We publish an article by a Chilean comrade on Kast's rise to the presidency of the republic, a bridge between the Pinochet-led right of the past and contemporary fascist-style populism.

On 11 March, José Antonio Kast was inaugurated president of Chile. Within hours he had signed six emergency decrees, and whatever illusions remained about the post-dictatorship settlement were disposed of without ceremony.

Kast leads the Partido Republicano, a hard-right formation descended from Pinochetist factions fused with evangelical conservatism and the kind of “anti-establishment” posturing that, in Chile as elsewhere, always turns out to mean the most aggressive fractions of domestic capital demanding the state do their work without apology. His coalition unites the traditional right (Unión Demócrata Independiente, Renovación Nacional) with these newer currents, all converged on the same programme: accelerate extraction, suppress dissent, subordinate everything else to the restoration of profitability. The inauguration ceremony said as much plainly, given that Javier Milei, Daniel Noboa, and Venezuelan opposition exiles were in attendance. This is the emerging regional model: executive authoritarianism serving as the instrument of extractive capital and Washington alignment, without the parliamentary mediations that had begun to look expensive.

The decrees themselves are worth reading carefully. “Plan Escudo Fronterizo” places the Army in command of border control, authorizing biometric surveillance and physical barriers against the flow of Venezuelan and Haitian migrants, the most precarious fraction of the proletariat, targeted precisely because disciplining them disciplines the rest. The declaration of northern regions as “military zones” strips those areas of normal legal protections. The “auditoría total” fast-tracks $16 billion in extractive investment by overriding environmental permits. A 3% spending cut, the first tranche of $6 billion in promised austerity, was signed at the same desk. Pacification, dispossession, fiscal compression, all at once, all by decree.

This is not a conservative restoration in the sense the Chilean left keeps insisting. It is the terminal logic of a post-dictatorship settlement that has been dying since 2019. Since 1990, Chilean politics have oscillated between Concertación center-left administrations and center-right coalitions while the Pinochet economic model, constitutionally entrenched, remained untouched by all of them. What has changed is that this oscillation no longer absorbs the contradictions. When accumulation faces a profitability crisis of sufficient depth, democratic forms become a cost rather than a benefit, and the bourgeoisie finds representatives willing to say so.

Understanding the Kast victory requires revisiting the October 2019 revolt and its aftermath.⁽¹⁾ The “Estallido Social” began as a refusal of the AFP pension system, of the two-tier health and education model, of the constitutional framework inherited from Pinochet in the 1980s, and it had a breadth and intensity that briefly made something more than street protests imaginable. Neighbourhood assemblies formed. Infrastructure symbolic of financial capital was systematically destroyed. The question of dual power was, at least in outline, present.

What happened to it is well known. On 15 November 2019, every party with parliamentary representation, including the Partido Comunista (PC) and the Frente Amplio (FA), signed the “Agreement for Social Peace.” The streets were demobilised. The uprising’s energy was redirected into a constitutional convention process that took three years and produced two draft constitutions, both rejected at referendum. The working class had been handed an institutional process in exchange for its insurgency, and the process delivered nothing.

Gabriel Boric (2022-2026) was the political figure who crystallised this substitution.⁽²⁾ A former student movement leader who had spent the years since 2011 becoming a professional politician, Boric represented the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia (university graduates, NGO workers, public sector professionals) that sought to manage capitalism humanely from within its institutions. His government administered austerity, continued the militarisation of Mapuche territories, and passed the Naín-Retamal law extending police impunity for the violence of 2019. The promise that “if Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave” is the standard against which four years of his administration should be measured.

By November 2025, the working class was exhausted and politically homeless. The reintroduction of compulsory voting drove turnout from 55% to 85%. The most revealing result of the first round was not its headline (Jeannette Jara of the PC placing first with 27%, a figure that briefly looked like vindication for the reformist left), but what the runoff made of it. Kast won 58%, the second-highest margin since 1990. Null and blank votes tripled. The right's candidates had aggregated over 50% in the first round, and the coalition held; the left's plurality did not. A mandatory ballot cannot manufacture identification where none exists.This was not a rightward shift of the proletariat; it was a panorama of its fragmentation.

The weeks immediately preceding the inauguration produced an episode that clarified things in miniature. The proposed “Chile-China Express”, a 19,873-kilometer undersea fiber-optic cable linking Valparaíso to Hong Kong and backed by China Mobile, was approved by Boric’s transport minister on 27 January 2026. Two days later, under direct US pressure that included open threats from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the decree was revoked. Washington then imposed visa sanctions on three Chilean officials, a public humiliation of the kind normally reserved for governments considered hostile, not traditional allies.

What the cable affair exposed was not primarily a diplomatic embarrassment. It demonstrated something the constituent process had spent years obscuring. Chile is not a sovereign state navigating between great powers but a terrain on which those powers contest. The Boric government's attempt to balance Chinese infrastructure investment against US security demands (the “pragmatism” that social democracy always presents as the sophisticated alternative to principle) ended in paralysis and capitulation when the pressure became direct. Not a single party in the outgoing government coalition Unidad por Chile, neither the PC, nor the FA, drew the obvious conclusion. They protested “interference in national sovereignty,” as if sovereignty were the operative category, as if capital had not long since transcended the boundaries that make that phrase meaningful.

