Almeyda Medina, Clodomiro

(c. 1923–1997)

   A leader of the Partido Socialista de Chile (PS, Socialist Party), a Marxist scholar, and a high official in the Unidad Popular (UP, Popular Unity) government of Salvador Allende Gossens—all of which made him a target of the junta that ousted Allende Gossens on 11 September 1973. Like Allende Gossens, Almeyda Medina joined the PS as a student and spent his life as a committed Marxist. He held a variety of positions within the UP, including foreign minister, defense minister, and vice president. Although a voice of moderation in government, he would adopt a more hard-line stance after the coup. On 11 September the army captured Almeyda Medina along with the other UP officers as they exited what was left of the heavily bombed La Moneda (the presidential palace). He was immediately sent to Dawson Island prison camp and then transferred to Santiago before his ejection from the country in 1975. During his exile (1975–1987), most of it spent in East Germany, he became an advocate for exiles forcibly expelled from the country and unable to return because of the junta’s ban on political dissidents. In 1987, defying the ban, he returned to Chile, where he was seized by the security forces of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. The military government referred to him as an “apologist for violence” and sentenced him to internal exile, or relegación. An international campaign for his freedom, however, led the Supreme Court to commute his sentence after he had served 300 days. As a member of the PS central committee, Almeyda Medina became active in the Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP, Popular Democratic Movement), a leftist coalition formed in 1983 by the Partido Comunista (PC, Communist Party of Chile). In 1990 he reentered government service as ambassador to the Soviet Union under President Patricio Aylwin Azócar. He resigned his post under controversy, having sheltered his friend Erich Honecker, the former leader of Communist East Germany, in Moscow in 1991. Germany, now reunited, wanted Honecker extradited to face charges in connection with the East German government’s policy of shooting people trying to escape communist rule. (Honecker was granted asylum in Chile, where he died in 1992.) Before his death in 1997, Almeyda Medina returned to writing and teaching at the Universidad de Chile in addition to his work on behalf of the PS. He was buried with a state funeral and military honors.