Rise of the Far Right in Chile

Wednesday 31 December 2025, by Oscar Mendoza


WITH THE SECOND round of the Chilean election, José Antonio Kast won a decisive victory over the progressive candidate Jeanette Jara (58% to 42%). When Kast is sworn in as president on March 11, he will be the first far right-wing president since 1990.


Kast’s surprising victory speech hit a moderate tone calling for national unity, avoiding attacks on political opponents and even praising Jara for “her courage…in facing a very difficult challenge…and fighting till the end.” He also stated that people had voted for change, hinting at a major departure from the current government’s policies.

He has received congratulations on his win from a number of far-right figures including Argentina’s president Javier Milei. Millei posted a map of Latin America on X with Chile joining Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru governed by the right.

How did Chile move from the euphoria of Gabriel Boric’s triumph in 2021, with a 10-point lead over Kast, to a far right-wing victory?

First, we can point to the failure of the Boric presidency to secure a new constitution, which could replace the one from the Pinochet dictatorship (1980), with some amendments during the Coalition of Parties for Democracy (CPPD) after 1990.

The social revolt that led to Boric’s win had already approved a plebiscite for constitutional change. Securing a new constitution that would overcome the barriers to the inequality of income distribution, health, education and pensions was its main task.

But when the final draft was submitted to a referendum vote on September 4, 2022, it was soundly rejected by 62% to 38%.

The always-present right wing had campaigned hard against the new constitution, and its victory allowed a majority right-wing delegates to develop its proposal, which was also soundly defeated in a December 2023 referendum.

By that point, Chileans had moved on from constitutional concerns to the bread-and-butter, post-pandemic issues of employment, inflation, mass immigration and public safety. Of course, the issues of inequality, health care, education and pensions bubbled in the background, always present.

The changed political climate had diminished the optimism and much of the trust in Boric’s government, whose popularity steadily declined despite attempts by the government to address key issues — even with Boric’s relative success in terms of the economy, which is growing steadily as inflation is well under control, and Labor Minister Jara’s achievements in increasing the minimum wage, reducing the working hours and implementing pension reform.
“Falling to Pieces” False Narrative

The right’s narrative of Chile “falling to pieces” was pushed daily by the majority rightwing media. It grew in strength with continued attacks on economic competence and the failure to curb “illegal immigration” and crime, principally violent crime.

Secondly, for the 2025 elections voting was made mandatory. Most analysts agree that these additional “forced voters,” normally not interested or engaged in politics, mostly expressed discontent with the government and voted for the opponents of Jara, the Minister of Labor in the Boric government and a member of the Communist Party.

These voters are neither right nor left, they are looking for politicians to offer solutions that deliver more money in their pockets and safety in the streets and in their homes.

In the November 16 first round of elections, of the eight candidates, Jeanette Jara won 26.58% while the top three right-wing parties won the majority. José Antonio Kast, a 59-year-old lawyer and leader of the extreme right-wing populist Republican Party won 23.92%.

Including Kast, the top three right-wing candidates won over 50% of the vote while the People’s Party candidate won almost 20%. Although Jara worked to win the People’s Party voters, most voted for Kast in the decisive second round.

This was Kast’s third time running for president; last time Boric beat him by a 10% margin. Kast’s father arrived in Chile in 1951 from Germany, where he had been an army officer and Nazi Party member. His brother was a key minister in the Pinochet regime.

Kast has claimed that Pinochet, if still alive, would have voted for him. However, he did not run on his very extreme right-wing social views, such as complete opposition to abortion, but as someone prepared to efficiently govern. In fact, the election of Kast is not necessarily a sign of some major shift to the right in Chilean politics.

The country will go from a progressive president in Boric to a far-right extremist in Kast, but Chile is most definitely not “falling to pieces”’ and its strong institutions will continue to function fairly normally.

The right’s failure to dominate Congress, which has a tie in the Senate and a simple right-wing majority in the lower chamber, means that legislation will have to be negotiated. With the strong People’s Party representation (14 deputies) and its plan to be in active opposition means that the more extreme measures in Kast’s program are unlikely to succeed.

