Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle
Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle was president of Chile from 1994 to 2000, the engineer son of the Christian Democrat president Eduardo Frei Montalva of 1964-70, elected in December 1993 with fifty-eight per cent, the largest share since 1931, on the strength of the Aylwin years, and the president of the boom. There was growth of seven per cent a year until the Asian crisis of 1998, the copper price high, the highways and ports concessioned to private builders, the school day lengthened and the schools rebuilt, the free-trade agreements with Canada and Mexico and the association with Mercosur, and the poverty rate cut to twenty per cent. His term also had Pinochet's retirement from the army in March 1998 into the senate seat for life the constitution gave him. Then came Pinochet's arrest in London that October on a Spanish warrant, which the government fought for sixteen months on the ground that Chile would judge him itself. It brought him home in March 2000 to a Chile that then did. He was born in Santiago in 1942, studied civil engineering at the University of Chile and in Italy, and built a consulting firm, Sigdo Koppers, through the dictatorship, which killed his father in 1982 by poison, as a court found in 2019, in a hospital where he had gone for a hernia. He entered politics after the plebiscite of 1988, took a senate seat for Santiago in 1989 and the party's presidency in 1991. He beat Lagos in the coalition's primary of 1993. The government's later years were the Asian crisis, which ended the boom and brought unemployment to ten per cent, the electricity rationing of 1999, and the Concertacion's near-defeat in the election of December 1999, in which Lagos beat Lavin by thirty thousand votes in the first round and won the run-off. He took his own senate seat for life in 2000 and was elected to it in 2005. He ran for the presidency again in 2009 and lost to Pinera, and has been Chile's ambassador at large for the Pacific since 2014.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: president, politician
