19 Facts About Gabriel Terra

Jose Luis Gabriel Terra Leivas was a Uruguayan lawyer and statesman who served as the 26th constitutional president of Uruguay from 1931 to 1933 and as dictator until 1938.

Gabriel Terra led a traditionalist and corporatist regime known as the March dictatorship, because the self-coup that he led took place on March 31,1934.

Gabriel Terra practiced as a lawyer and Justice of the Peace at the end of the 1890s and he was a professor at the Higher School of Commerce beginning in 1901.

Gabriel Terra was a national deputy from 1903 to 1907, minister of Industry, Labor and Public Instruction from 1907 to 1911.

Gabriel Terra founded the industrial oxygen production company CINOCA in 1908 and was a member of the National Constituent Assembly of 1917, Minister of the Interior from 1919 to 1921, and member of the National Council of Administration from 1926 to 1929.

Gabriel Terra was Constitutional President between 1931 and 1933, but became a de facto president from March 1933 to May 1934 after launching a self-coup.

Gabriel Terra was president of the Banco de la Republica Oriental del Uruguay in 1938.

Gabriel Terra died in poverty, passing away in an armchair on the early morning of 15 September 1942.

Gabriel Terra's remains were accompanied by hundreds of thousands of people along the procession.

Gabriel Terra graduated as a lawyer in 1895 from UdelaR and had a lengthy political career, being a national deputy, he was deputy, minister of Industry, Work, and Public Instruction, a member of the 1917 Uruguayan Constituent Assembly, and member of the National Board of Directors.

Gabriel Terra was affiliated to the Colorado Party, although he was often independent of the dominant positions of its leader, Jose Batlle y Ordonez.

Gabriel Terra was an expert in economic and diplomatic issues, areas in which he advised all the Uruguayan governments between 1900 and 1938, he was a member of the Colorado Party, although many times independent of the dominant positions of its leader, Jose Batlle y Ordonez.

In 1920, Gabriel Terra presented a bill providing for the creation of a National Cooperative Institute.

Gabriel Terra had the longest uninterrupted tenure in office of any Uruguayan president, the only one to have three terms and the first to be re-elected.

Gabriel Terra died in poverty, left no economic inheritance, nor political-partisan inheritance, and his name is synonymous with repudiation in Uruguay.

Gabriel Terra opposed the Constitution of 1918 from the beginning, claiming that it was an unviable system that generated ungovernability.

Gabriel Terra established a progressive and anti-liberal government that was opposed by Batllismo, the Independent Whites, the Socialist Party of Uruguay and the Communist Party of Uruguay.

Gabriel Terra made statements about Jews and international finance, in one of his long radio-conferences.

In 1934, dictator Gabriel Terra ordered the establishment of the National Tourism Commission, as well as the magazine "Tourism in Uruguay", which under the editorial leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Relations, as well as the aid of State resources and diffusion, presented a positive image of Uruguay and its ruling regime to the citizens of the world.