Sebastián Piñera, former president of Chile, dies in a helicopter accident, according to Chilean media

The former president of Chile Sebastián Piñera died this Tuesday at the age of 74 in a plane accident in Ranco, an area located 920 kilometers south of Santiago, when his helicopter crashed, according to Chilean media reports, including Radio DNA. Piñera, president in two terms (between 2010 and 2014 and 2018 and 2022), was the first right-wing president in democracy and one of the founders of Renovación Nacional, one of the main formations of the traditional Chilean right.

The former president was piloting a helicopter he owned along with three people, including a woman and a minor, who survived. In that area of ​​southern Chile, his family has a house in Bahía Coique, where every summer they fly over Lake Ranco.

This Tuesday was a rainy day in the area, with complex weather conditions. This afternoon, according to the first information, Piñera had left the house of his friend José Cox and piloted a Robinson R 66 model helicopter.

Married since 1973 to Cecilia Morel—with whom he has four children—Piñera combined public management with his companies for many years. At the end of the seventies he obtained representation for Chile for credit cards and, since then, his consecutive ventures have grown in ambition and success. He was the main shareholder of the airline Lan Chile (currently Latam), the television channel Chilevisión and Blanco y Negro, the company that manages one of the most popular soccer clubs in the country, Colo-Colo. But this intersection between money and politics was not free for Piñera: both his ability to earn money and to use loopholes to his advantage have been his main Achilles heel in his political life.

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1949, he is the third of the six children born to Magdalena Echenique and José Piñera Carvallo, an engineer and diplomat who educated his children thanks to his work and who was the founder of the Chilean Christian Democracy, the party that For decades he represented the middle classes. The reasons why the former president did not join his father's party and ended up joining the right have never been entirely clear.

In his last interview, granted to the newspaper Third, He referred to the constitutional plebiscite, when Chile for the second time rejected a proposal for a new Magna Carta.

Former Colombian president Iván Duque, very close to Piñera, has sent a message of condolences on X, formerly Twitter. “I feel the greatest pain for the death of my great friend and colleague Sebastián Piñera. A unique leader, an upright human being and a friend like few others who always supported Colombia. My solidarity with his entire family,” he wrote.

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