Just south of Santiago, the small rural town of Paine is a quiet network of painted mansion facades, shady plazas and shuttered storefronts as the summer holidays come to an end.
But the fear of crime that propelled his most famous son, José Antonio Kast, to a resounding victory in December’s presidential election is as present in the sleepy Paine as it is in all of Chile.
“We have a lot of crime here: robberies, firearms, drugs, whatever,” María Elena Balcázar said at a table in her roadside cafe across from the Parroquia Santa María Virgen de Paine, the church where the Kast family attended mass.
“After eight no one goes out anymore, everyone is afraid,” he said. “People voted for José Antonio Kast because he promised strong and drastic changes.”
Kast, 60, whose career on the most right-wing fringes of Chilean politics has often sparked controversy, was elected president on the third try when he won 58% of the vote.
Chileans voted for iron-fisted solutions to rising violence and illegal immigration — Kast’s campaign principles that he repeated again and again to baying crowds on tours across the country.
Violent crime has increased in Chile in recent years with the arrival of international gangs, part of a wave of illegal migration across the country’s long, porous borders.
But the perception of the problem has far exceeded reality.
Although three times higher than in 2015, Chile’s homicide rate of six homicides per 100,000 people in 2023 does not place it anywhere near the most dangerous countries in Latin America, much less in the world.
Ecuador recorded 46 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, Haiti 41, and Mexico and Colombia 25. In Latin America, only Argentina and Bolivia had lower murder rates than Chile.
However, a 2024 Gallup safety report ranked Chile sixth among 144 countries in the world where people most fear walking in their neighborhood at night.
Continuous news stories depicting images of violent assaults have contributed to the perception that the country has become ungovernably violent under outgoing leftist President Gabriel Boric, who defeated Kast in 2021.
On the night of the December runoff, Kast announced that he would install an emergency government to restore public order.
But that night and throughout the campaign he avoided all mention of the ultra-conservative, hard-line moral code on which he has built his political career.
Kast has publicly supported the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, under which more than 3,200 people were murdered and 1,469 were forcibly disappeared. Thousands more were detained, tortured or forced into exile.
While running for president in 2021, Kast said the former dictator, who died in 2006 without ever facing justice, would have supported his candidacy.
He used his three terms in Congress to oppose abortion and the morning-after pill, and to promote traditional family values.
“They simply realized that, to win the presidency, (Kast’s team) needed to move away from (Boric’s) agenda and say that their priorities are, first, public safety and, second, economic growth,” said Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist at Diego Portales University in Santiago.
Kast was born in Santiago on January 18, 1966, the youngest of 10 children of German immigrants Michael Kast and Olga Rist.
His father was a member of the Nazi party and during World War II he was recruited into the Wehrmacht, where he rose to lieutenant and fought on the Eastern Front and in Italy, France and the Crimea.
The couple were devotees of the hardline Catholic Schoenstatt movement and instilled a strict work ethic in their children, opening a meat processing factory in Paine and a Bavarian restaurant on the dusty edge of the Pan-American Highway.
It has become a successful national chain of more than 50 restaurants.
Balcázar’s father worked in the factory and spoke fondly of Michael Kast. He remembers him handing out sandwiches to children in the square.
The family has long been influential in Chile’s right-wing politics. Miguel Kast, brother of José Antonio, was a key ideologue of the Pinochet regime as one of the “Chicago Boys”, a group of economists who imposed a neoliberal model during the dictatorship.
José Antonio Kast studied law at the Catholic University, where he became involved in student politics under the watchful eye of Jaime Guzmán, a fiercely conservative lawyer and architect of the constitution devised under Pinochet.
A young Kast appeared in campaign ads advocating the continuation of the dictatorship before a pivotal plebiscite in 1988.
He briefly worked as a lawyer upon graduation, but turned to politics. He became a councilor for the conservative Independent Democratic Union (UDI) party in 1996 before being elected to Congress in 2002 and serving three consecutive terms.
“Kast has always been on the most conservative fringe of Chilean politics in neoliberal cultural and economic terms,” said Felipe González Mac-Conell, a historian and co-author of a book about the president and the Chilean extreme right.
“He always stood by his beliefs and never wavered. He hasn’t changed his way of thinking nor have any of those around him, who have thought the same as him all along.”
After 20 years in the party and two failed leadership attempts, Kast resigned from the UDI, saying it had strayed too far from its founding principles as Chilean society modernized (and liberalized).
He first ran for president as an independent in 2017, winning 8% of the vote, before founding the Republican Party in 2019 on the basis of “defending human life from conception,” family values and market economics.
It has already begun to shape the future of Chile. He came under fire over the weekend for attending the splashy launch of Donald Trump’s Shield of the Americas security alliance.
He spoke at a Conservative Political Action Conference summit in Hungary last year and met with El Salvador’s security minister during the country’s harsh crackdown on gangs.
On the outskirts of Paine, next to a noisy highway, there is a monument to the 70 men disappeared by the Pinochet regime, more than in any other municipality in Chile.
“Truth and justice are at stake,” said Flor Lazo, whose father and two brothers were kidnapped from their home in the tense days after Pinochet’s 1973 coup.
No trace of them has ever been found.
“We are on a war footing. Let me be clear. We will be closely watching everything the new president does. We will take our fight to La Moneda (presidential palace) if necessary.”
