On December 14, Chile elected far-right politician José Antonio Kast as president with 58 percent of the vote, defeating Communist candidate Jeannette Jara, who won 42 percent. The outcome marks a sharp political rupture with the center-left government of outgoing President Gabriel Boric and represents the Chilean left’s worst electoral defeat since the country’s return to democracy in 1990.
Kast’s victory was welcomed by U.S. President Donald Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei, underscoring his alignment with a growing international far-right bloc. Within Chile, however, human rights, Indigenous, and environmental organizations have expressed deep concern about a wide variety of his campaign proposals and his repeated defense of Augusto Pinochet’s bloody military dictatorship. Kast’s family history has also drawn scrutiny: his father was a former registered Nazi Party member who was accused of involvement in human rights abuses during the dictatorship.
The election was driven in large part by public anxiety over rising crime, increased migration, and economic stagnation during the Boric administration. Kast centered his campaign on these issues, advancing proposals to expel undocumented migrants, strengthen policing and punitive security policies, cut taxes, and reduce state regulation. This law-and-order platform proved electorally effective, allowing him to secure a decisive margin of victory.
Beyond security policy, Kast has also signalled his intentions to deregulate key economic sectors, including aquaculture, and accelerate extractivist policies by speeding up the permitting process and attracting increased foreign investment in the sectors like mining. Critics warn that such measures could weaken environmental oversight and intensify existing conflicts over land, water, and Indigenous rights. As Kast prepares to take office, Chile faces a critical moment, with hard-won advances in human rights, environmental protection, and democratic accountability increasingly under strain.
The Kast Family in Chile
José Antonio Kast’s political rise is best understood from his family’s history, which is deeply tied up with the violence and neoliberal restructuring of Chile’s dictatorship. The Kast family patriarch, Michael Kast Schindele, was a Bavarian lieutenant who joined the Nazi Youth at age 18. After World War II, he assumed a false identity and fled to South America, ultimately settling in the commune of Buin in Chile, where he opened a sausage factory. His role during the dictatorship has been the subject of serious allegations. In a report aired by Chilean TV channel Chilevisión, former detainees identified Kast Schindele and the eldest son Christian as civilian participants in acts of torture. Another survivor, Luis Martínez, testified that Kast Schindele denounced workers as communists and took part in physical assaults, allegedly declaring “we need to kill all of these Marxists” during interrogation sessions.
The family name has also appeared in connection with the Caravan of Paine, a coordinated campaign of repression in which 70 rural workers, supporters of Salvador Allende, were detained, tortured, and disappeared. Paine became one of the regions with the highest concentration of forced disappearances during the Pinochet regime. Survivors and human rights organizations have accused members of the Kast family of playing a direct role in the violence.
Kast’s contemporary rhetoric, centered on restoring “order,” criminalizing protest, expanding police powers, and relativizing human rights violations, echoes both the rhetoric and logic of the dictatorship.
Kast’s family has also been involved in the economic violence inflicted on the country’s popular classes. His brother, Miguel Kast, was a key economic technocrat under Augusto Pinochet and one of the ‘Chicago Boys,’ a group of economists who helped engineer Chile’s market reforms after the coup in 1973. The new president’s economic vision clearly takes inspiration from these family histories.
While José Antonio Kast has repeatedly dismissed these histories as irrelevant and framed the Pinochet years as a necessary response to “Marxist chaos,” his defense of a dictatorship that disappeared more than 3,000 people and tortured as many as 100,000 has gone far beyond that of the country’s last conservative leader, Sebastian Piñera. Kast has also suggested that he will free the few torturers that have been convicted of human rights abuses currently held at special facility Punta Pueco, including Miguel Krassnoff, a notorious high-ranking member of the country’s secret police that was convicted for crimes against humanity, including the killing of Miguel Enriquez, former leader of the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR).
Kast’s contemporary rhetoric, centered on restoring “order,” criminalizing protest, expanding police powers, and relativizing human rights violations, echoes both the rhetoric and logic of the dictatorship. By presenting authoritarianism as common sense and repression as governance, Kast draws on Chile’s unresolved past and actively seeks to rehabilitate it. His rise signals less a rupture than a continuity, translating the ideological foundations of the military regime into the vocabulary of twenty-first-century electoral politics.
Make Chile Boring Again
Kast’s policy platform translates this authoritarian position into concrete proposals. While he studiously avoids the term “deportation,” he has pledged to remove most, if not all, of Chile’s estimated 336,000 undocumented migrants, framing mass expulsions as a matter of sovereignty and public order. At the same time, he promises to cut roughly US$6 billion from the national budget, about 7 percent of total public spending. His proposal to abolish property taxes on primary residences would further strain public finances, a contradiction that even some of his center-right allies have acknowledged.
