María Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet (née Hiriart Rodríguez; 10 December 1923 – 16 December 2021) was the wife of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and, in that capacity, the First Lady of Chile during his 1973–1990 military dictatorship. Regarded by contemporaries as a forceful and politically astute figure, she is widely described as having been one of the most influential advisors to her husband, and by some accounts a key factor in his decision to lead the 1973 coup d'état against President Salvador Allende. In her later years, she and members of her family faced repeated legal accusations of tax evasion, embezzlement, and misuse of public funds.
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Early life and family
Hiriart was born into a wealthy family of Basque-French descent in Antofagasta on 10 December 1923. She was the eldest daughter of Osvaldo Hiriart Corvalán, a lawyer and Radical Party politician who represented Antofagasta and Tarapacá in the Senate of Chile and later served as Interior Minister under President Juan Antonio Ríos, and of Lucía Rodríguez Auda, herself the daughter of a wealthy lawyer. Osvaldo Hiriart also worked as legal counsel for the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción and later served as a director of the utility company Endesa. The Hiriart family belonged to Chile's political elite.
Through her father's line, Hiriart's family traced its descent to the French count, politician and writer Dominique Joseph Garat; she was a great-granddaughter of Pierre Fabien Hiriart Etchecoin, an emigrant from the Pyrénées-Atlantiques who arrived in Chile in 1860, and a granddaughter of Luciano Hiriart Azócar, a veteran of the War of the Pacific and later mayor of Talca.
When Hiriart was ten years old, her family moved from Antofagasta to the Santiago area, and she was educated at a liceo in San Bernardo, where she was crowned a local beauty queen. She excelled in mathematics and developed a lasting interest in opera, dance, and books on biography, science, and archaeology, later pursuing studies in early-childhood education and business administration.
Marriage and family
Hiriart met the then-second lieutenant Augusto Pinochet in September 1941, and the couple began a relationship; Pinochet asked for her hand in marriage on 11 April 1942. Her father reportedly disapproved of the match, both because a military career carried comparatively low social status at the time and because of Pinochet's middle-class background. The couple nonetheless married in a civil ceremony on 29 January 1943, followed by a religious ceremony the next day, 30 January 1943; guests reportedly included President Juan Antonio Ríos and First Lady Marta Ide Pereira, family friends of the Hiriarts.
They had five children – three daughters (Inés Lucía, María Verónica, and Jacqueline Marie) and two sons (Augusto Osvaldo and Marco Antonio). For a time the family lived outside Chile in Quito, Ecuador, while Pinochet served as a founding instructor at Ecuador's war academy, a posting that gave the couple access to Ecuadorian diplomatic and high-society circles.
Role in the 1973 coup
Hiriart is widely reported to have been among the people who most influenced Pinochet's decision to lead the coup against President Allende on 11 September 1973. Pinochet arranged for his wife and younger children to be away from Santiago on the day of the coup: on 10 September 1973, Hiriart and her teenage children Marco Antonio and Jacqueline Marie were taken to the Escuela de Montaña, a military installation in Río Blanco, in the Los Andes area, commanded by Colonel Renato Cantuarias Grandón, with plans to cross into Argentina if the coup failed.
First Lady of Chile (1974–1990)
Political role and public life
Hiriart is considered to have been one of the closest advisors to Pinochet during his nearly sixteen and a half years in power, though the extent of her influence over government decisions has long been debated. Political episodes attributed in part to her influence include the dismissal of Foreign Minister Hernán Cubillos following a failed diplomatic trip by Pinochet to the Philippines, and the prolonged tenure of General Manuel Contreras as director of the secret police agency Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA).
Because of Chile's international political isolation during the dictatorship, Hiriart and Pinochet made relatively few official trips abroad, traveling in that capacity to Spain, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and the United States (the last in connection with the Torrijos–Carter Treaties); Hiriart, however, traveled abroad frequently in a private capacity. On 8 November 1982, she was received at the White House for tea by First Lady Nancy Reagan, a visit that helped underscore the Reagan administration's comparatively favorable stance toward Pinochet's government.
While the Government Junta was headquartered at the Diego Portales Building between 1973 and 1981, Hiriart maintained an office on the seventeenth floor, supported by a staff of roughly twenty advisors. From that position she led the creation or reorganization of a number of charitable and social institutions, most notably the Centro de Madres organization CEMA Chile (a network of women's community organizations), as well as the Fundación Septiembre, the National Cancer Corporation, the National Committee of Kindergartens and Christmas, and the National Foundation for Community Aid. CEMA Chile became the most prominent of these; Hiriart presided over it until her resignation in August 2016.
Personality and reputation
Contemporaries and biographers have described Hiriart as a dominant and politically shrewd woman: resolute, autonomous, and, in the view of critics, arbitrary and lacking in compassion. She was seen as more direct and outspoken than her husband, and at official receptions she was frequently the more talkative of the pair, while Pinochet — known for his limited rhetorical skill — often stayed quiet. Privately, she was known to have addressed her husband dismissively on numerous occasions, particularly during periods of personal tension before the 1973 coup. She took a close personal interest in matters that mattered to her, including the appointment of mayors and military attachés at Chilean embassies abroad, and the dismissal of officials who fell out of her favor.
