The Run-up to the “Trump of Chile,” José Antonio Kast

On December 14, hard-right candidate José Antonio Kast was elected as Chile’s president with over 58% of the vote. Kast built his campaign around the promise of expelling undocumented migrants and has been called the “Trump of Chile.” On today’s show, host Allen Ruff is joined by journalist Nyki Duda to talk about the political history of Chile and what led to the election of Kast.

Duda says that what makes Kast different from other far-right leaders like Trump or Bolsonaro, is that he developed his career within the institutional Right in Chile. His father was a member of the German Nazi Party who fled Europe to avoid accountability for his crimes. Kast’s father established himself within the landed gentry outside of Santiago and, with Kast’s brother, was involved in a series of murders around the 1973 coup. Kast’s other brother was one of the “Chicago boys” who implemented neoliberalism in Chile. Kast has never renounced his family’s crimes and is poised to be the most right-wing leader Chile has seen since the Pinochet dictatorship, says Duda.

There was a time in the 90s when Chile was seen as a model of democracy and economic growth in Latin America coming off the repressive regimes of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But that dream has not come to pass. Duda describes the legacy of Pinochet-era “anti-terror” laws and attempts to rewrite the dictatorship-era constitution and the media misinformation campaign against the draft of a new constitution that would have created plurinational status for Indigenous tribes and introduced rights of the environment. 

Duda also discusses the 2019 student protests and the violent government backlash, including the case of Nicolás Piña. 

Nyki Duda is an editor at Al Jazeera digital and researcher at Lead Stories. As a freelance journalist, she covers migration, social movements and far-right politics. Her writing has appeared in Truthout, Jacobin, In These Times and more.

Featured image of José Antonio Kast from 2009 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 CL).

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