Background
Marín was born in Curepto, in the Maule region to Heraclio Marín, a farmer, and school teacher Adriana Millie, later moving with her family to Sarmiento, and then to Talagante.
Marín was born in Curepto, in the Maule region to Heraclio Marín, a farmer, and school teacher Adriana Millie, later moving with her family to Sarmiento, and then to Talagante.
Escuela Normal Superior José Abelardo Núñez.
She was Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) (1994–2002) and then president of the PCCh until her death. At the age of eleven she settled in Santiago. Marín joined the Communist party while studying at pedagogy faculty in Santiago.
She was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1965, and again in 1970, representing a working-class district of Santiago.
Following the 1973 coup d"état, Marín first went underground and then, at the PCCh"s insistence, took refuge in the Dutch embassy in Santiago, where she remained for eight months before being allowed to leave the country to East Germany. Her husband Jorge Muñoz disappeared in 1976, while Marín was out of the country, travelling in Costa Rica.
She returned to Chile, clandestinely, in 1978 and fought from the underground for the return of democracy. On January 12, 1998, Marín filed a complaint — the first person in Chile to do so — against Augusto Pinochet, accusing him of genocide, kidnapping, illicit association and illegal inhumation.
In 1997, Marín ran for a seat in the Senate and obtained the eighth largest national majority, but was not elected due to the nature of the Chilean electoral system, which favours the two dominant parties or coalitions. She ran for president in 1999 and achieved less than four percent of the vote, mainly due to fear from leftist voters that the right-wing candidate Joaquín Lavín could defeat Socialist Ricardo Lagos.