The son of a Nazi soldier and brother of a Pinochet minister, the far-right candidate has promised to repeal the abortion law if he reaches power in the elections on December 19, in which the leftist Gabriel Boric is measured.
José Antonio Kast Rist is 55 years old. He was born in Santiago de Chile on January 18, the same day that such disparate characters as Santiago Carrillo, José Luis Perales, Pep Guardiola and Isabel Allende were born. But nothing to see. He has called Kast, one of his adversaries, “Doctor Fear” because of his surname, his past and his political ideas totally embraced by the extreme right. Kast is less than a month away from becoming the second son of immigrants to become president of the Chilean government if he wins the second round of elections on December 19. He is one of the ten children of a German couple who came to the South American country after World War II. His father, Miguel Kast Schindele, was part of the Wermacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany. That origin weighs, and more if at some point in your political life you have aligned or defended some decisions of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. In theory, this data, added to an ultra-conservative program, had to mean a cross for candidate Kast, but in the first round of the elections he beat the other five candidates by obtaining 27.9% of the votes, while Gabriel Boric , who in the polls was the favorite and who will be his rival in three Sundays, achieved 25.8%.
In a country like Chile, which is in turmoil with the desire to bury the horrific past lived between 1973 and 1990, Kast complained in campaign that almost all the criticism received from his opponents looked back. There was no shortage of people who reminded him that one of his brothers, Miguel, was a prominent minister and also president of the Central Bank during the dictatorial regime of Pinochet.
Nor can Kast hide that before foreign press correspondents he praised Pinochet’s “democracy” by allowing the 1989 elections to be held, and even came to compare it with what happened recently in Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega imprisoned his opponents. Kast, a lawyer and founder of the Republican Party two years ago, rejects the criticism claiming that the journalist’s question was correct, his answer was correct, but the interpretation of it was wrong and malicious.
The label of ‘Doctor Fear’ is not only based on the origin or recent past of José Antonio Kast, who confesses to being an admirer of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Also in his 204-page program that, under the slogan of ‘Dare yourself’, he presented for the campaign of the first electoral round. Today’s firm candidate to be the new president of Chile includes ideas that are more in line with a counterrevolutionary project than what Chilean citizens voted in the plebiscite proposed in 2019, which basically consists of drafting a new Constitution that liquidates the one devised by Pinochet . While the people work to change the model, Kast insists on maintaining it under three premises: the Republic, Freedom and the Family. Uniting Chile around the values that have always prevailed is its main slogan.
In a party that defines itself as the new right, Kast raises a political option that, he says, is determined “to recover the cultural, ideological and programmatic struggle to return to the path of true human dignity and development.” There are analysts, such as Tomás Mosciatti, current director of Radio Bío Bío and a CNN collaborator in Chile, who, upon reading Kast’s program, have described him as a simpleton. “When you read it, it seems that nothing has happened in Chile.”
Father of nine children and deeply Catholic, Kast is a serious defender of protecting the family and perhaps that is why in his program he plans to repeal the abortion law, encourage married couples, at the same time that he vindicates the rights of natural persons and legal issues to conscientious objection.
Intercept documents
Kast is truly scary when he says that a society that prioritizes equality over freedom will get neither. In a country harshly punished in terms of human rights, candidate Kast wants to close the National Institute of Human Rights, also repeal the Law of Political Exemptions and put an end to the compensatory benefits that until now have been given to victims of human rights violations. human rights by law enforcement officials in the past.
There is a point in the security section that makes many Chileans tremble. In a state of emergency, if José Antonio Kast were elected president, he could intercept, open or record documents and all kinds of communication without notifying anyone. It is that moment when Kast would transform into a dictator. In addition to creating border ditches to prevent the passage of migrants, Kast is in favor of building more prisons.
Different analysts hope that Kast will modify his program for the second round, not only in the points where he has been most questioned such as values and gender, but also in those referring to the economy and education, where he has been populist. “The programs are not set in stone, they are also for discussion, for conversation,” said Kast. With stones, precisely, he was fired the day after the elections in the Lo Espejo commune, south of Santiago.
.
#Kast #candidate #Chile #fears