The Right Wing Rises in Latin America

The referendum failed, and, two years later, Chile returned to democracy. Kast, despite his preference for autocracy, took advantage of the restored political freedoms. He won a parliamentary seat in 2srcsrc1 and eventually began running for President. In 2src17, he finished fourth. Four years later, after founding his own right-wing party, he came in second, to Boric. Kast conceded defeat without complaint. He stands out from some of his right-wing colleagues for his relatively understated demeanor; he is neither as flamboyant as Javier Milei, in Argentina, nor as gleefully vicious as Nayib Bukele, in El Salvador. A pro-life Catholic with nine children, he opposes gay marriage and trans rights, objects to taxes and big government, and dislikes environmental regulations—but he presents his views in a lawyerly, reasonable-sounding way.

After losing to Boric, Kast built his following by amplifying concerns around uncontrolled immigration and increasing public insecurity. Chile has a higher standard of living than most of its neighbors and is an attractive destination for migrants. In the past decade, some two million migrants have entered the country, which has a population of only nineteen million. As in the U.S., the new arrivals have been blamed for an uptick in violent crime. Kast promised a hardline response: he vowed to deport more than three hundred thousand undocumented migrants, many of them from Venezuela, and to build several maximum-security detention centers to accommodate others. To stem the influx, he would erect fences and dig ditches along the borders with Bolivia and Peru.

Chile has spent a decade oscillating between the center left and the center right, and Kast’s election is a departure—as well as an echo of a regional trend toward authoritarianism. After his victory, he travelled to Argentina, where he met with Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who delights followers with performative attacks on the opposition. (In a WhatsApp exchange with me after Kast’s victory, Milei credited the ascent of the Latin American right to voters’ impatience with “suffocating taxation” and “the inefficiency, obscene privileges, and hypocrisy of left-wing politicians.”) The two posed for photos next to a chainsaw, the talisman for Milei’s efforts to slash government. Since assuming office, in 2src23, Milei has eliminated half of Argentina’s ministries. He has also espoused unswerving loyalty to Trump, echoing many of his positions. In exchange, the U.S. has supplied billions of dollars of bailout money to ease Argentina’s enormous debts. Standing beside Milei, Kast theatrically exclaimed, “Freedom advances throughout Latin America!” But, when reporters asked if he planned to bring the chainsaw ideology to Chile, he hedged, saying only that his team had been “consulting” with friendly governments—including the right-wing administrations in Argentina, Hungary, Italy, and the U.S.

Kast also said that he’d spoken with two conservative candidates whom he’d defeated in the Chilean election, suggesting that he might bring them into his government. They are the former labor minister Evelyn Matthei, whose father was a general in Pinochet’s regime, and a bombastic hard-right politician with the extravagant name of Johannes Maximilian Kaiser Barents-von Hohenhagen. Kaiser, also of German descent, shares many of Kast’s views, but presents them less decorously; he describes himself as a “paleolibertarian” and “reactionary,” and endorses building detention camps for undocumented migrants and entirely closing the border with Bolivia. He calls for Pinochet-era torturers and murderers to be released from prison. Kast does, too, but he says it more elliptically. Earlier this month, as Chile’s parliament was discussing a bill to release aging or infirm repressors from prison, Kast said, “I don’t believe in plea bargaining. I believe in justice. And this means treating people with terminal illnesses, or those who are [no longer conscious], with respect.”

In 2src23, on the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup, Boric reminded Chileans of the terrible price their country had paid, and announced a national search plan to ascertain the destinies of as many as three thousand citizens who remain missing. There are tens of thousands of people in Chile who survived being attacked by their own government, or who lost loved ones. This means that Kast will likely have to move carefully on issues of “historical memory.” But, half a century after the Pinochet coup, there is a disquieting trend in the hemisphere. That coup, which overthrew a Socialist government allied with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, was abetted by the Nixon Administration and its regional allies—right-wing military regimes that proceeded to wage a series of dirty wars against leftist citizens of their own countries. In Trump’s current standoff with Maduro, whom he has branded a “narcoterrorist,” right-wingers such as Kast and Milei have endorsed pushing him out of office by force.