Kast used the affair with characteristic precision. He suspended all transition meetings with Boric, accused the outgoing government of “hiding strategic information,” and positioned himself as the administration that would solve Chile’s geopolitical ambiguity by resolving it, firmly in Washington’s favor. The cable crisis is the bridge between the constituent trap and the emergency state: the attempt to navigate between imperialisms was always impossible, and the authoritarian right can offer the bourgeoisie the coherent subordination it requires.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Latin America has become the primary theater of what analysts of the energy transition are increasingly calling green extractivism, the reorganisation of the old colonial-extractive pattern under the banner of decarbonisation. Chile alone accounts for roughly a quarter of global copper production and sits within a lithium triangle (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia) that contains close to half of known global lithium reserves. These are not incidental facts. Copper and lithium are the material substrate of electrification, every EV battery, every solar installation, every grid-scale storage facility requires them in quantities that are projected to double within a decade. The scramble for the region's mineral wealth is therefore not a passing investment cycle but a structural feature of global capitalism’s attempt to reproduce itself through the energy transition rather than beyond it.

This restructuring has a specific geopolitical form. China invested over $16 billion in South American lithium projects between 2018 and 2024, and has progressively deepened its position in Chilean and Peruvian copper through equity stakes in the region’s largest mining firms. Washington's response is the “Trump Corollary”, the 2025 National Security Strategy’s explicit declaration that restoring US strategic primacy across the Western Hemisphere, and denying rival powers control of strategically vital assets within it, is a primary objective. Supply chain nearshoring compounds this: as global manufacturers restructure away from Asian production centres, the Americas are being actively recast as a hemisphere-wide production platform, with Latin American states expected to absorb the manufacturing overflow while continuing to export raw minerals at the bottom of the value chain. The cable crisis, in this light, was not an aberration. It was Washington enforcing the logic of a new hemispheric order in which Chile’s infrastructure decisions are a security matter to be settled in Washington before they are announced in Santiago.

The class character of the new government is not in dispute. Kast’s cabinet places CPC employer confederation representatives in the economic ministries, prosecutors associated with organised crime suppression in security posts, and veterans of Pinochet’s legal apparatus in justice and defence. This is not technocracy but direct class power, the dominant fractions of Chilean capital administering the state without the social democratic intermediaries who had managed that relationship for three decades.

The regional axis matters as well. Milei’s Argentina is dismantling what remains of its welfare state under a programme of dollarisation and “chainsaw” austerity;⁽³⁾ Noboa’s Ecuador has militarised internal security to a degree that would have been remarkable five years ago; the Trump administration’s revived Monroe Doctrine has made clear that Washington’s tolerance for economic ambiguity in Latin America has limits.⁽⁴⁾ Chile under Kast is not an exception to this regional pattern but its latest expression.

For the working class, the immediate consequences are plain. “Plan Escudo Fronterizo” criminalises the most precarious sector of the proletariat to discipline the broader labour market. The “permisología” decrees strip Mapuche and campesino communities of any formal veto over mining and energy projects.The fiscal adjustment compresses the social wage while the regime promises “growth”, which is to say, growth in extraction and growth in profits. None of this constitutes fascism in the historical sense; there is no mass paramilitary movement and constitutional forms remain nominally intact. But the content of politics is now decided by emergency decree and imperialist alignment, whatever the constitutionalist left imagines about parliamentary process.

The opposition’s response has confirmed what the Boric years already made apparent about its limits. Unidad por Chile has fractured into two currents: a “progressive” pole of PC and FA clinging to constitutionalist positions, and a centre-left current of DC and PPD already calculating the terms of selective cooperation with Kast on “governability”. The shared premise of both is the nation-state framework, the assumption that class politics must pass through Chilean state institutions, and this premise is precisely what the cable crisis showed to be untenable. Capital has already transcended the national boundaries that make “sovereignty” a coherent demand; the reformist left has not.

Resistance will come. Deportations, pension cuts, and territorial dispossession will generate it. Resistance emerged on the day of inauguration itself. But the question is whether that resistance can be politicised beyond the defensive liberalism that channeled 2019 into constitutional conventions and produced nothing. The working class in Chile faces the same offensive as workers in Argentina, the US, and Europe: austerity, militarisation, and imperialist realignment in the shadow of a widening global conflict. The reformist parties that administered the post-dictatorship settlement have demonstrated across four years of government that they have no answer to this, only the administration of its terms.

The organisation of the proletariat on an internationalist basis, independent of all national fronts and all bourgeois parties, is not a long-term aspiration to be deferred until conditions improve. It is what the situation demands now. The emancipation of the working class remains the task of the workers themselves. In Chile, as everywhere, that task is overdue.

Notes:

Image: Gobierno de Chile (CC BY 3.0 CL), commons.wikimedia.org

(1) On the 2019 wave of protests in Latin America, see: leftcom.org

(2) On the election of Boric, see: leftcom.org

(3) On Milei's labour reform in Argentina, see: leftcom.org

(4) On Trump's approach to Latin America, see: leftcom.org