Chile’s former president Sebastian Piñera dies in helicopter crash | EUROtoday

He divested from most of these when he first assumed the presidency, after operating on a centre-right platform.  Crucially, he had distanced himself from the 1973-1990 Pinochet dictatorship.

It was that break, from a brutal regime infamous for its extrajudicial killings and “disappearances” of practically 3,000 suspected leftwing subversives, that lastly allowed the Chilean proper to turn into palatable as soon as once more to a majority of the citizens.

Ultracompetitive and a risktaker, in addition to flying choppers, Piñera additionally cherished to scuba dive. Yet throughout his presidency, he was gaffe-prone and seen as failing to empathise with the hardship endured by peculiar Chileans in one in all Latin America’s most unequal economies.

Tributes poured in from throughout Latin America, together with Argentina’s former president, Mauricio Macri, who mentioned: “He was a good person, committed like no one else to Chile and to the values of freedom and democracy in Latin America. It really is a total, irreplaceable loss.”