Piñeragate

Piñeragate, also known as Kiotazo, was a political scandal in Chile that unfolded on August 23, 1992, when a secretly recorded telephone conversation was broadcast live on A eso de..., a political program aired by the private television channel Megavisión. In the recording, Sebastián Piñera—then a senator and a prospective candidate in the 1993 presidential election—was heard coaching an associate on tactics to discredit his rival for the nomination, deputy Evelyn Matthei, during a planned televised debate.

Both Piñera and Matthei were prominent young members of the right-wing National Renewal (RN) party, part of a group of rising politicians nicknamed the "patrulla juvenil" (youth patrol), and both were vying for the presidential nomination of the Union for Progress coalition. The recording was played on-air by businessman Ricardo Claro, the president of Megavisión, using a Kioto-brand cassette player—a detail that gave the episode its popular nickname, Kiotazo.

The scandal forced both candidates out of the nomination race. On November 7, 1992, Matthei publicly acknowledged that she had been behind the leak of the tape, withdrew her candidacy, and resigned from National Renewal the following year. Subsequent reporting established that the tape had been recorded by an Army intelligence officer and passed to Matthei before she gave it to Claro. National Renewal ultimately passed over both candidates and nominated an outside figure, Manuel Feliú, for the 1993 election.

Despite the controversy, Piñera went on to serve two non-consecutive terms as President of Chile (2010–2014 and 2018–2022); he died in a helicopter crash in February 2024. Matthei remained active in Chilean politics for decades afterward, serving in the National Congress and as Minister of Labor under Piñera, later as mayor of Providencia, and running unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2013 and 2025.

Background

By 1992, Piñera and Matthei were both rising figures within National Renewal who had reached national prominence without the traditional apprenticeship expected of party leaders, and both sought to become the standard-bearer of the right-wing Union for Progress coalition in the 1993 presidential election. Both were trained economists: Piñera, a senator with extensive business interests who had voted against Pinochet's continuation in the 1988 plebiscite, held a doctorate in economics from Harvard University, while Matthei, a deputy and the daughter of Fernando Matthei—the Air Force commander-in-chief who had sat on the four-man military junta that ruled Chile from 1978 until the return to civilian government in 1990—had graduated top of her class with a degree in economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in 1979. Considered unconventional within RN despite this shared technocratic pedigree, the two saw their competition for the coalition's nomination grow increasingly bitter as the primary contest intensified.

Public revelation

On the night of August 23, 1992, A eso de..., a political debate program broadcast live on Megavisión, became the setting for the confrontation. Ricardo Claro, the businessman who owned the channel and appeared as a panelist on the show, opened the broadcast by saying he had received sensitive information suggesting the program's independence was under threat, and told viewers that a stranger had given him a cassette earlier that day. He then played the recording using a small Kioto-brand cassette player he pulled from a bag.

In the recording, Piñera was heard discussing tactics with his friend Pedro Pablo Díaz for undermining Matthei in a forthcoming televised debate. Their strategy centered on raising the subject of divorce and Matthei's religious observance, topics expected to expose her as inconsistent given her public identification with conservative Catholicism, while avoiding any approach that might let her appear as a victim of the attack. Piñera summarized the goal bluntly:

Piñera had been invited to appear on the program that evening but was off-camera when Claro played the tape. After a commercial break, he returned to the studio, acknowledged the voice was his, and accepted responsibility for the conversation while objecting to what he described as an act of espionage against a private call.

Aftermath

Program's cancellation

The broadcast was repeated the following night given its impact. A week later, on August 30, 1992, host Jaime Celedón and panelists Jorge Andrés Richards, Héctor Riesle, Pilar Molina, and Tomás Jocelyn-Holt resigned on-camera, and A eso de... was discontinued shortly afterward. Panelist Héctor Riesle was later reported to have listened to the tape hours before the broadcast without informing the rest of the production team, a fact that reportedly strained his relationship with his former colleagues.

