pro-law Conservatives formed the Traditionalist Conservative Party. The Liberal and Agrarian Labor parties gave the law majority backing, and thus saw no comparable internal split.[16]

The Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy was a major issue in the 1952 presidential election, in which every candidate pledged its repeal; the winner, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, nonetheless invoked the law repeatedly during his term, including against strikes by labor organizations.[17] In response to the repressive climate, Chile's trade union federations united around labor leader Clotario Blest, founding the Central Única de Trabajadores (CUT) on 12 February 1953, which organized a general strike on 7 July 1955.

The controversy also damaged González Videla's own standing, and he left office in 1952 with diminished popularity among influential figures and left-leaning sectors affected by the law.[3] In April–May 1950, midway through his term, González Videla made a state visit to the United States, meeting President Harry S. Truman in Washington.[18]

Repeal

In 1958, amid that year's presidential race, a legislative coalition called the Democratic Sanitation Bloc formed, comprising every party except the Conservatives and Liberals, which sought both to curb electoral vote-buying and to restore political rights to those sanctioned under the law, while also seeking to recover Communist-aligned votes ahead of the election eventually won by Jorge Alessandri.[17] With majorities in both houses of Congress, the bloc pursued electoral reform, an administrative-probity law, and repeal of the Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy.[17]

The law was replaced by Law n.º 12.927, about State Security Law (Seguridad del Estado), on 6 August 1958,[19] a measure celebrated by Communists and by members of the majority bloc.[17] The repeal ended the disqualification from voter registration, the bar on holding public office, and the prohibitions on standing for or sponsoring election candidacies and on union membership or leadership that the 1948 law had imposed,[17] and lowered penalties for crimes against state security and public order to levels comparable with those that existed prior to 1948. Historian Carlos Huneeus has nonetheless argued that the repeal was incomplete, since the new law retained penalties from the earlier statute for offenses against internal security and public order and restored some categories of offense first defined in the 1937 security law, so that the 1948 law continued to constrain individual and union rights even after its formal repeal.[17]

See also

References

  1. ^ Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life url
  2. ^ a b Rojas-Flores, Jorge (2022). "Exclusión legal y participación electoral de los comunistas chilenos, 1948-1952". Izquierdas. 50. Santiago. Retrieved 3 September 2025.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Huneeus, Carlos (2009). La guerra fría Chilena. Gabriel González Videla y la Ley Maldita. Santiago: Debate.
  4. ^ Human Rights Watch, Limits of Tolerance: Freedom of Expression and the Public Debate in Chile on 1 November 1998, 1-56432-192-4, retrieved 29 June 2011
  5. ^ "Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia". Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  6. ^ a b c d Loveman, Brian; Lira, Elizabeth (2000). Las ardientes cenizas del olvido: vía chilena de reconciliación política 1932-1994. Santiago: LOM Ediciones/DIBAM. p. 77.
  7. ^ a b Villalobos, Sergio. Historia de Chile. Vol. 4. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. p. 853.
  8. ^ Mayorga, Rodrigo (2011). Escribir a Chile desde la escuela: Conciencia histórica e investigación escolar entre Centenarios (1910–2010). Santiago: RIL Editores. p. 191.
  9. ^ "González Videla: ¿un traidor o un previsor?". Crónica Digital. Retrieved 3 April 2014.
  10. ^ "Cancelada inscripción electoral del Partido Comunista" (PDF). La Nación. 5 September 1948. p. 25. Retrieved 17 February 2025.
  11. ^ "Nómina de Senadores, Diputados y Regidores en actual ejercicio de su mandato constitucional". Dirección del Registro Electoral, Diario Oficial de la República de Chile. 21 December 1948. Retrieved 3 September 2025.
  12. ^ a b Benavente, Andrés. "Partido comunista y sindicalismo politizado: una estrategia de supervivencia" (PDF). Estudios Públicos (20). Centro de Estudios Públicos. Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 September 2015.
  13. ^ "Lamatta y Avendaño, fuera del Congreso Nacional" (PDF). La Nación. 12 May 1949. p. 7. Retrieved 18 July 2025.
  14. ^ "Resultados Electorales, 1925-1973". Dirección del Registro Electoral (SERVEL). Retrieved 18 July 2025.
  15. ^ a b c "On the Run". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  16. ^ a b c Marcelo Casals, La creación de la amenaza roja: del surgimiento del anticomunismo en Chile a la 'campaña del terror' de 1964 (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2016), p. 191.
  17. ^ a b c d e f Carlos Huneeus, "Capítulo 7: La derogación de la ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia," in La creación de la amenaza roja: del surgimiento del anticomunismo en Chile a la 'campaña del terror' de 1964 (Santiago: Debate, 2016).
  18. ^ "Editorial Note". Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Volume II. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
  19. ^ "Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional | Ley Chile".

Bibliography

  • Casals, Marcelo. La creación de la amenaza roja: del surgimiento del anticomunismo en Chile a la 'campaña del terror' de 1964. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2016.
  • Chile, República de. Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia. Santiago, 1958. PDF copy via Memoria Chilena
  • Huneeus, Carlos. La guerra fría chilena: Gabriel González Videla y la Ley Maldita. Santiago: Debate, 2009.
  • Trabucco Godoy, Luis. Sobre la Ley n.º 8.987 (de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia). Santiago: Editorial Jurídica de Chile, 1953.
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