Skip to main content

Georgios Papadopoulos Biography

Georgios Papadopoulos

(Eleokhorion, 1919-Athens, 1999) Greek military and politician.Graduated as a second lieutenant from the Military Academy in 1940, that year he fought against the Italian invader in Albania and during the German invasion of 1941 he followed the royal family to Egypt.There he continued his studies at the Middle East Officers Training School and joined the Greek battalions that fought alongside the British on the fronts of the region, including guerrilla warfare in occupied Greece.

In 1943 he reached the rank of lieutenant, in 1944 he joined as an intelligence officer of the General Staff of the Greek Army and in 1946, a year after the end of World War II, he was promoted to captain and commander of an artillery battery.From that moment he fought in the Greek National Democratic Army (EDES), mostly monarchical, against the communists of the National People's Liberation Army (ELAS) until the end of the civil war in 1949, which ended with the rank of major.Throughout the conflict he served as an instructor officer in the Artillery School (1946-1948) and commander of units 131 (1948) and 144 (1948-1949) of the Mountain Artillery.

Without supporters in high places and with only his impeccable record of service, Papadopoulos made a dark and slow military career, until reaching the ranks of lieutenant colonel (1956) and colonel (1960).He regularly followed short courses at the Greek Military Academy and received supplementary special training at academies in the US and the UK.

On April 21, 1967, he held a post on the Integrated General Staff In the NATO forces, he starred with Brigadier General Stylianos Patakos and Colonel Nikolas Mazarekos in a bloodless coup that ended the parliamentary regime and the government of Panayotis Kannelopoulos.A government chaired by the civilian Konstantinos Kollias was constituted in which Papadopoulos appeared as minister without portfolio, but as a result of the thwarted counterattack of December 13, 1967 led by King Constantine II, in which Kollias was involved, he seized the Presidency of the Government and the Ministry of Defense, at the same time that he was promoted to brigadier and immediately afterwards he ceased active military service.

Anti-communist and convinced patriot, and imbued with regenerationist purposes of a marked reactionary nature, Papadopoulos was progressively personalizing the so-called "regime of the colonels", of a strictly military and dictatorial nature.With the consent of the United States, which appreciated the service rendered to contain communist influence in the region, Papadopoulos repealed constitutional guarantees, banned political parties, imposed harsh information and cultural censorship, and established a police state in the region.that thousands of opponents or suspected of being so were arrested, imprisoned or deported, including prestigious politicians and figures from the artistic world.

On September 29, 1968, he approved in a referendum (with 91.8% of the favorable votes) an authoritarian Constitution that legitimized the "Revolution of April 21".On November 29, 1970, elections to a "Legislative Advisory Committee" were held through corporate channels and without a party base.

On the outside, he had to face the harsh opposition from Western Europe in the first years, such that on December 12, 1969 he had to withdraw the country from the Council of Europe to avoid the humiliation of an imminent expulsion.Faithful guarantor of the strategic interests of the US, he applied a flexible and moderately pragmatic diplomacy (as opposed to the ideology that guided his internal management), which went through a prudent stance on the Cyprus question (reception by Archbishop Makarios in January 1970), the rapprochement with the Arab world and the communist countries of the Balkans (resumption of diplomatic relations with Albania on November 13, 1971) and, notably, the recognition of People's China in 1972.

When On August 3, 1971, the US House of Representatives decided to suspend military aid to the Greek regime for its violation of human rights, President Nixon came out in defense of Papadopoulos, and later reached an agreement with him to turn Greek ports into the main bases of the 6th US Fleet in the Mediterranean.

Papadopoulos added to his functions that of Minister of Education in 1969 (until 1970), that of Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1970 and own head of state on March 21, 1972 as regency, a position that General Georgios Zoitakis had held since the king's flight in December 1967.On June 1, 1973 he accused Constantine of having prepared the failed royalist plot "the Armada "dismantled in March and announced a law to abolish the monarchical institution and proclaim the" Parliamentary Presidential Republic ", a project that was effectively approved in a referendum on July 29 with 78.4% affirmative votes.

The entire political arc, from the monarchists to the communists, gathered in a Parliamentary Committee for the Restoration of Democratic Legality, denounced the consultation as "a fraud and a disgrace for the country" and "a maneuver to prolong the dictatorship." Be that as it may, on August 19, 1973, Papadopoulos was sworn in as President of the Republic for a seven-year term.

