Gonzalo Vial Correa

Gonzalo Vial Correa (29 August 1930 – 30 October 2009) was a Chilean historian, lawyer and journalist. He was a member of the State Defense Council and the Council on Ethics in Social Media. In addition he was president of the Barnechea Foundation for Education, which he founded with his wife, María Luisa Vial Cox.

In 2005, Vial was voted the most influential intellectual in Chile by 112 Chilean scholars and politicians. In August 2010 the Faculty of History at Finis Terrae University instituted a prize bearing his name.

Despite this recognition, Gonzalo Vial has been widely criticized for his work White Book on the Change of Government in Chile, written immediately after the 1973 Chilean coup d'état and supervised by Admiral Patricio Carvajal, which described the so-called "Plan Zeta". Plan Zeta disseminated the false idea that left-wing elements were organizing a self-coup against President Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular, and for years this was the main justification of the coup and subsequent establishment of a military government. Under the pretense of countering Plan Zeta, the DINA arrested, tortured, and murdered many people. At the same time he studied the history of education and some of his mentors in this field were Jaime Eyzaguirre, Mario Góngora and Ricardo Krebs.

Professional activities Vial taught in the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile's Faculty of Law and in its Faculty of Sociology. He had also served as Dean of History, Geography, and Arts at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences

During the second administration of President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, Vial was private secretary to Finance Minister Jorge Prat. According to the Valech Report, the contents of the White Book were pure political propaganda and an excuse to justify the coup. Vial, on the other hand, insisted that documents relating to Plan Zeta were genuine, pointing out that the Revolutionary Left Movement itself had publicly proposed a coup d'état and a dictatorship of the proletariat with the support of willing factions within the military. Vial also stated that the military itself did not immediately agree to make the existence of the plan public on the grounds that they were still investigating it, which indicates that the military did not intend for it to be propaganda.

Between 1978 and 1979 he was Education Minister in the military government led by Augusto Pinochet, though he was dismissed from his post abruptly. Some suspected freemasons of being behind his sudden replacement, due to his Catholic faith and his connections with the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He also took part in the Round-Table Discussion of 1999 to 2000, but did not sign the final declaration because he felt that it did nothing to further the objective of the undertaking, which was to find the bodies of people who had been "disappeared" by the regime.

Works Historia de Chile (1891-1973) , 6 volumes published: La sociedad chilena en el cambio de siglo (1891-1920) Triunfo y decadencia de la oligarquía (1891- 1920) Arturo Alessandri y los golpes militares (1920-1925) La dictadura de Ibáñez (1925-1931) De la república socialista al frente popular (1931-1938) Pinochet, la biografía Arturo Prat Salvador Allende: El fracaso de una ilusión Chile, cinco siglos de historia; desde los primeros pobladores prehispánicos hasta el año 2006. 2 Volumes. Coauthor of: El senado de Chile Balmaceda y la guerra civil La Sudamericana de Vapores Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez, una biografía Jaime Eyzaguirre y su época