Sebastián Piñera
Sebastián Piñera was president of Chile twice, in 2010-14 and 2018-22, the first elected president of the right since 1958, the billionaire who had made his fortune introducing credit cards to Chile in the 1980s and owned the airline LAN, the television channel Chilevision and a fifth of the Colo-Colo football club, and who sold them, slowly, when elected. The first term began eleven days after the earthquake of February 2010 and rebuilt two hundred thousand houses. It is remembered for the thirty-three miners rescued from seven hundred metres under the Atacama in October 2010 after sixty-nine days, which he watched from the mine's mouth with a billion people. Then there were the student marches of 2011 that took his approval to twenty-six per cent. The second began with growth and ended in the estallido, the social explosion of October 2019 that started over a metro fare, burned the metro stations and brought a million people into the streets, in which the police blinded more than four hundred protesters with pellets and he said the country was at war with a powerful enemy. He survived it by agreeing to the referendum on a new constitution that seventy-eight per cent voted for in October 2020. He was born in Santiago in 1949, the son of a Christian Democrat ambassador, took a doctorate in economics at Harvard, was convicted and cleared on appeal of a banking offence in 1982. He made his money in the boom of the dictatorship's last years while voting No in the plebiscite of 1988, which set him apart on the right. He was a senator from 1990 to 1998, led National Renewal. He lost to Bachelet in the run-off of 2006 before beating Frei in that of 2010 by three points. The pandemic was the second term's last chapter, with one of the world's fastest vaccination campaigns and three withdrawals from pension funds that he opposed and signed. He left office in March 2022 to Boric with an approval rating of twenty per cent, and died in February 2024 when the helicopter he was flying himself went into Lake Ranco in the south.
- Lived: 1949 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
