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Chile’s former president Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire and major figure on the Latin American right who left office in 2022, has died in a helicopter crash, the country’s interior minister Carolina Tohá has confirmed.
Piñera, 74, was piloting the helicopter when it crashed into Lake Ranco in the southern Chilean region of Los Ríos, where his family owns a summer home, according to local media. Three other passengers survived, including one of the former president’s family members.
Piñera, who was president from 2010-14 and again from 2018-22, was determined to pull Chile into the ranks of the world’s developed nations through free-market policies, innovation and foreign investment.
He was also one of the country’s wealthiest people, having amassed a personal fortune of $2.8bn by 2018, according to Forbes. His career included introducing credit cards to Chile in the 1970s and making early investments in airline LAN Chile, which later grew to become the region’s biggest carrier Latam.
Tohá said President Gabriel Boric had ordered “a state funeral and the declaration of a period of national mourning” in Chile.
The country is currently on the second of two days of national mourning declared after the deaths of at least 131 people in severe wildfires in the central Valparaíso region over the past week.
Piñera’s second term from 2018 to 2022 was overshadowed by months of mass protests and riots that erupted in October 2019 over inequality and the cost of living.
The conservative leader was almost unseated by the unrest, which he had not predicted. He had told the Financial Times in an interview only days before the riots erupted that Chile was an “oasis” of stability. He was criticised for an initially heavy-handed response when he sent in the army to try to quell riots.
Tough, self-assured and determined, Piñera wanted to be remembered as a good steward of the economy who brought Chile through one of its most difficult periods intact and laid the foundation for prosperity. His critics, however, painted him as a patrician oligarch who had neglected crucial public services.
Chile swung to the left in subsequent presidential elections in 2021, picking former student protest leader Boric as president at the head of a coalition that brought communists into government for the first time since the Salvador Allende period in the early 1970s. The rightwing candidate Sebastián Sichel backed by Piñera was eliminated in the first round.
In response to the protests in late 2019 Piñera helped to launch a push to rewrite Chile’s constitution, which has its origins in the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, though it was subsequently heavily modified. The process finally ended in failure in December after Chilean voters rejected an initial radical text drafted by leftists and independents, and a later conservative-leaning text.