Lifestyle and criticism of extravagance
During her years as First Lady, opponents of the regime accused Hiriart of frivolous extravagance. She was known for a fondness for hats and Chanel or Christian Dior suits, an extensive fur-coat collection, and quantities of European footwear and jewelry purchased at Santiago's finest jewelers; she maintained a personal hairdresser, makeup artist, and photographer. Her wardrobe combined imported haute couture — ordered from fashion houses in Europe and shipped via Chilean diplomatic pouches — with garments from Chilean designers such as José Cardoch and Laura Rivas, the local representative of Nina Ricci.
In 1975, Hiriart accompanied Pinochet to Spain for the state funeral of Francisco Franco. Despite Spain's official mourning, several exclusive boutiques in Madrid reportedly opened specially for the First Lady, who spent roughly a million dollars on beauty products, jewelry, and clothing during the visit, funded through government travel allowances. During the same trip, the couple attended the proclamation of Juan Carlos I as king, with Hiriart seated in a box at the Palacio de las Cortes behind Princess Grace of Monaco and Imelda Marcos.
London became one of Hiriart's favorite cities, and the couple had visited the British capital several times even before Pinochet's 1998 arrest there. During those visits, she was known to shop at the department store Harrods, often selecting gifts for her grandchildren.
Properties
Hiriart took a strong personal interest in the decoration of the family's homes and estates. The first was a mansion on Presidente Errázuriz street in Santiago, which she had remodeled in a French style after Pinochet became army commander. In 1984, the family began construction of a new residence in the Lo Curro neighborhood, on an 80,000-square-meter lot that reportedly cost about a million dollars; the resulting 6,000-square-meter house, which used imported Italian and Spanish marble flooring (replaced more than once at Hiriart's insistence) and Belgian glass in its windows, featured a private cinema, saunas, a gymnasium, swimming pools, tunnels, and a bomb shelter, and cost an estimated twenty million dollars to build. The scale of the project caused a public scandal, prompting Pinochet to transfer the property to the army; it now houses the Club Militar. Hiriart subsequently built her own residence on Los Flamencos street in the La Dehesa district of Santiago. The family also acquired a rural property in El Melocotón, where a 606-square-meter chalet was built; Hiriart intervened repeatedly in its design and siting, at times ordering completed work to be undone and rebuilt to her specifications.
Legal accusations
In 2005, Hiriart was sued by Chile's Internal Tax Service (Servicio de Impuestos Internos) over tax evasion totaling US$2.35 million and was arrested with her son Marco Antonio a few months later, spending a day in pretrial detention; the charges against her were ultimately dropped by the courts in January 2007. In October 2007, she was arrested again in connection with the Riggs Bank case, along with Pinochet's five children and 17 other people (including two generals, one of his former lawyers and his former secretary) on charges of embezzlement and use of false passports. They were accused of having illegally transferred $27 million (£13.2 million) to foreign bank accounts during Pinochet's rule. On the day of her 2007 arrest she was admitted by ambulance to Santiago's Military Hospital, and she was released on bail on 6 October; on 26 October the Santiago Court of Appeals annulled the proceedings against her, ruling that her individual legal guarantees had been violated.
In August 2016, Hiriart was accused of using funds from her NGO, CEMA Chile. During Pinochet's time under house arrest in London, two separate transfers were made from Chile to her, in 1998 and 1999. Each transfer totaled $50,000. According to prosecutors, the money was used to pay for Pinochet's living expenses. Hiriart was sued by two Communist Party lawmakers from Chile, Hugo Gutierrez and Karol Cariola, along with the Relatives of Disappeared Detainees Group (AFDD), for misappropriation of public assets owned by CEMA Chile, tax fraud, and embezzlement. CEMA Chile is accused of illegally acquiring more than 30 properties for more than $18 million. During the investigation, Hiriart resigned following a news report from November 2015 stating that she had used sales and rentals of public lands from CEMA Chile for her own benefit.
Later life and death
On 30 December 2018, Hiriart was hospitalized after falling at her home in Santiago and fracturing her arm and several ribs.
In her final decade, Hiriart made only occasional public appearances, generally at events connected to her late husband. She attended the June 2009 funeral of her friend, former First Lady Rosa Markmann, and in December 2011 took part in a memorial Mass for Pinochet, held five years after his death in the chapel of the Hacienda Los Boldos, in Bucalemu, where his ashes are interred. On 25 November 2015, she again visited the Los Boldos chapel, together with relatives and supporters of the late general, to mark the centennial of his birth. Her last public appearances came in December 2019, at a further memorial Mass for her husband, and in April 2020, when she and her children sent condolences on the death of Renovación Nacional founder Sergio Onofre Jarpa.
Hiriart died from heart failure at her son Marco Antonio's home in the Lo Barnechea district of Santiago on 16 December 2021, at the age of 98, following a period of declining health marked by respiratory complications; her death certificate listed the immediate cause of death as cardiorespiratory arrest resulting from ischemic heart disease. She had spent her final days at home surrounded by family. Her son Marco Antonio announced that the funeral would be private; her body was cremated at the Parque del Recuerdo cemetery and her ashes were later transferred to the chapel at the Los Boldos estate, alongside those of her husband.
In popular culture
Hiriart was portrayed by Gloria Münchmeyer in the 2023 black comedy horror film El Conde directed by Pablo Larrain.