Bye bye, human rights under Kast?

Shortly before his inauguration as President of Chile, José Antonio Kast traveled on March 7 to the Shield of the Americas summit at Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami, USA. Seventeen countries from the Western Hemisphere, led by the United States, have joined forces within this military coalition to combat drug trafficking and illegal immigration. The core of the project, referred to in White House parlance as the “COMMITMENT TO COUNTERING CARTEL CRIMINAL ACTIVITY,” aims at the “willingness to use lethal force to destroy the cartels.”

Following this and in parallel with Kast’s inauguration on March 11, the think tank Ideas Republicanas, founded by Kast, invited like-minded politicians to a meeting titled “Freedom and Patriotism: A New Era on Both Sides of the Atlantic” in Santiago, Chile. Attendees at this event included Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation; Alex Chafuen (as honorary chairman of the FREE Foundation); Miklós Szánthó and Vajk Farkas from the Hungarian Center for Fundamental Rights, Hermann Tertsch (VOX, Vice Chair of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament), the presidents of Costa Rica, Armenia, and Ecuador, former Bolivian President Jeanine Áñez, and the Vice President of El Salvador, Félix Ulloa.

Exchanging Ideas with El Salvador´s Bukele on Prison Management

The new Chilean government is already collaborating on specific projects with some of the guests who attended Kast’s inauguration. Since 2025, Kast and his Minister of Public Security, Trinidad Steinert, have maintained an intensive exchange with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and his administration on issues related to prison management, including visits to the Salvadoran high-security prison CECOT and a week-long joint workshop on prison management. In March, El Salvador’s Vice President Félix Ulloa also spoke at length on Chilean television about the “advantages” of El Salvador’s prison system.

In the weeks since his inauguration, the Kast administration has sent excavators to the northern border. These are intended to dig trenches in the desert to implement the border closure toward Bolivia and Peru announced in the Plan Escudo Fronterizo program. In addition, the Kast administration is rolling back unpopular projects initiated but not completed by the previous government of center-left President Boric. These include 43 environmental policy measures, such as the establishment of national parks and protected areas, as well as a project intended to regulate industry-wide collective bargaining—rather than allowing negotiations only at the company level, as has been the case until now.

Rollback of Human Rights Policies

Particularly controversial are policy shifts on human rights issues and the dismantling of mechanisms related to remembrance policies. For instance, the undersecretaries at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights who were instrumental in the National Plan for the Search for the Disappeared (Plan Nacional de Búsqueda) were dismissed or replaced by Constanza Garrido, a conservative anti-abortion advocate. In addition, the Kast administration stopped the expropriation of parts of the former German sect settlement Colonia Dignidad in Chile, which had been planned by Boric and his government as a step toward establishing a memorial and a documentation center but had not yet been implemented. These texts, available in German or Spanish, provide background on this decision, which has drawn international criticism and is of particular concern to the German government due to its obligation to address the crimes committed in this settlement.

Chile and Argentina as a Strong Far-Right Block in Southern Latin America

On April 6, Kast finally flew to Argentina for his first international visit as President of Chile, where he met with Javier Milei. Kast and Milei share a great deal in common politically. Chile and Argentina already form a strong far-right bloc in southern Latin America. The foreign ministers of both countries have now issued a joint statement in which they commit to defending shared values such as “freedom, democracy, life, property, and the promotion of economic growth.” In this document, Chile pledges support to Argentina in upholding its “legitimate sovereignty claims” over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas).

In addition, mutual investments in the energy and mining sectors, technology and knowledge transfer within the framework of Chilean-Argentine (trade) agreements, as well as cooperation on issues of security and border protection are to be strengthened. The latter also includes the prosecution and extradition to Chile of Galvarino Apablaza, a Chilean citizen living in Argentina. The Chilean judiciary accuses Apablaza of having been the mastermind behind the 1991 assassination of Jaime Guzmán. Guzmán is regarded as a key intellectual figure of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973 to 1990), as the architect of the Chilean constitution adopted in 1980, and as the political mentor of José Antonio Kast.