It was an emblem hiding in plain sight. On February 24, two weeks earlier than his inauguration as Chile’s president, Jose Antonio Kast unveiled his official portrait.
The photograph confirmed the 60-year-old chief carrying a blue swimsuit, the presidential sash and a conspicuous coat of arms stitched within the center.
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It was conspicuous, as a result of no president for the reason that fall of Augusto Pinochet in 1990 had posed with the coat of arms on the sash. The final chief to take action was Pinochet himself.
For critics, the crest was one other expression of Kast’s professed affinity for the previous hardline chief.
However as Kast is sworn into workplace on Wednesday, analysts query whether or not his embrace of Pinochet is nostalgia for Latin America’s previous dictatorships — or whether or not it’s merely an indication of frustration with the established order.
Maria Fernanda Garcia, the director of Chile’s Museum of Reminiscence and Human Rights, famous that, around the globe, there seems to be a shift in the direction of extra hardline insurance policies.
She credit a “disaster of democracy” with serving to to “flip a previous that was filled with horror in lots of components of the world into one thing that’s glorified by individuals who didn’t stay by way of it.”
“It’s not what we anticipated after the learnings of the second world conflict and different conflicts and dictatorships,” Garcia added.
Nonetheless, she has noticed that younger folks particularly are falling prey, influenced by reactionary narratives on social media.
“Rise up lately will not be in opposition to conflict or dictatorships, however the insurrection is in opposition to that which is established,” Garcia mentioned. “And the established is democracy, respect for human rights.”
Who was Pinochet?
Kast gained December’s presidential election with the biggest vote tally in Chilean historical past. Greater than seven million Chileans forged a poll for him within the run-off, incomes him greater than 58 p.c of the vote.
His success got here regardless of critics pointing to previous statements the place he confirmed reverence for Pinochet.
Kast had even speculated throughout a previous race that, if Pinochet had been alive, “he would have voted for me.”
Pinochet seized energy in a 1973 army coup, ousting Chile’s democratically elected chief.
Over the subsequent 17 years, he carried out a marketing campaign of systemic repression in opposition to his political opponents, ensuing within the dying of greater than 3,000 folks. 1000’s extra had been imprisoned and tortured.
Kast was a younger man on the time of the dictatorship. However even then, he participated in a youth marketing campaign to maintain Pinochet in energy.
Whereas Kast downplayed these ties throughout his most up-to-date presidential race, the connection to Pinochet has been a part of his private model for many of his political profession.
Felipe Gonzalez Mac-Conell, creator of the ebook Kast: The Chilean Far-Proper, defined that the affect of Pinochet’s authorities will be linked to Kast’s embrace of neoliberal economics and his conservative strategy to points like crime and girls’s rights.
“What has permeated his complete political undertaking has been a vindication of the cultural values of the dictatorship, the financial insurance policies of the dictatorship, and likewise of assorted civic collaborators of the dictatorship,” Mac-Conell mentioned.
Pinochet’s associates have even shaped a cornerstone of Kast’s incoming authorities.
Earlier than his inauguration, Kast named two former legal professionals for Pinochet, Fernando Barros and Fernando Rabat, to his cupboard.
They’ll function minister of defence and minister of justice and human rights, respectively.
Frustration with the established order
The legacy of Chile’s coup, nevertheless, stays a divisive topic within the nation, and specialists warn it’s tough to know what number of Chileans at present assist the late Pinochet’s platform.
One ballot in 2023, from the advertising and marketing analysis group Mori Chile, discovered that greater than a 3rd of Chileans consider the 1973 coup was justified.
Pinochet has remained a dominant determine in Chilean politics — and never simply due to Kast.
Throughout the 2025 presidential marketing campaign, for example, one other far-right candidate, Johannes Kaiser, additionally expressed his assist for the coup. He in the end earned 14 p.c of the vote within the first spherical of the election.
However assist for the legacy of dictatorship will not be essentially what drove voters to Kast, in line with Mac-Conell.
As an alternative, Mac-Conell believes Kast got here to energy as the results of numerous elements, together with the shortcomings of Chile’s left wing — and frustration together with his predecessor, outgoing President Gabriel Boric.
Mac-Conell additionally identified that Kast shaped his personal celebration as an alternative choice to the established order. Kast’s Republican Get together is seen as extra conservative than the right-wing institution.
A regional development?
Jose Alejandro Godoy, a Peruvian political scientist who’s writing a ebook about autocracy in Latin America, has been exploring how Kast could also be a part of a broader development within the area’s politics.
Different outstanding Latin American leaders have equally embraced the dictatorships of their nations’ pasts.
In Brazil, for example, former President Jair Bolsonaro overtly commemorated his nation’s army dictatorship. He has since been convicted of attempting to overthrow the democratic rule of legislation himself.
In Argentina, in the meantime, President Javier Milei has minimised the atrocities that killed or disappeared an estimated 30,000 folks within the Seventies and ’80s.
Godoy argues that the rise of those leaders will not be an expression of “nostalgia for an earlier mannequin or period” however as a substitute a mirrored image of deep disaffection with present-day politics.
“Folks don’t suppose politics goes to vary something of their life within the close to or medium time period,” Godoy mentioned.
Amid that yawning apathy and distrust, “we’re discovering characters who’re nearer to an authoritarian imaginative and prescient,” he defined.
Godoy pointed to the political state of affairs in his personal nation, Peru, which is about to carry a brand new presidential election in April.
One of many frontrunners is Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the late Alberto Fujimori, a divisive chief broadly condemned as a dictator. Her marketing campaign slogans replicate her father’s enchantment for Peruvian power and stability.
“Let’s deliver order to Peru,” one slogan says. One other is solely, “The drive of order.”
The late Fujimori was in the end convicted of human rights abuses in 2009, together with for his use of dying squads.
Nonetheless, Godoy mentioned there has all the time been a sector of Peruvian society that minimised the human rights violations in favour of social and financial objectives.
In Chile, he added, it’s related: Kast’s enchantment will not be a lot a nostalgia for Pinochet however quite a thirst for order, one thing Kast harnessed together with his aggressive public security platform and proposed crackdown on immigration.
“The concern is,” Godoy mentioned, “you commerce safety for civil liberties.”