Some observers feel that a Kast administration is bound to fail for a number of reasons. Campaign promises, such as putting an end to crime and deporting over 330,000 irregular immigrants, seem undeliverable. Others believe that if he acts in the pragmatic manner he signaled on the night of his triumph, focuses on crime, immigration and the economy, and builds on the stability and growth delivered by the Boric government, he has a good chance.

Kast has issued a demand that those immigrants without status self-deport between his election and his installation next March. For the Venezuelans, Peruvians, Colombians and Haitians, even Bolivians and Argentinians who have overstayed their visas or came across the northern borders.

Chile is a magnet because of its relatively stable economy. These recent immigrants have family and friends in the country. Kast says he will build a wall, but that will not prove easy along the long and porous Peruvian and Bolivian borders.

With organized crime spreading throughout Latin America, Chile’s violent crime rate has gone up, although it seems already in decline. However, Chileans feel less safe and Kast’s “Implacable Plan” outlines an iron-fist policy. According to the New York Times December 13, 2025 feature on “The Crime Wave Reshaping Latin American Politics” by Emma Bubola, Kast met last month with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s security minister. Kast and his team have almost no experience of government, and unless prominent members of the more traditional right parties agree to join the cabinet, technical and political mistakes are almost inevitable.

Kast himself makes a virtue of his inability and unwillingness to compromise. Given that politics in government is all about reaching agreement, it’s impossible to see how the president Kast will differ from the long-term candidate. Can the leopard lose his spots?

However, it looks increasingly clear from Kast and his closest advisers’ pronouncements and ongoing meetings with traditional right-wing personalities and former government ministers and their advisers, that his first cabinet to be announced in January, will draw from the whole of the right-wing spectrum.

Unlike the United States, where Trump enjoys a legislative and executive “trifecta” and the almost total loyalty of the GOP, Kast will have no such luxury. Political actors who neither owe him allegiance nor have an interest in seeing him succeed hold considerable sway in Congress, and he’s in for a rough ride.

Some analysts have even predicted a resurgence of mass protests just months from the presidential inauguration in March 2026. I’m not convinced about this since Jara and the whole of the forces behind her campaign have called for responsible opposition within Chile’s institutional framework and wholly within the law.

As the next electoral cycle for local councils and governors is scheduled for October 2028, his administration will have 30 months before his performance in the role will be subjected to public scrutiny.

In the meantime, a vast number of Chileans will wait and see what develops, with only a quarter of all voters who are staunch Kast supporters fully committed to his success. Only then, I think, could we speak of a decisive and definite rise of the far right.

Source: January-February 2026, ATC 240.


Attached documentsrise-of-the-far-right-in-chile_a9335.pdf (PDF - 912.7 KiB)
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Chile
Kast: Chile’s “democratic route” back to Pinochetism
From progressive decline to reactionary advance in Chile
After the 1973 Coup in Chile
The coup in Chile
The Chile Coup and after
Far Right
What is left of the Chinese Left?
Notes on the historic rise of the far right in Britain
Three years of Meloni: A model for the international far right
A New Step in the Radicalisation of the Far Right in the Netherlands
The imperial engine of fascism

Oscar Mendoza
Oscar Mendoza is a social scientist, specialist in international development and cooperation, former political prisoner between September 1973 and May 1975, based in Scotland since May 1975 (initially as a refugee until 1987).

(Video) Meeting the challenge of the far right & challenges for the left

By Zarah Sultana, Joseph Choonara, Vivi Reis & Daniel Chavez

Published date 1 January, 2026

 

The Idiocy of Fighting Narco-Terrorists With a Useless $200 Billion Surface Navy

by David Stockman | Dec 31, 2025 | ANTIWAR.COM

Talk about attacking a gnat with 1,000 pounds of TNT!

We are referring, of course, to the Donald’s latest gambit of sending a $40 billion carrier battle group to the coast of Venezuela in order to help kill a few fishermen (46 to date) on $400,000 speedboats, who run a side-gig of bringing cocaine across the Caribbean to distribution points to the US market. These hapless fishermen have been relabeled as “narco-terrorists” by the Washington War Machine, but as we show below, that’s pure barking hogwash.

