Gladys del Carmen Marín Millie (; July 18, 1937 – March 6, 2005) was a Chilean schoolteacher, activist and political figure who led the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) as Secretary-General from 1994 to 2002 and as president from 2002 until her death. A deputy in the Chamber of Deputies from 1965 until the 1973 coup d'état, she spent much of the Pinochet dictatorship in exile or in clandestinity, and played a central role in the party's turn toward armed resistance in the 1980s. After the return of democracy, she became a leading voice for human rights accountability, filing the first criminal complaint against Augusto Pinochet in January 1998. Gladys Marín was the youngest person ever elected to the Chilean Congress, one of the first two women, alongside Sara Larraín, to run for the country's presidency, and the only woman ever to lead a Chilean political party. She died of glioblastoma in 2005, and her funeral drew hundreds of thousands of mourners to Santiago.
Early life and education
Marín was born in Curepto, in the Maule region, to Heraclio Marín, a farmer, and school teacher Adriana del Carmen Millie; she was the second of the couple's four daughters. Her father left the family while she was still young, leaving her mother to raise the children alone. The family later moved to Sarmiento and then to Talagante, and at the age of eleven Marín settled in Santiago.
While in high school, she began volunteering with organizations that aided the poor, including the Juventud Obrera Católica (Young Catholic Workers). She went on to train as a teacher at the Escuela Normal de Preceptores in Santiago, where she was elected president of the Federación de Estudiantes Normalistas (Federation of Normal-School Students). In 1957, she received her teacher's diploma and joined the staff of School No. 130, which served students with intellectual disabilities inside the capital's main mental hospital.
Soon after, at seventeen years old, she joined the Juventudes Comunistas (Communist Youth), taking part in volunteer community projects — planting green spaces, painting murals and repairing housing — in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Santiago, and quickly rose to lead the organization. At 21, she took charge of Women's Affairs for the Communist Youth, and in 1962 joined the Communist Party of Chile's Political Commission of the Central Committee as an appointed member — the only woman among its 45 members. By 1965, at age 27, she had become Secretary General of the Communist Youth of Chile, a post she held until 1977, making her the first woman to lead a political youth organization in Chile.
During her years in the Communist Youth, Marín worked on Socialist Salvador Allende's presidential campaigns of 1958 and 1964, and it was through her party activities that she met Jorge Muñoz Poutays in 1959; the two married in 1963. Marín and Muñoz came from lower and upper middle class families respectively, and had first met at party headquarters before formally meeting a few months later during party-led volunteer work. At 23, she won a seat in the lower house of the Chilean Congress, where she would go on to serve for nine years.
Political career
Chamber of Deputies (1965–1973) Marín joined the Communist party while studying at pedagogy faculty in Santiago. She was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the 1965 parliamentary election, representing the 2nd district of Santiago, which encompassed the working-class communes of Renca, Conchalí, Recoleta, Independencia, Colina, Til Til, Talagante, Curacaví, Quinta Normal and Barrancas (present-day Pudahuel). She was reelected in 1969 and again in 1973, holding her seat until the Congress was dissolved following the coup of that year.
After the Popular Unity Government of Salvador Allende took power, Marín helped to organize much of the political work taking place outside of parliament. In her post as Secretary General of the Communist Youth, she participated in cultural groups, volunteer urban work crews, and involved herself in peasant movements.
1973 coup and exile Following the 1973 coup d'état, Marín first went underground. Augusto Pinochet's military coup on September 11, abolished party politics within Chile. Order No. 10 issued by the ruling military junta in the days after the coup demanded the voluntary surrender of ninety-five prominent supporters of the Popular Unity government, a list that included Marín alongside Orlando Letelier, Luis Corvalán and Carlos Altamirano; many of those named were later imprisoned, tortured, killed or became forcibly disappeared. She went into hiding and was named one of the regimes 100 most wanted persons. In November, 1973, she obtained asylum in the Dutch embassy, which would be the last place she would see her husband. She obtained asylum at the PCCh's insistence and remained there for eight months before being allowed to leave the country to East Germany. She was formally exiled in 1974. During her exile her part of her political work entailed spreading the word about the political situation in Chile. On the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Marín held a press conference at UN Headquarters in order to call attention to the situation in Chile. Marín travelled widely, specifically in Argentina. In September 1974, she traveled to Buenos Aires to warn Pinochet's predecessor as army commander-in-chief, who was living in exile, that Pinochet was planning his assassination. Four days later, he and his wife were killed when Pinochet planned for their car to explode.
