Augusto Pinochet and his wife Lucía Hiriart attend a ceremony in Santiago in September 2000. Wojtek Laski (Getty Images)
Lucia Hiriart, widow of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, has died at the age of 99, according to local media reported on Thursday afternoon. Hiriart died at her home in the luxurious La Dehesa neighborhood, in Santiago de Chile, where she had remained, almost cloistered, since her husband died in 2006. Hiriart disappeared from the focus of the media, but in 2019 the book entitled
Doña Lucía
, by the journalist Alejandra Matus, dusted off the figure of a strong woman of the Chilean military dictatorship that lasted between 1973 and 1990.
The unauthorized biography told that the woman remained, even years after Pinochet's death, in mourning. Not only because of the loss of her husband but because of the deprivation of privileges and power. "After the death of the patriarch, the family has disintegrated, the visits are few and Lucia feels immensely lonely," says the book, which after its publication was very soon among the first in sales in the country. Of her five children, only one, Marco Antonio, visited her frequently.
Of Basque-French descent, Hiriart came from a democratic and antimilitarist family that made up the political elite of the early 20th century. Daughter of a senator, at the age of 16 she met Pinochet, who was 23 at the time. The relationship did not please the young woman's family and, according to the journalist, the woman was not happy during the first years of marriage because of the financial straits - so distant from her childhood wishes - and because of her husband's infidelities, who was even on the point of leaving her when the children were young. At the end of the 1950s, while the family was stationed in Quito, the military man fell in love with the Ecuadorian Piedad Noé, a separated woman, liberal and artist.
"She was not happy with Pinochet until the dictatorship arrived and her husband was able to give her everything she always dreamed of," the author of
Doña Lucía
told this newspaper
.
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