A border wall and mega-jails: how Chile’s election frontrunner plans to tackle crime

Jose Antonio Kast, founder of Partido Republicano

During his two previous failed bids for president, conservative Chilean politician Jose Antonio Kast, a father of nine, focused his attacks on abortion, same-sex marriage and delinquency.

Now on his third attempt to win the keys to the Moneda Palace, the hard-right politician has shifted his focus almost exclusively to the key issue defining November’s election: organized crime.

Chile is one of Latin America’s safest countries, but its murder rate of six per 100,000 people -- while still a fraction of Brazil’s or Mexico’s -- has more than doubled in the past decade, causing voters to lurch to the right.

Increased contract killings and racketeering have rattled Chile’s 20 million citizens, many of whom blame the encroachment of foreign crime gangs, particularly from Venezuela.

Enter Kast, the favourite to succeed center-left President Gabriel Boric in the November 16 vote with his declaration of “war” on what he calls a crime “emergency.”

“Who is not afraid when leaving home or returning?” he told a conference with investors in mid-August.

His plan to make Chile’s streets safe again include introducing tougher sentences for gang members and building maximum-security prisons.

On a recent visit to El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), where suspected gang members are confined to crowded cells for all but 30 minutes a day, sleep on metal cots and are denied visits, Kast heaped praise on President Nayib Bukele, saying his “anti-gang war” had liberated Salvadorans from violence.

A champion of gun rights who keeps a loaded revolver at home, the Republican Party candidate has also called for the police to be issued with automatic weapons.

Other pledges include building a five-meter-high wall along Chile’s desert border with Bolivia to keep out undocumented migrants, and carrying out mass deportations.

Some 330,000 foreigners, mostly Venezuelans, live illegally in Chile, according to official estimates.

“People who cross our border enter through the window, not the door,” Kast complained at the launch of his campaign last month.

Fifty-nine-year-old bricklayer Jose Martinez, who previously voted for the left and center-right, told AFP this time he would vote for Kast.

He is the “only one who can take a firm stand” against crime, Martinez told AFP in downtown Santiago.

‘More moderate’

With a month to go until the first round, the election is shaping up as a three-way race between Kast, communist former labour minister Jeannette Jara and conservative Evelyn Matthei -- a former presidential candidate running in third place.

No candidate is expected to win in the first round, in which case a run-off will be held in December. Polls suggest Kast would win in a head-to-head race.

The son of a suspected German Nazi who fled to Chile after World War II, Kast won the first round of the 2021 presidential election but was defeated in the run-off by former student leader Boric two years after mass protests over rampant inequality.

In that election, Kast campaigned as an ultraconservative, at one point threatening to close the ministry of women’s affairs and to repeal Chileans’ already very limited rights to abortion.

Today, the white-haired lawyer is anxious to avoid “any issue that divides Chileans.”

“A more moderate Kast has emerged, but there are doubts over whether this new persona will suit him,” said Gonzalo Mueller, a political analyst at the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago.

Catherine Astudillo, a 33-year-old single mother of two girls, is skeptical.

“I don’t like him because of the sexist opinion he has about women,” she said.

On the economic front, Kast is a free market advocate who has vowed to cut regulations and slash public spending by US$6 billion over 18 months.

Over the course of the campaign, he has kept the media at arm’s length, saying he wants to avoid being the target of “physical and verbal violence.”

Five of his close associates declined to speak to AFP for this article.

“He’s a Chilean kind of far-right leader. He knows the institutions very well, is reserved and boring,” was the verdict of Amanda Marton, co-author of the book “Kast. The Far Right, Chile Style.”