Sebastián Piñera

Sebastián Piñera (born December 1, 1949, Santiago, Chile—died February 6, 2024, Los Ríos region, southern Chile) was a Chilean businessman and politician who served two terms as president of Chile (2010–14; 2018–22). He was the first conservative to lead the country since the end of the dictatorial rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1990.

Early life and political career

When Piñera was a baby, his family moved to the United States, where his father, a civil servant, spent four years working for the Chilean Economic Development Agency (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción; CORFO). The family returned to Chile in the mid-1950s, then left again in 1965, when Piñera’s father was appointed Chile’s ambassador to Belgium. Piñera studied at the Catholic University of Chile, receiving a degree in commercial engineering in 1971. With the aid of a Fulbright scholarship, he returned to the United States to continue his studies, receiving a master’s degree and a Ph.D. (1976) in economics from Harvard University. He served on the economics faculty of the Catholic University of Chile throughout the 1970s and ’80s. He also taught at the University of Chile and the Valparaíso Business School (now Adolfo Ibáñez University).

Piñera worked in the consulting and banking sectors prior to his founding of the hugely successful Bancard in the late 1970s. The company, which introduced credit cards to Chile, made him a billionaire. He also held large stakes in other companies, including LAN Chile, the country’s national airline; a private hospital; and the Colo Colo football (soccer) team. Among Piñera’s other endeavours was the creation in 1993 of the Fundación Futuro, a nonprofit organization concerned with water preservation and renewable energy that also established Tantauco Park, an ecological park on the Chilean island of Chiloé.

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Piñera began his political career in 1989, managing the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Hernán Büchi, former finance minister of Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet (1974–90). That same year Piñera was elected senator for East Santiago, a seat he held until 1998. He made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2005, as the candidate of the National Renewal party. When he ran again in 2009, he advanced to the second-round runoff election, in which his opponent was former president Eduardo Frei (1964–70), the candidate of the Coalition of Parties for Democracy (Concertación de los Partidos por la Democracia; CPD), because popular incumbent president Michelle Bachelet was constitutionally prohibited from serving a consecutive term. Piñera’s victory in the election ended 20 years of CPD rule.

First presidential term

On February 27, 2010, less than two weeks before Piñera was set to take office, a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile (see Chile earthquake of 2010). While Bachelet oversaw initial relief efforts, Piñera toured disaster sites and began speaking on the record as the Chilean leader. Piñera’s inauguration ceremony, on March 11, was punctuated by two powerful aftershocks. In August 2010, 33 Chilean miners became trapped in a mine collapse, and, following their rescue 69 days later, Piñera’s popularity surged. However, his government faced a major challenge in May 2011, when large student protests broke out demanding reform of the outdated, underfunded, and class-based public education system. Efforts to quell the unrest—including cabinet changes—largely failed, and in 2012 labour groups began protesting. Despite Chile’s continued economic growth, the country experienced great economic inequality, which fueled the unrest and caused further dissatisfaction with Piñera’s government. Barred from seeking a consecutive term, he left office in 2014, succeeded by Bachelet.

Second presidential term

Piñera was back on the ballot for the 2017 presidential election. In response to a series of political scandals and the country’s stagnating economy, Chilean voters appeared ready for a change of leadership, and it was thought that front-runner Piñera might win a majority in the first round of voting to preclude a runoff. In the event, he took more than 36 percent of the vote to finish first in an eight-candidate field. Two leftist candidates—Alejandro Guillier, a onetime television news anchor representing Bachelet’s New Majority (Nueva Mayoría) coalition, and Beatriz Sánchez, of the grassroots Broad Front (Frente Amplio) coalition—collectively won more than two-fifths of the vote. Guillier, who tallied some 23 percent of the vote (Sánchez claimed about 20 percent), advanced to the second-round contest with Piñera. On December 17, 2017, Piñera was elected to a second term as president by taking some 54 percent of the vote.

At the end of 2018, opinion polling indicated that 47 percent of those surveyed approved of Piñera’s handling of the presidency. Within a year that figure would nosedive to 12 percent, the lowest approval rating for a Chilean president since the restoration of democracy in the country. This rapid decline reflected the widespread disenchantment with Piñera’s response to the social upheaval that roiled Chilean society beginning in October 2019, when demonstrators took to the streets to protest a rate hike for the Santiago subway system. In short order those protests intensified as their focus expanded to include the broader issue of Chile’s wide gap in economic inequality and demands for higher wages, as well as reform of the education, health care, and pension systems, along with a new constitution. As they spread, the protests grew violent and frequently met with a brutal police response. By the end of November, more than 20 protesters had been killed and more than 2,000 individuals wounded in the demonstrations.

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Some Chileans called on Piñera to dispatch the military to confront the protesters; other demanded his resignation. However, before November ended, the president had made it known that he was open to the possibility of a new constitution. A referendum was scheduled for April 2020 that would allow Chileans to decide whether to replace the constitution and to determine the nature of the body that would draft its replacement. The month before that referendum was scheduled to take place, the country found itself in the grip of the global coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (the first cases of which had been reported in China in December 2019). The outbreak of the virus in Chile initially was largely contained, but by June some 200,000 Chileans had contracted COVID-19, the potentially deadly disease caused by the virus, as the country developed one of the world’s highest per capita rates of the disease’s spread.

Already disrupted by the late 2019 protests and further slowed by the lockdown measures imposed to stem the spread of the virus, the economy tumbled into recession, with GDP declining by 6 percent in 2020. Piñera’s administration sought to mitigate these economic effects through significant financial relief efforts. It also staged one of the world’s most aggressive and successful vaccination programs. By September 2021 nearly 75 percent of Chileans had been fully vaccinated. The rescheduled constitutional referendum was held in October 2020. Those voting overwhelmingly endorsed creation of a new constitution, a draft of which was to be readied by July 2022 for a public vote. In the December 2021 presidential runoff election, Chileans selected leftist Gabriel Boric, a former student organizer, to succeed Piñera.

In February 2024 Piñera was killed when his helicopter crashed into Lake Ranco, southern Chile.