At his inauguration, he announced the appointment of Spyros Markezinis to preside over a new civilian government., the amnesty for all political prisoners since 1967 (including the man who attacked him in August 1968), the lifting of martial law in Athens and the holding of pluralist legislative elections in 1974.This institutionalization of the regime and its alleged defeat Liberal was understood as an attempt to perpetuate the dictatorship.On November 17, 1973, in the face of serious disturbances caused by students, who had called for a popular uprising, Papadopoulos had to declare martial law in Athens, but the following 25 a group of soldiers commanded by the chief of the military police (ESA ), Dimitri Ioannides, removed Papadopoulos from power and installed Lieutenant-General Phaidon Gizikis as president.

The maneuver saw the alarm of the extreme right sector of the army before the latest normalizing initiatives of Papadopoulos, inclined to a certain legalistic solution to the crisis and reaffirmed in its promise to hold legislative elections in 1974, which, they feared, they could lead to chaos.The new junta accused Papadopoulos of being incapable of containing public disorder, of "betraying the aims of the 1967 movement" and of "obstructing the return to a healthy parliamentarism." However, the disastrous military adventure in Cyprus caused the collapse of the regime in July 1974 and in October Papadopoulos was arrested by the new democratic authorities.

In the process that was opened to the heads of During the dictatorship, in August 1975, Papadopoulos was found guilty of insurrection and high treason and sentenced to death, a sentence that would be commuted to life imprisonment.He was held in Korydallos Prison, where he died in 1999.On January 29, 1984, he launched a far-right party, the Greek National Political Society (EPEN), which did not achieve a major impact.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Josep Tarradellas Biography

Josep Tarradellas (Josep Tarradellas i Joan; Cervelló, Barcelona, ​​1899-Barcelona, ​​1988) Catalan nationalist politician.His Catalanist and leftist convictions led him to participate in the republican opposition against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), as a member of various groups that, in 1931, were integrated into the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya coalition. Josep Tarradellas Tarradellas was elected secretary general of that group, which was to dominate Catalan political life during the Second Republic (1931-1936).He was a member of the Spanish Parliament and, after the approval of the first Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia (1932), also a member of the Catalan Parliament, Minister of the Interior and Health and a close collaborator of the first president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Francesc Macià.
Post a Comment
Read more

Francisco Asenjo Barbieri Biography

Francisco Asenjo Barbieri (Madrid, 1823-1894) Spanish composer and musicologist.The significance of Francisco Asenjo Barbieri in Spanish music is threefold: he was an excellent composer, a capable conductor, who is responsible for the introduction in Spain of many symphonic works from the European continent, and a tireless musicologist, responsible for the recovery and edition of the ancient heritage of his homeland. Francisco Asenjo Barbieri Drawn to opera since his earliest childhood (when he attended the Italian opera performances that were offered at the Teatro de la Cruz, in the that his grandfather worked), Barbieri studied clarinet, singing and composition at the Madrid Conservatory, where he had Ramón Carnicer as his teacher.At the end of his studies he carried out various tasks, from copyist to choirmaster, while trying to publicize his first compositions, including the Italian opera Il buontempone (1847). The difficulties to release it made him focus his interest o...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Berlin Wall - Construction, history and fall of the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall-Construction, history and fall of the Berlin Wall .The construction and especially the fall of the Berlin Wall have been great events that have marked the history of the 20th century since This wall divided Germany into two parts for more than 28 years. In this article we want to explain the background, the history of the construction, the fall and where you can see the remains of the Berlin Wall.all about the Berlin Wall, the Cold War symbol ! Index of the article Background of the Berlin Wall Let's start the article explaining how Germany was and what happened for the construction of the Berlin Wall.When World War II ended Germany was divided , we focused on Berlin where the city was segmented and n four sectors depending on the countries that occupied it.Or what is the same, Berlin was divided into these four sectors of occupation : The Soviet area The American zone The French zone The English zone When four countries with such different pol...
Post a Comment
Read more

Prehistory: How did the Paleolithic hunters and gatherers live?

In a previous article we already talked about Prehistory and specifically, about hunters and gatherers in the Paleolithic.We suggest you learn more about how these societies lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. Article index Prehistory: Paleolithic hunters and gatherers, how did they live? The prehistoric era encompassed the longest period of humanity, and in fact includes from the appearance of man until the first writings are given.We can say that the prehistory is divided between Neolotic, Paleolithic and stone age. Focusing on the paleolotico , the remains of paintings of the man who lived in the caves, has allowed us to know that these were mainly dedicated to hunting animals and also n collected. Adaptation to the Environment In order to carry out the collection, it was necessary to adapt to the environment that is the ability of man to obtain resources from the environment for the subsistence and growth of the society . The humans of the Paleo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jorge L. Tamayo Biography

