When she was 10 years old, her family moved to Santiago, where she studied in the 1930s, at the San Bernardo high school, where she was elected beauty queen.
She then went on to study as a gardening teacher and business administration.
Hiriart met then-Second Lieutenant Augusto Pinochet in September 1941, with whom he began a courtship that would culminate in April 1942, when the then-future dictator asked for Hiriart’s hand.
The Hiriarts did not see this union favorably due to Pinochet’s middle-class origin.
They contracted civil marriage in January and religious marriage in April 1943 at a party that included the then president Juan Antonio Ríos and the first lady Marta Ide Pereira, who were friends of the Hiriart family.
The Pinochets, who lived in Quito for a time, had five children, three women and two men: Inés Lucía, Augusto Osvaldo, María Verónica, Marco Antonio and Jacqueline Marie.
During her stay in Ecuador, where Pinochet was a member of the founding team of that country’s War Academy, Lucía frequented diplomatic circles and Ecuadorian high society.
Confident and right-hand man of the general, he was – according to the dictator’s words – one of the people who most influenced his decision to lead the coup against President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.
On the day of the coup that forever changed the history of Chile, Pinochet decided that Lucía and her minor children should be far from Santiago, the Mountain School, located in the town of Río Blanco, Los Andes, guarded by troops so that -if the coup failed – they would cross the border until they were safe in Argentina.
Hiriart is credited with, among other events, a great influence on the removal of Foreign Minister Hernán Cubillos after the diplomatic scandal unleashed when the Philippine government refused to receive him on an official visit in 1980.
Also attributed to his power in the shadows is the prolongation of General Manuel Contreras in his position as director of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), Pinochet’s secret police.
In 1982, Lucia was received in the White House by the first lady Nancy Reagan, reaffirming the position in favor of the government of her husband on the part of the Reagan administration.
While the Governing Board had its headquarters in the Diego Portales Building (from 1973 to 1981), Hiriart had an office on the 17th floor where she was advised by about twenty people.
Hiriart was a mainstay in the defense of what was done by the dictatorship.
He led the construction of aid centers for the lowest income, creating and re-founding a series of institutions, including the Center of Mothers of Chile (CEMA-Chile), the National Cancer Corporation, the National Committee for Kindergartens and Christmas. among other institutions.
In 2005, the SII (Chilean tax collecting body) filed a complaint accusing her of complicity in the crime of tax evasion (for an amount of about 2.35 million dollars) and she was prosecuted for said cause for which she was in preventive detention for one day.
Finally, the courts reversed the prosecutions against Lucía Hiriart in January 2007.
That same year a magistrate issued his indictment and arrest, along with his five children and 17 other people, for the crime of embezzlement of public funds.
The same day she was admitted by ambulance to the Santiago Military Hospital.
On October 6 of that year, he was released on bail, and on October 26 the process against him was annulled by the Santiago Court of Appeals on the grounds that there had been a violation of his individual guarantees.
In one of his last public appearances, he was seen at the funeral of his friend, the former first lady of Chile Rosa Markmann (widow of former president Gabriel González Videla (1946-1952) in June 2009, who gave his absolute support to Pinochet and to his government from the beginning.
Before his death, his days broke his routine with the occasional visit of a son or grandson, and of the few remaining loyalists, a deputy or directors of the Pinochet Foundation.
He no longer had retinues or stalwarts.
The last years of her life as an elderly woman she wandered alone in the three thousand square meters of her house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Chile.
Source From: Ambito
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