Ghost of Pinochet looms over hardline new president

Just south of Santiago, the tiny rural town of Paine is a quiet grid of painted adobe facades, shaded squares and shuttered shop fronts as the summer holidays draw to a close.

- By John Bartlett PAINE

José Antonio Kast has built his politics on a hardline, ultra-conservative moral code

(JAVIER TORRES/ AFP/GETTY)

But the white-knuckle fear of crime that propelled its most famous son, José Antonio Kast, to a resounding victory in December’s presidential election is as present in sleepy Paine as it is the length of Chile.

“We have so much crime here - robberies, guns, drugs,” said Maria Elena Balcázar at a table in her roadside cafe opposite the church where the Kast family would attend mass.

Kast, 60, took his oath of office in a ceremony at the National Congress in the coastal city of Valparaíso last Wednesday, elected president at the third attempt with his campaign tenets of iron-fisted solutions to increased violence and illegal immigration.

Although three times what it was in 2015, Chile’s murder rate of six homicides per 100,000 people in 2023 places it nowhere near the most dangerous countries in Latin America, let alone the world. Yet a 2024 Gallup security report ranked Chile sixth out of 144 countries worldwide where people most fear walking in their neighbour-hood at night. Rolling news footage has contributed to the perception that the country has become ungovernably violent under the outgoing leftist president Gabriel Boric.