Jorge L.Tamayo (Oaxaca, 1912-Playa Vicente, Veracruz, 1978) Mexican engineer and geographer.He was a professor of economic geography, a technical consultant on transportation for the UN attached to ECLAC, and president of the Mexican Society of Natural History (1974-1978).His works include The use of water and soil in Mexico (1958), Atlas of the water of the Mexican Republic (1976) and The fundamental problem of the Mexican agriculture (1964), for which he won the national economics prize in 1962 and 1964.Despite not being one of his fields of study, Jorge L.Tamayo also carried out an enormous task as a historian by collecting more than nine thousand writings and documents related to the Mexican president Benito Juárez, a task in which he invested ten years and whose results would be published in fifteen volumes.
Post a Comment
Read more

Ibn al-Nafis Biography

Ibn al-Nafis (Damascus, 1205-Cairo, 1288) Arab physician.He studied medicine in Damascus.His professional career developed in Egypt, where he was chief of physicians, and later headed the Nasiri Hospital in Cairo. Ibn al-Nafis He is known for his writings on physiology and medicine.His voluminous book on the art of medicine, entitled Kitab al-Shamil , includes specific sections on surgical techniques and on the obligations of physicians to their patients.He also wrote various treatises on eye diseases and on diet, as well as comments on the writings of the Greek physician Hippocrates. His most outstanding contribution was the discovery of the lesser circulation of the blood (pulmonary circulation), to the that it arrived surely by pure reflection, since the dissection was prohibited by the Muslim law; Such a contribution is found in his work Sharh Tashrrih al-Qanun .His theory was not accepted by his contemporaries; However, as early as the 16th century, the Spanish theologi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Georges devereux Biography

Georges Devereux (Lugos, 1908-Paris, 1985) Hungarian-American anthropologist and psychiatrist.He studied physics with Curie and Perrin, but in 1926 he went to the institute of ethnology, where he was a disciple of Maus and Lévy-Bruhl, and settled in the United States, where he was a professor at various universities.He founded ethnopsychiatry ( Ethnopsychiatry , 1970) and synthesized Greek culture ( Dreams in Greek tragedy , 1976), psychoanalysis ( Complementary ethnopsychoanalysis , 1972) and anthropology (he has two studies on the Prairie Indians and the Mohave).
Post a Comment
Read more

John osborne Biography

John Osborne (London, 1929-Shropshire, UK, 1994) British playwright.The first book of his autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1989), describes his childhood in the suburbs, his brief experience as a journalist and his years as a provincial actor, during which he began to write his first plays, the first being staged in 1950. He made his name with Looking back with anger (1956), which was followed by Epitaph for George Dillon (1957), written in collaboration with Anthony Creighton. The Host (1957) starred Laurence Olivier in the role of Archie Rice, a withered survivor of the great Music Hall era. Looking back with anger was the founder of a new theatrical trend that critics called the school of angry young men ( angry young man ) for the vitality, satire and realism of his proposal, which expressed a reaction against the old values ​​and the social order established in the postwar period.Osborne was precisely one of the most important and well-known playwrights o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Enrico Caruso Biography

Enrico Caruso (Naples, 1873-id., 1921) Italian tenor considered the best of his time and one of the greatest in history.Enrico Caruso made his debut in his hometown in 1894, although it was in Milan that he achieved his first great success in 1898 with the interpretation of the opera Fedora , by Umberto Giordano. Enrico Caruso His tours took him around the world, with performances in Saint Petersburg, Rome, Lisbon and Monte Carlo, where he excelled in his magnificent interpretation of La bohème by Giacomo Puccini, accompanied by Australian soprano Nellie Melba.With his fame firmly established, he made his debut in 1902 at London's Covent Garden with Rigoletto by Verdi, an opera that he also performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1903, with extraordinary success.The beauty and strength of her voice won over the Metropolitan audience. His cheerful and outgoing character, his dramatic talent on stage and an almost perfect tenor voice, with a superb powe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Albert uderzo Biography

Albert Uderzo French cartoonist and screenwriter, born in Fismes in 1927.His foray into the world of comics took place very early, as an employee in a publishing house, which allowed him to learn his techniques and launch himself to the publication of his first plates.In collaboration with René Goscinny, he created Pistolet and Luc Junior ; Years later, in the weekly Pilote, would appear what was to become one of his most successful creations: Asterix , with scripts by his friend Goscinny.Another of his notable productions, in collaboration with Charlier, was Tanguy et Laverdure .He is considered one of the most important authors of the comic.
Post a Comment
Read more