Her husband Jorge Muñoz, the then secretary for the Communist Party of Santiago, disappeared in 1976 while Marín was out of the country, traveling in Costa Rica. Today, he is presumed dead but his corpse was never found. Under Chilean law, Pinochet stands charged with his kidnapping. She returned to Chile, clandestinely, in 1978 and fought from the underground for the return of democracy. She was in Moscow before returning secretly to Chile. Before returning to Chile, they wanted to have her teeth removed and replaced, as she states "I'm lucky to have kept my teeth because they wanted to change them for me." She passed herself off as a Spanish women, using a Spanish accent and dressed in Spanish clothing. She filled her mouth with pads to alter her facial expressions and rounded her bust and hips. In disguise, she passed police examination on the bus across the Andes from Argentina.
Clandestine leadership and the armed resistance Once in Chile, she continued to secretly promote the Communist Party and was elected its under-secretary in 1984. Marín was instrumental in the creation of the armed wing of the Communist Party, the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), as the Communist Party switched to a strategy of popular rebellion during the Pinochet dictatorship. According to Marín's later biographers, her conviction was decisive in persuading the party to train armed cadres and to pursue the "political-military road" against the dictatorship. In 1986, together with the party's military chief Guillermo Teillier — who was then living clandestinely under the alias "Sebastián Larraín" — she was involved in overseeing the party's channel to the FPMR, which that year attempted to smuggle roughly 80 tons of weapons and explosives from Cuba into the country through the northern cove of Carrizal Bajo, in what became the largest arms-trafficking operation uncovered in Chile up to that time; the great majority of the arms shipment was subsequently seized by the armed forces. Along with other exiled members who had received military training, the Front would unsuccessfully attempt to assassinate Augusto Pinochet in 1986.
Return to legal politics and party leadership After the end of the dictatorship in 1990, Marín was elected Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Chile in 1994, the party's most senior post. In October 1996, during a commemoration of the anniversary of the 1973 coup, Marín publicly described Pinochet — then still commander-in-chief of the army — as the chief architect of state terrorism and crimes against humanity who continued exercising power because the government allowed it. The army filed a defamation complaint against her under the State Security Law, and she was arrested and briefly held in a women's prison in Santiago; the complaint was withdrawn days later following domestic and international pressure and the intervention of Chile's Supreme Court.
In 1997, Marín ran for a seat in the Senate and obtained the eighth largest national majority, but was not elected due to the nature of the Chilean electoral system, which favours the two dominant parties or coalitions. In her own constituency, Santiago Poniente, she placed fourth with 15.69 percent of the vote (174,780 votes).
Legal case against Pinochet and 1999 presidential campaign On January 12, 1998, Marín filed a complaint — the first person in Chile to do so — against Augusto Pinochet, accusing him of genocide, kidnapping, illicit association and illegal inhumation. At the time, Pinochet was still the commander of the Armed Forces and would soon become a lifetime senator. Marín was staunchly against the proposal to make Pinochet a lifetime senator, stating that the complaint was aimed at fighting against the move. Marín's complaint led to hundreds of families to come forward and accuse Pinochet and his allies in court.
She ran for president in 1999 against Joaquin Lavin of the Union Pro Chile Coalition and Ricardo Lagos of the incumbent Concertacion Coalition. Achieving less than four percent of the vote, Marín became, alongside Sara Larraín, the first female candidates to contest the first round of a presidential election in Chile. In the runoff election between Lavin and Lagos which followed, Marín and the Communist Party expressed hesitation to endorse Lagos against the far right Lavin, instead labeling them both "two sides of the same coin neoliberalism."
In August 2000, Marín attended the Third Al Mathaba Conference, held by the Al-Mathaba World Anti-Imperialist Centre, a centre in Libya established by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for supporting anti-imperialist and leftist revolutionaries worldwide, as the representative of the PCCh, whose erstwhile anti-Pinochet armed wing, the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, had received support from Libya and its leader.
In the 2001 legislative elections, conflict among the Concertacion coalition emerged after the Socialist Party of Chile (PS) sought to endorse two candidates from the Communist Party. Some members of the governing Concertacion Coalition believed that this move would split the coalition ideologically, while members of the Communist and Socialist Parties saw it as an opportunity to grant the Communist Party a space in parliament, something they had not had since the coup of 1973. Additionally, the move aimed to boost the Concertacion Coalition's votes to secure two seats. Gladys Marín weighed in on the decision positively, stating "This agreement will allow the party to regain a legitimate presence in the parliament, which is long overdue."
Illness and death On September 25, 2003, Marín was hospitalized in Santiago, where doctors diagnosed her with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer. On October 1, she traveled to the Karolinska clinic in Stockholm, Sweden, where she was operated on by neurologist Inti Peredo. Later that month she traveled to Havana, Cuba, to begin a course of rehabilitation arranged by her personal friend, Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In February 2004, while still in Cuba, she presented her autobiography, La vida es hoy, at the Havana International Book Fair, with a prologue written by Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez. She underwent a further operation for tissue necrosis in Havana in September 2004, before returning to Chile.