Valparaíso (Chile) (AFP) – Chile’s most right-wing president in over three decades, Jose Antonio Kast, will be sworn in on Wednesday on a promise to tackle surging rates of violent crime and carry out mass migrant deportations.
Chile is the latest Latin American country to lurch to the right as voters back law-and-order candidates to fight the spread of organized crime.
Kast, 60, trounced Jeannette Jara, a communist, in December’s election run-off to clinch the presidency on his third attempt.
He is Chile’s most hardline leader since the brutal 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet – whom Kast greatly admires.
Last week, Kast was among a dozen right-wing allies of US President Donald Trump who gathered in Florida to seal a new US-led “Counter Cartel” military coalition.
The trained lawyer, whose election was cheered by Washington, has also amplified US concerns over Chinese investment in Latin America, where Trump insists on calling the shots.
The ultraconservative father of nine borrowed from Trump’s playbook on the campaign trail, vowing to deport hundreds of thousands of mostly Venezuelan irregular migrants and seal the northern border.
The new president will represent “a conservative right wing unlike anything seen since the return to democracy (in 1990),” Rodrigo Arellano, a political analyst at Chile’s University of Development, told AFP.
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