Patricio Aylwin
Patricio Aylwin was president of Chile from 1990 to 1994, the first after Pinochet, the Christian Democrat lawyer who had presided over his party's senate group in 1973 and welcomed the coup as a necessity, who led the campaign for the No in the plebiscite of October 1988 that denied Pinochet another eight years, and who won the election of December 1989 with fifty-five per cent as the candidate of the Concertacion of seventeen parties, taking office on 11 March 1990 with Pinochet still commander of the army, nine appointed senators in the upper house, and a constitution that the dictatorship had written. He governed within those limits, saying that justice would be done to the extent possible. He appointed the Rettig commission that in 1991 documented two thousand two hundred and seventy-nine dead and disappeared, and read its findings on television asking the victims' families for forgiveness in the name of the state. The army's leader stood the troops to in December 1990 and again in May 1993 to remind him what he could not do. He was born in Vina del Mar in 1918, the son of a judge who became president of the supreme court, taught administrative law at the University of Chile for forty years. He led the Christian Democrats seven times from 1958, sitting in the senate from 1965 to 1973, where he negotiated with Allende in August 1973 and failed. He spent the dictatorship in the study group of twenty-four that opposed the constitution of 1980, and emerged in the 1980s as the man the centre and the left could both accept. The government kept the free-market economy the Chicago Boys had built and added the taxes and the labour law they had refused, growing at seven per cent a year and cutting poverty from forty per cent of the population to twenty-eight in four years, which was the Concertacion's argument for twenty years. He handed the sash to Frei in 1994, the first peaceful transfer between elected presidents since 1970, and was the elder of the coalition until it dissolved. He died in Santiago in April 2016 at ninety-seven, and Chile gave him three days of mourning.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 2016 CE
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: president, politician
