Chile in mourning after former president dies in helicopter crash

CHILE’S former president, Sebastián Piñera, has died after a helicopter he was reported to be piloting crashed into a Patagonian lake.

Rescuers pronounced the 74-yearold businessman dead at the scene. Three other people travelling in the helicopter are reported to have survived the accident, the cause of which remains unclear.

Piñera was a hugely influential figure over the past 15 years and his sudden death has shocked the nation. He led Chile twice, from 2010 to 2014 and from 2018 to 2022, during some particularly turbulent events including the pandemic, massive inequality demonstrations, a huge earthquake and the dramatic rescue of 33 miners trapped below the Atacama Desert.

Piñera’s successor, Gabriel Boric, declared three days of national mourning beginning this Friday, when the former president will be honoured with a state funeral.

His death comes at a particularly difficult time as Chile endures unprecedented forest fires that have killed more than 100 people so far, with hundreds more missing.

Piñera, who was one of Chile’s richest men and worth £2billion, often spent his holidays around the lakes of southern Chile, indulging in one of his many passions, flying his personal helicopter.

The economist made his first mark on Chile in the 1980s when he introduced credit cards to the country. He then diversified his business empire, taking major stakes in a television station, one of Chile’s biggest football clubs and, as it was called at the time, LAN, now South America’s largest airline.

He divested from most of those when he first assumed the presidency, after running on a centre-right platform. Crucially, he had distanced himself from the 1973-1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It was that break from a brutal regime that finally allowed the Chilean Right to become palatable once again to a majority of the electorate.

Tributes poured in from across Latin America, including Argentina’s former president, Mauricio Macri, who said: “He was a good person, committed like no one else to Chile and to freedom and democracy in Latin America.”