| Luis Munoz Cortes | |
| Birth: | 4 September 1892 Cachapoal Province, Chile |
| Death: | 18 April 2010? Cachapoal Province, Chile |
| Age: | 117 years, 226 days? |
| Country: |  CHL
|
| Longevity claimant | |
Luis Alfredo Ignacio Muñoz Cortés (4 September 1892 - 18 April 2010?) was a Chilean diplomat and lawyer who allegedly died in 2010 at the age of 117. However, very little evidence of his survival past the 1990s has been provided.
Biography[]
Luis Munoz Cortes was born on 4 September 1892 in Cachapoal Province, Chile. He began his studies at age 6 in 1898, in the nearby city of Chillán, and then moved to the city of Santiago de Chile, where he would study to become a lawyer at the University of Chile, in 1912. He married on 9 April 1915 with Herminda Flores Ayala, with whom he had 13 children.
On 18 June 1922, he began working in the Chilean government, as ambassador to the neighboring nation of Argentina until 12 September 1924, the day of the coup d'etat. Subsequently, on 12 March 1925 he resumed his activities, but in Spain. Then he becomes Chile's ambassador to Peru, Venezuela, the United States, Canada, Australia, Portugal, France, Italy, Mexico, Austria and New Zealand, until 11 September 1973, when after the coup d'etat he is imprisoned despite of his high age. Due to his activity as a diplomat in different countries, he has had to learn different languages of the world in addition to his own (Spanish), such as Portuguese, English, French, Italian and German. He was also a basic speaker of Russian, Greek and Japanese.
He was released in 1976 and forced into exile in Sweden, where he lived until 1993, before returning to Chile. In 1998 he moved from the city of Santiago de Chile to his native Cachapoal. It was later claimed that on 27 February 2010 Muñoz was still alive at the age of 117, and suffered a heart attack due to the strong earthquake in the country. He was in the hospital until 18 April of the same year, and later died from complications of heart failure, becoming the fourth official victim of Cachapoal to die due to the earthquake and its aftershocks. If he indeed survived until 2010, his final age at the time of death would have been 117 years, 226 days, making him several years older than the oldest verified living person at the time, 114-year-old Kama Chinen.