Francisco Vidal Salinas
Chilean politician
Francisco Javier Vidal Salinas (born 20 September 1953) is a Chilean politician and scholar.
In 1971, he began his political career at the rightist National Party.
He was Chile's Minister of National Defense from March 2009 to March 2010. Before this position he served as Minister Secretary General of Government of Chile during the administrations of Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet and Interior Minister during Lagos's mandate.
He is a professor of history at the University of Chile.
Family and education
He was born in Santiago on 20 September 1953, the son of Carlos Enrique Vidal Vargas, a bank employee who ended his working life at a construction company, and María Cecilia Salinas Opazo, a Catholic homemaker. His parents separated when he was young.
His sister Adriana married surgeon Julio Montt, who served as a councillor, deputy, and Minister of Health during the administration of President Patricio Aylwin. One of their sons, Julio Montt Vidal, also pursued a political career, serving as Undersecretary of Healthcare Networks during the administration of President Ricardo Lagos.
He completed his primary and secondary education at the German School of Santiago, the Military School of Bernardo O'Higgins ―which he entered at the age of sixteen and where he met future agents of the Pinochet regime like Armando Fernández Larios and Álvaro Corbalán― and finally at Liceo Rafael Sotomayor in Las Condes.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Francisco Vidal Salinas” as chilean politician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as chilean politician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1630031. VIAF identifies the subject as 233145857948123021343. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1971, 2009 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francisco Vidal Salinas” 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.