Roberto Jorquera, Santiago

On March 6, Chilean Communist Party president Gladys Marin died at the age of 63 after a 18-month battle with cancer. As soon as her death was made public at 6am, many people began to gather outside her house to show their respects and admiration for a person that struggled all her life for a just society.

Marin was not only highly respected within the Communist Party but was a public symbol of the resistance against General Augusto Pinochet' 1973-89 military dictatorship.

Estimates of the size of Marin’s March 8 funeral procession ranged in the hundreds of thousands — perhaps the largest political gathering in Chile since the end of the dictatorship.

Marin joined the Communist Youth at the age of 16 and participated in Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende's 1964 presidential campaign. She was later elected to parliament in 1965 and reelected in 1969 and 1973.

As general secretary of the Communist Youth, Marin was part of organising solidarity marches with Vietnam between Valparaiso and Santiago (over 100 kilometres) during the US war against that country.

On the day of Pinochet's military coup (September 11, 1973), Marin was put on a list of the 100 most wanted people by the new regime. Under the direction of the Communist Party, she entered the grounds of the Dutch embassy and went into forced exile.

In May 1976, Marin received the news that her husband, Jorge Munoz, had been detained. His body has still not been found.

Two years later, Marin was one of the first political exiles to clandestinely return to Chile to help organise the Communist Party underground until it was able to function publicly in 1984. She was elected as the CP's general secretary in 1998 and became party president in 2002.

From Green Left Weekly, March 16, 2005.
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