The real reason for all the bellicose posturing from the Donald and the pathetic wanna be Navy Seal who got made Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is yet again “regime change”.

To be sure, Maduro is a relentlessly destructive socialist dictator, but so what? He doesn’t have even a tinpot military that could get out of port if it tried.

Moreover, if the Washington neocons have failed to notice a notable event, we haven’t. To wit, the Cold War ended 34 years ago – so the remnant of the World Communist Menace in China and Russia is no longer even a remote military threat to the Homeland Security of the US, even if the US spy satellites can identify an operative or two from these nations stumbling around the ruling courts of Caracas.

In short, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to be sending the state-of-the-art Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) carrier battle-group to the Venezuela coast on the hoary grounds of national security. In fact, this hideous exercise of the mighty US Navy is a reminder of the pure idiocy of the $200 billion per year that Washington spends on the Surface Navy and Marines.

In this day and age the skies are full of satellites and military arsenals are rife with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and high-powered, lethal fighter aircraft – and soon, mother-ship bombers capable of launching swarms of hundreds of weaponized drones at Navy battle groups floating on the surface waters like sitting ducks. So the only thing the Surface Navy is good for is –

• (a)fighting regime change wars of invasion and occupation against no-count third-world dictatorships, which is not a legitimate purpose of homeland security.
• (b)Helping to kill defenseless fishermen on speed boats!

Yes, under the Donald, that’s what the Mighty Washington Empire has been reduced to. So far, it has killed 46 Venezuelan fishermen for no valid purpose whatsoever.

And, no, it’s not because they are sending boatloads of “poison” to kill innocent Americans as per the bombastic rhetoric of Hegseth and Ice Barbie at the Homeland Security Department. The latter had this to say the other day, but it’s absolute malarkey.

“You’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean.”

OK, that just unadulterated bullshit. That is to say, last year there were 178 million alcohol drinkers in the US, which, unfortunately, resulted in 178,000 alcohol related deaths in the US. That’s a regrettable 0.1% fatality rate among users.

But alcohol isn’t illegal because America hasn’t forgotten the bitter lessons of the Prohibition disaster 100 years ago.

By contrast, the only illegal drug that comes in from Venezuela is cocaine. There is no evidence whatsoever by the Federal government’s own lights that any fentanyl comes into the US from Venezuela.

So the “killer” drug they are gumming about is cocaine. Yet even then, Venezuela grows zero percent of the annual US supply of about 826,000 pounds, and accounts for only 8% of US-bound shipments via transit from Colombia and other sources.

Still, cocaine may well be both illegal and a dubious source of recreational stimulants for most people, but it is actually no more deadly than alcohol. To wit, according to the DEA and other government agencies, last year, there were about 5 million cocaine users in the USA and about 5,000 deaths from pure cocaine overdoses.

In this regard, the higher figure of 20,000 cocaine deaths per year often cited by drug prohibitionists reflects the widespread spiking of street cocaine with deadly fentanyl. The latter is far, far cheaper at 0.3 cents per dose versus $150 per dose for cocaine or more than 1,000X more.

In any event, the fatality rate among cocaine users purely from cocaine is just 0.1% or the same as alcohol. Yet due to Nixon’s long-running misbegotten War on Drugs, we spend billions each year trying to eradicate it – a pointless effort that now includes even the mobilization of the US Navy against fishing boats.

But here’s the thing. Using $40 billion carrier battle groups to blow up cocaine-transiting speed boats is simply the stupidest, most irrational action ever conceived on the banks of the Potomac, and there is surely plenty of competition for that honor.

The reason is straightforward: Namely, interdiction and destruction of supply only drives up the price and drastically so – thereby making the illicit business of growing, shipping, and distributing cocaine all the more profitable. In turn, this also means that the illegal cartels which distribute it are capable of spending whatever it takes to counteract law enforcement and to compensate for the loss of product due to interdiction. Stated differently, the idiots behind prohibition – from alcohol to cocaine and heroin – believe that they can win by defying the law of supply and demand.

