Photo: Matias Delacroix | Credit: AP

In December, Chile elected the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast to be its next president, toppling leftist coalition candidate Jeanette Jara decisively with more than 58% of the vote. Kast’s victory marks the latest win for a resurgent right in Latin America, alongside Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Argentina’s Javier Milei. Kast’s “Chile First” campaign pledged a border wall on Chile's porous frontier with Peru and Bolivia, maximum-security prisons, and mass deportations of regional migrants — issues that are already receiving preliminary nods within theU.S. Administration. This election marks the biggest shift to the right since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1990, which executed or forcibly disappeared more than 40,000 citizens during its years in power. 

Kast's brother was a minister during Pinochet's dictatorship, and his father was a member of the Nazi party in Germany prior to emigrating to Chile in 1950. Kast has openly praised Pinochet while promising to govern with “mano dura” (the iron fist) —rhetoric and historical connections that are concerning to human rights and pro-democracy advocates. Chile is the fifth largest economy in South America and is the world's leading producer of copper and the second-largest producer of lithium and has robust agricultural, fishery and forestry sectors. With Kast’s pro-business, nationalist lens, could this frustrate tensions with left-leaning neighbors in the region? What will this new presidency mean for unresolved human rights violations and crimes in Chile’s past? Could Chile’s turn to the right solidify the Trump Administration’s sphere of influence across the region? Join us for this candid look at Chile’s election and other attendant issues with analyst and author Peter Kornbluh —a favorite with WorldOregon audiences.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and the director of the Chile Documentation Project and the Cuba Documentation Project. He is also a longtime contributor to The Nation on Cuba, and is co-author, with William M. LeoGrande, of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana and author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. Kornbluh has spoken often for WorldOregon on political developments in Latin America.