Chile turns rightward

Chile has joined the right-wing trend sweeping Latin America by electing the ultra conservative candidate Jose Antonio Kast as its first rightist president since the demise of Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1990.

Kast, 59, leader of the Republican Party, trounced Jeannette Jara, a communist party member, and the candidate of Chile’s current ruling left-wing coalition, winning almost 58 percent of the vote in Sunday’s poll. Jara, a former Labour minister, conceded victory to Kast, saying “Democracy has spoken loud and clear” and wishing her opponent success “for the good of Chile.”

It was Kast’s third run for the Presidency; when he last stood in 2021, he was soundly beaten by the current President, Gabriel Boric, who was constitutionally not permitted to run again for a second term, and has recently suffered a 30 point plunge in his popularity. The campaign was dominated by the two issues of crime and immigration.

Like Trump in the US, Kast has promised a crackdown on crime – declaring war on drugs traffickers and pledging mass deportations of illegal immigrants, and building maximum security jails where he says drug cartel members will be held incommunicado unable to do drug deals with their mobile phones. Such tough jails will be modeled on the prisons of El Salvador, where an estimated 2 percent of the population have been incarcerated by right wing president Nayib Bukele.

Kast has accused the left-wing Unity for Chile governing coalition of turning a blind eye to crime, and allowing an “invasion” by illegal migrants. As well as Bukele, another model for Kast to emulate will be the libertarian free market economic policies of Javier Milei in neighboring Argentina.

Although Jara won the first round of the election last month, Kast triumphed in the decisive second round when he scooped up the votes of other right-wing candidates in the head-to-head second round race with Jara.

His victory represents a dramatic turn in Chile’s politics, as the country has been chiefly ruled by the left since Augusto Pinochet relinquished power in 1990. The Pinochet regime came to power in 1973 after ousting the socialist government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup. Thousands of leftists were jailed, tortured and killed after the US-backed coup, and the country adopted monetarist policies which disadvantaged Chile’s working class but finally brought prosperity.

A third Latin American right-winger who came to power earlier this year was Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, who also benefited from popular disgust with rising crime and the seemingly unbreakable power of the drug cartels. The result of Chile’s election will delight the Trump administration, and may well encourage Washington to ramp up its ongoing campaign against Nicolas Maduro’s rule in Venezuela – one of the few remaining left-wing regimes left in the continent.