MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chilean Communist Party leader dead at 63

Gladys Marin, the combative leader of the Chilean Communist Party who became a symbol in the fight against the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, died early Sunday after a long fight with cancer, the party reported. She was 63.

Marin died at her home in the Santiago middle-class suburb of La Florida, said Guillermo Tellier, the Communist Party's secretary-general.

"A few hours after falling into a coma, our loved comrade and president of our party has died," Tellier said.

Marin battled brain cancer for a year-and-a-half, including surgery in Sweden and two recovery periods in Cuba, where she was a personal guest of President Fidel Castro.

Marin was an implacable foe of Pinochet's 1973-90 dictatorship. She was one of the leaders of the first massive protests against Pinochet in the 1980s, often facing the police tear gas and water cannons in the streets.

In 1998, she filed the first suit against Pinochet for human rights violations during his regime, thus starting the former dictator's legal troubles, which include two indictments and house arrests.

The daughter of a peasant, Marin joined the Communist Party at age 16 -- combining her political activity with her work in Catholic groups in Talagante, a town just southwest of Santiago.

She was elected to congress for three consecutive terms before the 1973 coup in which Pinochet toppled Marxist President Salvador Allende.

Marin went into hiding to escape the repression of leftists launched by the military, but on orders from the party she sought asylum at the Dutch embassy and then traveled into exile in Amsterdam.

While in the embassy, she saw her husband, engineer Jorge Munoz, for the last time, as he walked slowly in front of the diplomatic building. Months later, Munoz was arrested by Pinochet's security service and never seen again. The couple had two children.

Marin remained an old-style communist until the end and kept her party immune to the changes implemented by other communists in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet block.

She never agreed to support the center-left civilian governments that succeeded Pinochet in 1990.

"I can't support these governments while there are still hungry children in the streets of my country," she said once, urging "an end of the neoliberal system inherited from the dictatorship."

Her dedication to her cause gained her respect and praise even from some political rivals.

Msgr. Alfonso Baeza, a Catholic bishop who was a key figure in the defense of human rights under Pinochet, called Marin "a great human being, a political leader, a woman who battled firmly for justice and peace and against impunity."

The family said Marin's funeral will be held on Tuesday, the international day of women.