Origins of the recording

The scandal raised broader questions about political surveillance in post-dictatorship Chile. In September 1992, journalist Santiago Pavlovic interviewed an anonymous Army intelligence agent for TVN, who confirmed that the Army had been intercepting the telephone calls of politicians across the spectrum. Shortly after the broadcast, the Chilean Army stated that Captain Fernando Diez, an officer attached to a military telecommunications unit, had confessed to recording the conversation. Later investigative reporting, including material drawn from journalist Ascanio Cavallo's book La Historia Oculta de la Transición, found that Diez had passed the recording to Matthei, who in turn arranged for it to reach Claro through an intermediary—an account subsequently affirmed in judicial proceedings before Chilean magistrate Alberto Chaigneau.

Piñera's disclosures

On November 1, 1992, in an interview with journalist Raquel Correa published in El Mercurio, Piñera stated that figures within National Renewal had known in advance that the tape would be broadcast — a claim that directly contradicted a party directive barring members from discussing the episode:

Matthei's confession and withdrawal

On November 7, 1992, Matthei held a press conference at which she acknowledged her role in obtaining and circulating the recording. She announced her withdrawal from the presidential race, initially claiming the tape had reached her through an amateur radio operator she did not know, before the Army's statement regarding Captain Diez emerged publicly days later. In 1993 she left National Renewal, sitting for a time as an independent, and in 1999 she joined the Independent Democratic Union.

National Renewal's response

In a 2001 interview, RN legislator Alberto Espina—himself among the "patrulla juvenil" alongside Piñera, Matthei, and Andrés Allamand—reflected on the institutional failures that had allowed the crisis to occur, arguing that the party had erred by elevating two politically inexperienced figures to the nomination fight without adequate vetting:

National Renewal ultimately passed over both candidates and nominated independent lawyer and businessman Manuel Feliú for the 1993 election.

Possible motives

Claro's reasons for airing the tape have never been fully established. Contemporary and later reporting pointed to friction between Claro and Piñera over a joint business venture importing point-of-sale credit-card terminals, which Claro abandoned on Piñera's advice only for Piñera to pursue it independently. Other accounts have suggested Claro, a committed supporter of the former military government who had voted to keep Augusto Pinochet in power in the 1988 plebiscite, viewed Piñera—who had voted against Pinochet's continuation—as an unacceptably liberal standard-bearer for the right, and moved to derail his candidacy on ideological grounds. Claro, who had made his fortune as one of the "piranhas," a group of businessmen who acquired firms nationalized under Salvador Allende and became close to the Pinochet government, died of a heart attack in October 2008.

Cultural impact

The scandal produced a lasting pop-culture footnote. Later in 1992, the retail chain Supertiendas ABC (now Abcdin) aired a television commercial parodying the incident, in which a customer posing as a spy enters a store to buy a Kioto-brand cassette recorder and asks the salesman for discretion, only for the salesman to innocently confirm it was indeed a Kioto radio he wanted. The episode remained a fixture of Chilean political memory on its 25th and 30th anniversaries, revisited in retrospectives and online parodies.

Legacy

Despite the damage to both politicians' immediate ambitions, Piñera and Matthei went on to lengthy careers on the Chilean right. Piñera was elected President of Chile twice, serving from 2010 to 2014 and from 2018 to 2022, and died in a helicopter crash in the Los Ríos Region in February 2024 at age 74. Matthei served as a senator, as Piñera's Minister of Labor and Social Welfare from 2011 to 2013, and as mayor of Providencia from 2016 to 2024. She was again the coalition's presidential candidate in 2013, losing the runoff to Michelle Bachelet, and ran a third time in 2025, finishing outside the top two in the first round as José Antonio Kast and Jeannette Jara advanced to the runoff. The two politicians maintained a cordial working relationship in the decades after the scandal.

External links

• Supertiendas ABC "Kiotazo" commercial (1992) on YouTube