Chile, 1948 — dissident coup conspiracy
Event Summary
In 1948, during the anti-communist turn of the government of President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla in Chile, the president learned of a plot by some members of the armed forces to lead a coup against him and install the former president and army general Carlos Ibanez del Campo in power. Gonzalez Videla had been elected in 1946 with communist support and had appointed three communists to his first cabinet, but under Cold War pressures and a wave of communist-led strikes he broke with the party, expelled its ministers, and on 3 July 1948 enacted the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, the so-called Ley Maldita, which outlawed the Communist Party and interned leftist leaders in the Pisagua desert camp. Amid this turmoil the coded 31 October 1948 conspiracy reflects the discovered military plot to replace Gonzalez Videla with Ibanez, who had ruled Chile as a strongman in the late 1920s and would later return to the presidency by election in 1952.
The plot failed and Gonzalez Videla completed his term.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
Cross-Reference
Only one dataset carries it. One of the three reference datasets we check against carries this event; the others do not list it. That is not a contradiction — the datasets cover different periods and use different thresholds — but it means the record has had less outside corroboration.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
15510311948
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla survived the plot and completed his term in 1952.
Baseline coding: Plot discovered and disrupted before execution. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
CSP
Wikipedia
New York Times
Chicago Daily Tribune
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →