Chilean destroyer Ministro Portales
1944 Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer
Ministro Portales was a Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer purchased by Chile in 1974 from the United States that had been upgraded to FRAM II. Built and commissioned as USS Douglas H. Fox (DD-779) in 1944, the ship saw service during World War II and the Korean War. Between 1975 and 1976, the vessel was refitted with an extension on the flight deck for Alouette-III Helicopters.
Ministro Portales participated in the counteractive measures to the Operation Soberanía during the Beagle conflict in 1978. In this period, all the Chilean navy ships were camouflaged.
The vessel served the navy of Chile until it was taken off active duty and towed from Talcahuano to Puerto Williams, arriving at the wharf on 18 September 1991. There, it was a static support vessel for the local torpedo boat fleet until their replacement by missile boats.
On 11 November 1998, Ministro Portales was used as a target and sunk during a practice exercise.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Chilean destroyer Ministro Portales” is 1944 Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Chilean, destroyer and Ministro, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5098779. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1944, 1975 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chilean destroyer Ministro Portales” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.