Kast has summarized his economic vision with the slogan “Make Chile Boring Again,” a call to restore investor confidence through deregulation and fiscal prudence. Speaking at a recent industry summit, he sharply criticized what he described as excessive state bureaucracy and called for “substantial deregulation,” particularly in the extractive and export sectors. He singled out the salmon farming industry as emblematic of what he views as institutional obstruction. “In a decade, 210 relocation requests were filed. Guess how many have been approved. One,” Kast said. “That is not regulation; that is institutional sabotage.” Invoking U.S. tariffs and global competition, he argued that Chile “needs to be competitive again,” insisting that the state should “stop putting obstacles” in the industry’s path rather than offering subsidies. Chile is the world’s second largest supplier of salmon after Norway and salmon and trout make up around 6.8 percent of the country’s GDP.
Kast has been explicit that, in his view, ecological sustainability must follow, not precede, economic growth.
Kast is firmly opposed to the Lafkenche Law, which recognizes Indigenous coastal communities’ ancestral rights to marine territories. What he characterized as a policy with “a legitimate purpose” has, he argued, been “distorted into a tool of political blackmail,” leaving more than 1,000 applications for salmon industry development frozen. Kast has proposed unblocking these projects and returning decision-making authority to regional coastal commissions, a move that would significantly weaken Indigenous consultation mechanisms. “Just as salmon swim against the current,” he declared, “we too must swim against this current of mediocrity and laziness.”
Kast has been explicit that, in his view, ecological sustainability must follow, not precede, economic growth. He has proposed the relocation and consolidation of salmon concessions as a way to reduce environmental and health risks, arguing that the sector could advance rapidly under looser regulations. This approach runs directly counter to the agenda of President Gabriel Boric, who upon taking office in 2022 floated the possibility of a moratorium on the expansion of industrial salmon farming. Boric also created mechanisms to better manage protected areas and biodiversity, blocked risky mines like the proposed Dominga project to protect ecosystems, and launched a National Lithium Strategy to increase state oversight of lithium production.
The rollback of these measures could have severe consequences for Chile’s economy, social movements, and environment.
Rights at Risk
During his 16 years in the Chamber of Deputies, José Antonio Kast repeatedly voted against gender equality measures and women’s rights legislation, promoting a patriarchal family model rooted in conservative Catholic values that feminist groups have condemned as misogynistic and regressive. He has pledged to block any expansion of abortion rights and to roll back Chile’s existing legal exceptions for rape and risk to life, marking the sharpest retreat in reproductive rights since the Pinochet era. Kast also opposes contraception, divorce, and same-sex marriage.
Jaime Pineda Olcay, director of Chilean media outlet El Ciudadano, said that “Kast embodies a Pinochetista project expressed through political authoritarianism, economic neoliberalism, and religious conservatism.” Pineda Olcay worried that “those who would suffer most under such a future government are the popular sectors that mobilize in response to the loss of social rights, as well as women and migrant communities.”
Kast’s project is not only economic but civilizational
A representative from Mapuche International Link, an Indigenous rights group, who spoke under condition of anonymity because they are afraid of facing backlash from the new government, highlighted the unique threat posed toward Indigenous peoples. “Kast has pledged to dismantle Indigenous protections, including the Indigenous Law, ILO Convention 169, and CONADI, leaving Mapuche communities exposed to dispossession and persecution,” they said. Gesturing to the repression experienced by Indigenous communities in neighboring Argentina since the election of far-right leader Javier Milei, they worried that “Pinochet-era security and anti-terrorism laws, historically used to prosecute land claims, protests, and community leaders as criminal or terrorist acts, are expected to be applied with renewed intensity to silence dissent.”
In this sense, Kast’s project is not only economic but civilizational: a reassertion of state authority through deregulation, repression, and the subordination of rights to markets, coupled with a rollback of hard-won protections for women, LGBT communities, and other marginalized groups. If realized, this agenda would represent a decisive turn toward authoritarian conservatism in Chile, threatening decades of social progress and civil liberties.
Nevertheless, the country’s powerful social movements are ready for the attacks. According to the Mapuche International Link representative, though Kast’s measures “revive the logic of past dictatorships,” they historically “failed to suppress Mapuche resistance and instead strengthened it.”
Carole Concha Bell, PhD Candidate King’s College London. Founding member of Chile Solidarity Network UK.