Do we like them?

Do we like Sebastián Piñera?

Our score: 6 out of 10. He signed marriage equality into law after years of opposing it, but his business dealings drew controversy and our reading of the record was thin.

Sebastián Piñera was a billionaire businessman who became one of Chile's most important centre-right politicians, winning the presidency twice, in 2010 and again in 2018. He died on 6 February 2024, aged 74, after the helicopter he was reportedly flying crashed into a lake in southern Chile. Three others on board survived, and the government declared national mourning.

Nothing new on him lately in the news we could confirm. The coverage since his death is retrospective: anniversaries, legacy pieces and a debate about how to remember a man who split opinion in his own country.

The part that matters most to this page is marriage equality. For years Piñera argued that marriage was a union between a man and a woman. Then in June 2021 he startled Chile's political establishment by coming out in favour of same-sex marriage, and he promised to push the bill forward.

He followed through. In December 2021 Congress approved the bill by overwhelming majorities, and Piñera signed it into law, making Chile the 31st country to allow same-sex marriage. The law also gave same-sex parents rights over a spouse's children and set standard rules on inheritance. Reports at the time noted the Chilean LGBTQ group Movilh had pulled out of an earlier agreement with his government in 2020, saying he wasn't doing enough, so the turn was late rather than early.

On the harm test, we found no campaigning against trans people and no slide into conspiracy theories in what we could read. The asterisk is for the years he stood against marriage equality, and for the fact that we couldn't open as many full articles as we normally would. Treat this as a lean, not a final ruling.

The good-person side is messier. Spanish-language coverage in October 2021 tied the Pandora Papers leak to talk of a possible impeachment push against him, and later retrospectives list a string of business controversies across four decades. We haven't verified the outcomes in full here, so we call it mixed rather than guessing at how each one ended.