José Piñera Echenique is a Chilean economist, one of the famous Chicago Boys, who served as minister of Labor and Social Security, and of Mining, in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He is the architect of Chile's private pension system based on personal retirement accounts. Piñera has been called "the world's foremost advocate of privatizing public pension systems" as well as "the Pension Reform Pied Piper". He is now Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, President of the International Center for Pension Reform based in Santiago, Senior Fellow at the Italian libertarian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni, and member of the advisory board of the Vienna-based Educational Initiative for Central and Eastern Europe. He has a master's degree and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Piñera is a board member in Chile and an active supporter of SOS Children's Villages, the largest orphan and abandoned children's charity in the world. Today, Piñera is director of the magazine Economía y Sociedad, that was relaunched in November 2016.

Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean army officer and military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. He was the leader of the military junta from 1973 to 1981, and was declared President of the Republic by the junta in 1974 and thus became the dictator of Chile, and from 1981 to 1990 as de jure president after a new constitution which confirmed him in the office was approved by a referendum in 1980. His time in office remains the longest of any Chilean ruler.