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José Antonio Kast’s victory in Chile’s presidential election has been widely praised by leaders of the global right, with congratulations coming from the US secretary of state Marco Rubio, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Argentina’s Javier Milei and X’s Elon Musk.
The son of a Nazi party member, a father of nine and a staunch Catholic known for opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Kast won 58.16% of the vote in the runoff – more than 2m votes than the leftist Jeannette Jara, a former labour minister under the current president, Gabriel Boric.
Kast was running for the third time and had built his campaign on the claim that rising migration over the past decade had fuelled a rise in crime.
Two of his flagship promises were directly inspired by the policies of Donald Trump: the expulsion of about 330,000 undocumented migrants – most of them Venezuelan – and the construction of detention centres and 5-metre-high walls, electric fences, 3-metre-deep trenches and an increased military presence along the border.
Analysts view his victory as part of swing between the left and the right that has characterised national politics over the past 15 years – but Kast is the most far-right leader Chile has elected a president since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990.
Kast is the first post-dictatorship president to openly declare himself an admirer of Augusto Pinochet, under whose regime an estimated 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 killed. Among the many tributes he has paid to Pinochet, Kast said during the 2017 presidential campaign: “If [Pinochet] were alive, he would vote for me.”
His election “is bad news for Chile’s democratic system”, said Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, a populism researcher and professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
“What we are seeing with Kast is a return to the origins of a right that clearly did not have democratic credentials,” said Kaltwasser. Like many rightwing leaders across the region, Kast describes himself as an admirer of El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who has imprisoned at least 2% of his country’s adult population as part of a controversial crackdown on gangs.
“My fear is not that Chilean democracy will collapse in four years, but that the conventional right will shift ever further to the right and democratic rightwing forces will therefore disappear,” said Kaltwasser, adding that there is no evidence to support Kast’s claim that rising migration is responsible for the increase in crime.
Many analysts and political leaders see Kast’s election as part of a rightwing wave sweeping Latin America, with victories this year in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and – according to the latest data from a vote count that has dragged on for three weeks – Honduras.
Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, acknowledged the trend, tweeting: “From the south and from the north come the winds of death … Fascism advances.”
Alongside the rightward shift, there is also a regional swing towards “hardline security measures,” said Sandra Pellegrini, a senior analyst for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).
She attributes this wave largely to a widespread public belief that Bukele’s measures have been successful in El Salvador. “What people are not seeing, or seem not to worry about, is the trade-off behind such a decrease – which has been a striking surge in state-perpetrated violence and human rights violations.”
Under Bukele’s state of emergency imposed, hundreds of indiscriminate raids particularly in low-income neighbourhoods have led to the arrest of more than 81,000 people, drawing widespread condemnation from human rights groups.
Pellegrini recently published a report arguing that the US military buildup on Venezuela’s doorstep and its deadly strikes on alleged drug boats – which have already killed more than 80 people – “may be more about pressuring governments to align with its foreign policy goals”.
Trump has justified the operations as part of a “war on drugs” and has threatened similar action in Colombia, accusing the country of not being tough enough in curbing its cocaine production.
But many in the region see the threat of a US invasion or strike on Venezuela is intended to force regime change and the removal of dictator Nicolás Maduro,
According to the ACLED report, pressure from the White House for governments to be “tougher” is aimed at “reasserting the US as the dominant economic player in the Western Hemisphere and securing access to the region’s resources, staving off Chinese influence by promoting the emergence of US-aligned governments”.
Pellegrini added: “Conducting strikes – or extrajudicial killings, as the UN has called them – is clearly sending a message to governments across the region that human rights are no longer a priority for the US and that the cost of committing human rights violations is much lower.
“There is a real risk that we could see more of this in the coming years, not only in Chile, but across the other governments that have embarked on the path of militarisation,” she said.
