Mainstream WeeklyDec 15, 2025
Six years ago Chile experienced a massive civic rebellion that on one day brought 1.2 million protesters into the street in a country of 15 million. This weekend 58% of Chileans voted into power a far right extremist president, Jose Antonio Kast, whose father was a Nazi and whose brother was a minister in the Pinochet dictatorship. What happened?
The social explosion of 2019 was an unplanned unorganized outburst of frustration. Thirty years of centrist democratic government had failed on too many fronts. Wages and pensions were dirt low. The medical. educational and retirement systems were broken. There was still too much impunity for the perpetrators of murder and torture during the Pinochet dictatorship.
The divide between rich and poor was enormous and obvious. Chile bordered on economic apartheid. No more than 10 percent of he population looks like the knuckle head in the accompanying photo.
The rebellion lasted for weeks and as it was reaching its peak in March 2020 it was snuffed out overnite by the COVID pandemic and the closing down of all public spaces.
The conservative billionaire president negotiated with the young leaders of the uprising and came up with.a compromise. There would be a vote to approve a new highly progressive constitution.
The next year, the rebellion reappeared in the ballot box as in scheduled elections, a broad leftist coalition swept into power and the 34 year old former radical student organizer, Gabriel Boric, became the youngest head of state in the world.
The poor and the youth were electrified. They began high profile televised conventions to draw up the new constitution. The conventions became a sort of woke circus and Chileans were not prepared for some of he cultural claptrap that got thrown into the mix. The constitution was, on balance, utopian..and therefore never stood a chance.
The level headed and quite serious President, however, made a fatal first step. Upon assuming office the new government threw all of its political capital into campaigning for adoption of the constitution instead of carying out the many reforms it promised.
The result was catastrophic. Barely 8 month after taking office, Boric saw the constitution voted down by a 2 to 1 margin ad he never really recovered, His favorability went underwater and never resurfaced. He did effectuate some important reforms: a needed minimum wage increase and some important improvements to the pension system.
Chile’s broad leftist social organizations, smothered by Pinochet, began to rebuild during the 2019 rebellion but never really got a foothold. Congress remained in the hands of the center/right opposition. Boric. moved somewhat to the center but to no avail.
With the aftermath of the pandemic causing an inflationary spike, as tt did globally, in Chile it was Boric who got the blame. Again, s globally, there was a spike in street crime and somewhat more violent than in the past. That got blamed on the half million Venezuelan refugees that had come into Chile (actually invited by he former conservative president but again blamed on Boric.
Inflation and crime became national obsessions across the media, owned in totality by the Right. And that strategy had BIG consequences. Though Chile remained one of the most stable and safest countries in the world. millions of Chileans were scared witless and some would no leave their house.
The political extreme Right blossomed and flourished overtaking the Center/Right forces expected to win this week’s election.
Kast emerged as the front runner and performed a full one Trump routine, promising to expel 400,000 immigrants, build a wal on the northern border and stage a ruthless crackdown on real and imagined crime (the violent crime rate had actually began to fall the last year but nobody noticed). He also managed to venerate the dead dictator and war criminal, Pinochet.
The pale-skinned economic oligarchy and other business owners who lived in the posh neighborhoods were ecstatic. And even in the poorer neighborhoods there was support for Kast’s hard line on crime as this is where most of the crime took place.
This is just a superficial quick and dirty run down of what went down. And down it is. If theres any silver lining to the election of neo-Fascist Kast it remains invisible. He will be inaugurated on March. But even he knows Chileans have little patience and are not shy to vigorously oppose authoritarian regimes.
For the moment, however, there is only lamentation, apprehension, and a certain twinge of fear.
(Author: Marc Cooper in an award winning journalist and retired professor of journalism. He worked as translator for Salvador Allende until the time of te 1973 coup)
[Reproduced from Facebook, for educational and non-commercial use]