Chile Swerves to the Right and Into the Past

General Augusto Pinochet, the strongman who imposed a reign of terror on Chile from 1973 to 1990, must be smiling in his grave.

His brazen defender and admirer José Antonio Kast has just been elected president of Chile. Mr. Kast, a right-wing politician who has praised the military dictatorship and once said that if Mr. Pinochet were alive “he would have voted for me,” won by an overwhelming margin on Sunday, beating his center-left opponent by about 16 points. It is the first time since democracy in Chile was restored 35 years ago that any supporter of the dictatorship has won such high office.

Mr. Kast’s victory is not necessarily a public endorsement of his veneration for Mr. Pinochet. His campaign promises appealed to an angry, weary and confused populace eager for radical change: a vow to expel hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, a crackdown on crime and narcotrafficking, a pledge to slash government spending and boost economic growth. Mr. Kast, an ultraconservative Catholic, also opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, gender identity protections and Indigenous rights.

Some might call his rise just one more alarming case of a worldwide trend toward nativist authoritarianism — and it is. But the attendant rehabilitation of one of the continent’s most infamous autocrats is a particularly agonizing setback in a country where many considered the long struggle for democracy to have been won.

In 1973 the military, with Mr. Pinochet at the helm, overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The general proceeded to close Congress, torture and kill thousands of Mr. Allende’s supporters and persecute and exile many more. Mr. Pinochet’s power began to wane in the late 1980s, and democracy in Chile was eventually restored in 1990. In 1998 he was arrested in London on charges of human rights abuses; subsequent revelations that he had illicitly accumulated millions of dollars fueled a general abhorrence that turned him into even more of a pariah. When he died in 2006, wild crowds gathered in Chile’s cities, chanting, “Adiós, General.” To those dancing, riotous citizens, here was the chance to bury forever, along with Mr. Pinochet’s corpse, the influence he had exercised over Chile for so many decades.

I was not so sure. The totalitarian grip he exercised for so long and the dread he had engendered so deeply did not seem easily dispelled. Witnessing the carnivalesque ecstasy in the streets of Santiago, I wondered in an Opinion guest essay if the general’s legacy had really died. “Will he ever stop contaminating every schizophrenic mirror of our life?” I asked. “Will Chile ever cease to be a divided nation?”

Almost two decades later, the answer to both questions appears to be a resounding no.

Supporters of Mr. Pinochet never really went away. The general, they say, saved the country from communism; he imposed law and order; his neoliberal economic policies made Chile a modern country. But they have invariably been a minority. Since the end of the dictatorship, the only conservative to win the presidency — Sebastián Piñera, who governed from 2010 to 2014 and then again from 2018 to 2022 — was careful to distance himself from Mr. Pinochet’s frightful legacy.

In this sense, Mr. Kast’s victory is a political and ethical earthquake. For the first time in Chile’s contemporary history, it’s possible that the most powerful man in the country will use the full force of the executive branch to sanitize Chile’s violent past so that the pain, the slaughters and exiles, the torture and the concentration camps, can be expunged. Although he has said that anyone who violated human rights does not have his support, Mr. Kast has indicated that he might release the 139 high-ranking Pinochet officials who are still in prison for terrible abuses. This includes Miguel Krasnoff, a notorious henchman of Mr. Pinochet’s who was sentenced to over one thousand years for crimes including assassinations, tortures, and kidnappings.

What drove millions of Chileans to embrace him in this way? As I’ve spoken with voters of all social strata and political preferences, the word that kept coming up was “malestar,” which loosely translates to unease, unrest, malaise. Men and women around the country feel that something is obscurely wrong and off balance, and that this cries out for a return to the times when a strong leader enforced discipline and security, no matter the cost. This is what Mr. Kast’s victory signals: the belief that democracy itself is unable to deliver when it comes to the everyday problems of crime, cost of living and rampant immigration.

In his crusade to rewrite the past and recast the future, Mr. Kast may not have an easy ride. There are dissenters in his own conservative coalition who may try to rein in the new president’s worst instincts. Chile also can count on a vigorous and truly independent judiciary that is not inclined to tolerate an anti-democratic blitz. Nor is it certain that the armed forces, leery of being drawn into civilian politics and still stinging from the shame of having enacted so many of Mr. Pinochet’s horrors, will become Mr. Kast’s dogs of war.

The most important opposition to Mr. Kast’s plans will come from ordinary citizens. If the people of this country feel that he is unable to ease their suffering, if they continue to feel excluded and marginalized, without sufficient control of their destiny, that discontent may erupt. Over the past century in Chile, every advance of democracy has been paid for with the lives of miners, workers, peasants and students who died in the defense of their dignity and social rights. It was this embodiment of hope and struggle — this “river of buried tigers,” to quote Pablo Neruda — that I fell in love with when I arrived in Chile from the United States at the age of 12. It was not suffocated under the vindictive dictatorship that Mr. Kast nostalgically reveres, and it will not disappear now.

Any resistance that Chileans bring to the streets must be accompanied by an equally valiant attempt to imagine our way out of this crisis. Mr. Kast could not have won if the center-left parties and their elites had not failed to offer a viable alternative to the country’s chronic unhappiness.

What Chile needs now is a deep intellectual renewal of its progressive forces, a painful reckoning with its shortcomings and fractures. How well the Chilean opposition responds to this sobering defeat will determine whether Mr. Kast truly represents an ominous swerve toward the world’s current desolate panorama of would-be dictators, or whether he proves a mere parenthetical in Chile’s erratic but perpetual advance toward freedom and justice. The battle for the soul and identity of my adopted country is nowhere near over.

A version of this column first appeared in the New York Times.

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