They most surely cannot. The only thing supply destruction actually accomplishes is to massively increase the revenue of the drug cartels and their ability to maintain ever larger armies of ever more violent operatives to conduct their insanely profitable businesses.

For want of doubt, let’s begin with the basic facts of supply and demand. Currently, Grok 4 indicates that US cocaine consumption is estimated at 514,000 pounds per year. Among an estimated 5.0 million active users, that’s an average annual consumption of 2 ounces per user per year. That is to say, the overwhelming number of recreational users are not about to kill themselves on 2 ounces of snort.

Nevertheless, the actual supply of cocaine coming into the USA in 2024 was about 826,000 pounds, meaning that about 312,000 pounds of seizures by the Coast Guard, other border control operations, and law enforcement domestically amount to nearly 61% of actual use.

Yes, for a product with the inherent high price inelasticity of a recreational stimulant like cocaine, just have the cops confiscate 61% of the end demand. That does make the price go sky-high!

And that gets us to the absurd economics of the so-called War on Drugs. In this case, we are talking about using hundreds of thousands of domestic law enforcement personnel led by the DEA, thousands of Coast Guard and other border patrol, and now $40 billion Navy carrier battle-groups to hunt down 312,000 pounds of a drug that is no more lethal than alcohol!

After all, the US government at all levels spends an estimated $100 billion per year on the War on Drugs. So even if just 20% of that is directly against the cocaine traffic, that’s nearly $320,000 per pound of cocaine interdicted!

That’s surely stupid enough, but it’s not even half of it. Spending that much on policing, interdiction, and supply destruction drives the price skyward. As shown below, the farm-gate value of cocaine paste grown in Colombia is just $382 per pound, which rises by another $525 per pound for in-country processing and delivery to shipping points, but then the cost of interdiction takes off like a bat out of hell.

The landed value in the US is estimated by Grok 4 at about $11,320 per pound. However, the shipping cost of the 826,000 pounds that makes its way to the US is not remotely the $10,340 per pound uplift from the port of export value. That 10X markup is plain and simple, the high cost of combating law enforcement and compensating for the 61% of supplies that are lost due to interdiction on the way to end customers.

Beyond that, as also shown by the table, there is another nearly 5X markup on the way from illegal entry at the US border to street value at retail. Needless to say, the standard ratio of landed price to retail for normal legal commerce is 2X, as exemplified by the case of coffee in the second column.

In all, the markup from the Columbia farm-gate to retail is 142.5X or $54,050 per pound of product distributed at retail. By contrast, coffee beans grown in Colombia and distributed via legal commerce exhibit a markup of just 2.86X between farm gate and retail value per pound. The only reason the farm-gate value of cocaine is more than 100X higher than that of coffee beans is that it takes about 500X more land to generate enough cocaine leaf for a pound of paste than it takes to grow enough coffee cherries for a pound of brew.

Accordingly, were cocaine commerce to be legal and were the leaf-based paste produced at the farm level at $382 per pound to be handled by legal shipping lines and domestic drug store distributors, the street retail value would be about $1,100 per pound or 98% less than current levels. Stated differently, the prohibition cost amounts to more than $53,000 per pound.

Stated differently, what does that $53,000 per pound cost of law enforcement and prohibition in the retail price of coke really fund?

Well, violent criminal syndicates. That’s what!

And yet and yet. The Donald is compounding the insanity by mobilizing $40 billion Naval carrier battle groups to make, well, a lot more totally unnecessary crime on the streets, byways and communities of America.

Supply Chain Cost Of Columbia-Produced Cocaine Versus Coffee

Level	Cocaine ($/lb)	Coffee ($/lb)
Farm-gate costs per processed/shipped pound equivalent	382	3.50
In-country processing and handling to FOB	907	4.00
US landed	11,340	4.20
US retail	54,432	10.00
Mark-up X from farm gate to retail	142.5	2.86
Available margin per pound (retail less farm gate)	54,050	6.50
Illegality Premium	53,339	0.00

 

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

Spyware and Murder: The NSO Group, Governments, and Khashoggi

by Binoy Kampmark / December 31st, 2025

The efforts to hold the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate in October 2018 continue. In his complex connubial life, the slain scribbler can now count, not only on efforts made by fiancée Hatice Cengiz in 2020 but his widow Hanan Elatr Khashoggi in seeking curial scrutiny on why he was do remorselessly dispatched by a death squad authorised by the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Unfortunately, whether focusing on the culpability of the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, or that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, their efforts have yielded lean returns.

