Chile’s new president, José Antonio Kast, the country’s most right-wing leader in three decades, promised in his inaugural address Wednesday to press ahead with radical reforms to confront what he describes as “national emergencies.”
“To address emergencies in security, health, education and employment, Chile needs an emergency government, and that is what we are going to have… it is not a slogan,” he said from the balcony of the presidential palace in Santiago.
The ultra-conservative Catholic father of nine said he had asked all ministers to carry out “comprehensive audits” to assess the state of the nation following the rule of his left-wing predecessor, Gabriel Boric.
Addressing his key issue of illegal immigration, Kast called on the military to build border barriers along the border with Bolivia, and quickly signed three decrees on the issue.
Kast, Chile’s most right-wing president in more than three decades, was sworn in that same day in a ceremony in the central coastal city of Valparaíso.
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With Kast’s inauguration, Chile becomes the latest Latin American country to shift to the right as voters back law-and-order candidates to fight the spread of organized crime.
Kast, 60, defeated Jeannette Jara, a communist in Boric’s coalition, in the December runoff to win the presidency in his third attempt.
He is Chile’s toughest leader since the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), whom Kast greatly admires.
Several leaders from across the region attended his inauguration, including Argentine firebrand Javier Milei, gang member Daniel Noboa from Ecuador, and exiled Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.
Kast gives US President Donald Trump another ally in Latin America, where the Republican leader is reasserting American dominance in places like Venezuela, where he overthrew Nicolás Maduro at gunpoint.
Kast was among a dozen leaders from the region who traveled to Florida last week for the launch of Trump’s Anti-Cartel Coalition of the Americas.
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He borrowed from Trump’s playbook during the election campaign, promising to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, mostly Venezuelans, and seal the northern border.
It represents “a conservative right unlike anything seen since the return to democracy” in 1990, Rodrigo Arellano, a political analyst at the Universidad del Desarrollo of Chile, told AFP.
Martina Vivar, a 20-year-old occupational therapy student, said she felt “anger” at the victory of Kast’s “campaign of fear and terror, like during the dictatorship.”
Boric was the youngest leader in Chile’s history when he was elected four years ago after a months-long revolt over inequality, which brought more than a million protesters to the streets in 2019 and 2020.
However, attempts to draft a new constitution that would reflect the protesters’ demands ended in failure.
Taking strong action
Chile’s new leader has promised to act quickly to stop the rise of murders, kidnappings and extortion in what remains one of the safest countries in Latin America.
He wants to give police more firepower, deploy troops to crime hotspots and deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants, whom many Chileans blame for the violence.
Their proposals have resonated in a country that prides itself on being a stable and orderly outlier on a continent strangled by organized crime.
“My expectations are hopeful with Kast. In Chile we have had a lot of vandalism and crime for many years,” José Miguel Uriona, a 65-year-old salesman in Valparaíso, told AFP.
The run-up to Kast’s inauguration was marred by a standoff with Boric over a Chinese project to link Hong Kong and Chile via an undersea fiber optic cable.
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Washington claims the project is a threat to regional security. Kast argued that Boric had withheld information about the project, which Boric denied.
During the election campaign, Kast dodged questions about his admiration for Pinochet and his general opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape and risk to the mother’s life.
His cabinet choices have tapped into nostalgia for the Pinochet era among many Chileans, sparking protests from the opposition and human rights groups.
He appointed two lawyers who defended the Pinochet government to the Defense and Justice portfolios, and the incoming Minister of Women’s Affairs is an evangelical anti-abortion activist.
University of Chile political scientist Alejandro Olivares warned that Kast’s cabinet has “very little experience in negotiations and political maneuvers” that could frustrate his agenda.
Before taking office, Kast resigned from the Republican Party, which he founded in 2019, a symbolic gesture typically made by Chilean presidents to project independence from partisan politics.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
