Sebastian Pinera

Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique (1949–2024) was a Chilean businessman, economist, and politician who served two non-consecutive terms as President of Chile, from 2010 to 2014 and again from 2018 to 2022. He was the first center-right candidate to win the presidency since the country's return to democracy in 1990 and one of the wealthiest heads of state in Latin American history.

Born in Santiago to a Christian Democratic diplomat, he spent part of his childhood in Belgium and the United States while his father served as Chilean ambassador. He earned a degree in commercial engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and a doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1976, returning home to teach at his alma mater while building business ventures in credit cards, airlines, and television.

His first administration began on March 11, 2010, twelve days after the magnitude 8.8 Maule earthquake. Later that year his government oversaw the rescue of thirty-three miners trapped for sixty-nine days at the San José copper mine, an operation watched by an estimated billion television viewers worldwide. He also navigated student protests demanding free higher education that reshaped Chilean politics for the decade that followed.

Constitutionally barred from immediate re-election, he returned to the presidency in 2018. His second term was dominated by the October 2019 social uprising over inequality and the cost of living, which led to a constitutional convention process, and by Chile's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the country achieved one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. He died in February 2024 in a helicopter crash on Lake Ranco at age seventy-four.

The name Sebastián comes from the Greek Sebastianos, meaning "from Sebaste," a city in Asia Minor whose name derives from sebastos, the Greek translation of the Latin Augustus. Borne by the third-century Roman martyr Saint Sebastian, the name has long been favored in Spanish-speaking Catholic countries, and Piñera carried it through forty years of Chilean public life.