The October 2020 lawsuit filed by Hatice Cengiz and Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) was dismissed in December 2022 by US District Judge John Bates for reasons of head of state immunity. The judge nonetheless registered his “uneasiness” at the decision by the Kingdom to make the crown prince prime minister, along with “credible allegations of his involvement in Khashoggi’s murder”. The move had the stench of convenient expediency. “A contextualized look at the Royal Order thus suggests that it was not motivated by a desire for bin Salman to be the head of government, but instead to shield him from potential liability in this case.”

Prior to the decision, the Biden administration had also intervened on its own accord in the case, suggesting the court heed arguments of sovereign immunity. The State Department also affirmed the position that the US had “consistently, and across administrations, applied these principles to heads of state, heads of government and foreign ministers while they are in office.”

In 2023, Hanan Elatr filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of Virginia against the NSO Group alleging the intentional targeting of her devices, thereby causing “immense harm, both through the tragic loss of her husband and through her own loss of safety, privacy, and autonomy.” At the time, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert explained that his outfit had learned that the spyware Pegasus had been installed on her phone as she was being interrogated in Dubai “and the phone communicated several times with a server that is part of the NSO infrastructure”.

In May this year, the US District Court of Appeals of the Fourth Circuit upheld the lower court ruling that there was no “personal jurisdiction” in the matter for Hanan to assert. The reason here was that NSO had not appeared “to have directed electronic activity into Virginia”. If there had been “any express aiming of conduct towards Virginia, it was at the direction of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, not NSO.” This was to be contrasted with the 2019 targeting by the same company of WhatsApp’s California-based servers with the Pegasus spyware “through those servers to facilitate the sort of surveillance Pegasus offers to its clients”. (1,400 users had fallen victim to the exercise.) This was the sort of quibbling that gives the law a bad name, leading Hanan to make the chilling point that the NSO Group had irrefutably infiltrated her devices, spied on her and her husband and “tracked him down to his death.”

Hanan is now seeking redress in France for the data stolen from the two phones that were infected by Pegasus in April 2018 while being interrogated in the UAE. “It would be unthinkable not to establish a link between this interception (of information) and the actions that led to the murder” of Khashoggi, attorneys William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth said in a joint statement.

Her case has also piqued the interest of Virginian Congressman Eugene Vindman who, in November, urged President Donald Trump via letter to release the transcript of a 2019 call to Prince Mohammed. In this, he was not alone, keeping company with other 37 lawmakers. “The US Intelligence Community,” the letter states, “concluded that the Saudi Crown Prince personally ordered Khashoggi’s murder. In a direct rebuke of our dedicated national security civil servants, your recent statements suggest that you place greater trust in the Crown Prince’s claims than in the assessments of our intelligence agencies.”

The jurisprudence on holding spyware producers to account is burgeoning, if slowly. Meta’s victory in December 2024 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against the NSO Group’s targeting of WhatsApp was significant enough to lead spokesperson Emily Westcott to praise the ruling as placing such companies “on notice that their illegal actions will not be tolerated.” In May 2025, a jury in California found that $167.3 million in punitive damages and $414,719 in compensatory damages should be awarded to Meta.

NSO had resoundingly failed to exempt its activities from legal accountability in asserting sovereign immunity, their argument being that they had acted as an agent of a foreign power. This was conclusively rejected by the US Supreme Court in January 2023.

While those linked to Khashoggi may not have been successful securing remedies for his murder from governments using Pegasus to target those it deems undesirable, they can at least be given some cold comfort that the NSO Group’s reputation has fallen into an investment purgatory. The nature of such an industry, however, is that murky reputations are no guarantee to the extinction of these companies. Even now, a group of US investors led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds have acquired the company, effectively taking it out of Israeli hands. Those in the dream factory are not above producing nightmares on occasion.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]. Read other articles by Binoy.