Gallo Goyenechea, Pedro León (1830–1877)

Pedro León Gallo Goyenechea (b. 12 February 1830; d. 16 December 1877), Chilean politician. Born into a prosperous mining family at Copiapó, Atacama Province, Gallo took a lifelong interest in politics, strongly supporting President Manuel Montt (to whom he was related by marriage) at the time of his election (1851) but later turning against his authoritarianism. In January 1859 he launched an armed rebellion against Montt (the Constituent Revolution), sinking much of his fortune into the cause. At his base, the mining town of Copiapó, he recruited an army and manufactured weapons, also issuing his own locally minted currency (constituent pesos). Although Gallo staged a brilliant march to capture La Serena (March 1859), his army was defeated at the battle of Cerro Grande, just south of the city, two weeks later in April. Gallo fled into exile, returning to Chile in 1863, when, with his friend Manuel Antonio Matta, he founded the Radical Party, often nicknamed la tienda de los Matta y los Gallo (The Matta and Gallo store). In his later years he served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, and in 1876 he was elected to the Senate.

See alsoChile, Political Parties: Radical Party; Chile: The Nineteenth Century; Montt Torres, Manuel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mario Bahamonde Silva, El caudillo de Copiapó: Copiapó, 1859 (1977), and Simon Collier, "Chile from Independence to the War of the Pacific," in Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell, vol. 3 (1985), pp. 583-613.

Additional Bibliography

Collier, Simon. Chile: The Making of a Republic, 1830–1865: Politics and Ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

                                      Simon Collier