Guillermo Teillier, a long-time militant of the Chilean Communist Party who he has presided over for the last 18 years, died early Tuesday morning due to medical complications, reported the Clinical Hospital of the University of Chile, where he was hospitalized.
President Gabriel Boric, who had visited him while he was hospitalized, decreed a two-day national mourning as a tribute "for his tireless effort to build a more just society," the president wrote on his X social network account, before calling Twitter .
The Communist Party defined him in his X account as an "anti-fascist fighter and fighter against the dictatorship", among other allusions. After the 1973 military coup, he was arrested in 1974 and tortured during his six-month stay at the Air Force War Academy. He then was relegated several times and in 1976 he went into hiding.
Teillier was hospitalized on several occasions after contracting COVID-19 in September 2020 that led to various health complications, including intestinal ischemia that resulted in decreased blood reaching the digestive tract.
During the last few weeks, "he gave battle until the last second," declared the general secretary of the Communist Party, Lautaro Carmona.
At the end of the military dictatorship (1973-1990) Teillier was head of the Military Commission of the Communist Party and received Cuban weapons sent to Chile to resist the regime of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. In addition, he was his party's liaison with the Manuel RodrÃguez Patriotic Front, the armed wing of the Communist Party, which unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Pinochet on September 7, 1986.
After the return to democracy, he was elected deputy for three terms, between 2010 and 2022, and failed twice in his attempt to reach the Senate.
