Carlos Gregorio Dávila Espinoza (September 15, 1887—October 19 1955), was Secretary General of the Organization of American States from 1954 until his death in 1955. He was also provisionally President of Chile in 1932.

Dávila was born in Los Ángeles, Chile to Luis Dávila and Emilia Espinoza . He graduated from the University of Santiago, Chile in 1907. In 1929, he received an honorary LL.D. from Columbia University, and another in 1929 from the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles.

In 1911, he entered Law School at the University of Chile, but dropped out three years later to work for newspaper “El Mercurio ”, of Santiago. He left that paper in 1917 to establish “La Nación ” of the same city, which he directed until 1927. In 1932, he founded the Chilean magazine, “Hoy”.

From 1927 to 1931, Dávila served as Chilean Ambassador to the United States , and in 1932 he was for several months provisional President of Chile. Later he came to the United States and was associated for many years with the Editors’ Press Service , and acted as correspondent for numerous important South American newspapers. In 1941 he received the Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his distinguished journalistic contribution in the service of the Americas. A prolific writer, Dávila is the author of “We of the Americas”, published in 1949 and has contributed many analytical studies on politics and economics to leading American publications.

In 1933, Dávila was visiting Professor of International Law at the University of North Carolina, under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served on the Council of UNRRA from 1943 to 1946, and was Chilean Representative to the Inter-American Financial and Economic Advisory Committee in 1940. In the same year, he became the author of the “Dávila plan”, which created the Inter-American Development Commission . In 1946, he served as a member of the United Nations Economic and Social Council .

Dávila’s first wife, Herminia Arrate de Dávila, died in Chile in 1941, and Dávila returned to the United States with their two daughters, Luz and Paz. In 1950, he remarried, this time to Frances Adams Moore of Massachusetts, a widow with a daughter, “Dolly”, by her first husband.

Dávila died while serving as Secretary General of the OAS, in 1955.

References

• OAS Children's site
• Icarito