Fears over migration and crime push Chile’s presidential race to the right

Article content

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Fans sported MAGA-style caps. AC/DC blasted from the speakers. Red, white and blue flags flapped in the wind. Crowds whooped and cheered as the man of the hour lamented the surge of migrants across the border.

Article content

“This country isn’t falling apart,” he bellowed. “It is being shot to pieces, by bullets.”

Article content

Article content

You’d be forgiven for assuming this was a rally for U.S. President Donald Trump. After all, the U.S. president’s name adorned plenty of campaign merch.

Article content

But this eruption of visceral rage at immigrants and incumbents took place in Santiago, Chile, at the final campaign event for Johannes Kaiser, a radical libertarian candidate gaining traction before Sunday’s presidential election in Chile, where rising fears of uncontrolled migration have pushed everyone in this race — even the governing coalition’s Communist candidate, Jeannette Jara — to the right.

Article content

Article content

Kaiser is “the only one with a firm hand, the only one who can pull us out of the United Nations, close the borders to all the Venezuelan criminals and throw them in prison in El Salvador,” said Claudia Belmonte, 50, peering out from beneath the brim of a red baseball cap emblazoned with Kaiser’s promise to “Make Chile Great Again.”

Article content

Article content

Such demands for a “mano dura,” a “firm hand,” against crime and disorder have reshaped Chilean politics as transnational gangs like Tren de Aragua surged across porous borders from crisis-stricken Venezuela and elsewhere in recent years, importing kidnappings, contract killings and other violent crimes previously unseen in one of Latin America’s safest nations.

Article content

“People in Chile never had problems with foreigners. But you hear about a gang burying someone alive in your neighborhood and it changes you,” said Carlos Jadue, 49, a lemon vendor in central Santiago. “I’m not racist. I see new people coming in. And I see new crimes.”

Article content

The anti-migrant backlash has transformed a nation that just four years ago elected the bright young hope of the Latin American left, President Gabriel Boric, a millennial former protest leader who handily defeated the ultraconservative lawyer Jose Antonio Kast in 2021 with vows to “bury neoliberalism” in response to demands of the nation’s 2019 social upheaval.

Article content

Article content

This time around, experts say Chile’s nativist fears over illegal immigration give Kast a better shot, even if he’s unlikely to clinch the 50% of votes needed to win outright in Sunday’s first round. Polls show Kast facing off against Jara in a runoff on Dec. 14.

Article content

Anger turned toward immigration

Article content

In Santiago, there are few vestiges left of the 2019 mass protests against endemic social inequities — known here as “el estallido” or “the explosion” — in which as many as a million Chileans marched to vent a generation’s worth of economic and political grievances.

Article content

One is the stone plinth in the city’s Plaza Italia, the central square where protesters battled nightly with police, torching buildings and braving bird shot. The bronze statue of 19th-century Chilean war hero Gen. Manuel Baquedano was defaced, then taken down for what authorities promised would be a quick restoration.

Article content

Four years later, the stone plinth, scarred by anti-government graffiti, remains empty and freighted with symbolism. For protesters, it’s a reminder of all that’s unaddressed. Neoliberalism is alive and well. Chile retains the 1980 constitution adopted by military dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet after Boric twice failed to change it.