[3] She was an economic adviser to the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, from January 1973 until the day of the coup d'état by General Augusto Pinochet, when she had to take refuge in the Colombian embassy in Santiago until she managed to return home.

[4] Gloria Gaitán maintained a romantic relationship with Allende, which she acknowledged in 2007 when she revealed that she had left Chile pregnant with a son of the Chilean president, who was never born.

[2][4] Allende, who had met Gaitán in Cuba in 1959, found out in 1972 from his ambassador to Colombia, Hernán Gutiérrez Leyton, of economic difficulties she was going through after her divorce, and immediately decided to invite her to Chile, where her presence would "be a symbol".

[7] Between 1982 and 1993, she directed the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Center, attached to the Ministry of Education,[7] and ran for president in the 1994 election as a candidate for the Liberal Party.

[9] From a young age, she assumed the task of studying and maintaining her father's legacy, participating in various initiatives of the international left, in addition to giving her support to peace processes that the governments of the day carried out with leftist guerrillas in Colombia.