What is to be made of Chile’s new administration?

With the victory of José Antonio Kast in the Dec. 14 Chilean presidential election against the candidate Jeannette Jara, a member of the Communist Party of Chile, many in the left movement are wondering what to make of this election. What we can conclude is that the election of Kast continues the long history of the Chilean government ignoring the will of the people of Chile.

Pro-Western sentiment has long motivated this reality, even before the U.S-backed coup of 1973 that overthrew the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. The coup installed the fascist reactionary — and darling of the capitalist class — General Augusto Pinochet. Besides crushing democratic rights and workers’ rights and murdering, torturing and imprisoning tens of thousands of people, the Pinochet regime allowed the imperialist banks to dominate Chile’s economy.

Undemocratic rule in Chile has existed for nearly a century, tracing back to U.S. imperial influence and the capitalist elite from the early 20th century, particularly the 1920s. During this period, Washington helped cultivate and support the forerunners of this pro-U.S., anti-working-class tradition, most notably Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. Ibáñez was a right-wing, anti-worker president from 1927-31 and from 1952-58.

Most recently, the pro-imperialist character of the Chilean government has been demonstrated by the presidency of Gabriel Boric. Six years ago, Boric won office by presenting himself as a socialist and as someone aligned with the will of the Chilean people — only to disappoint many of those who voted for him. Regarding foreign policy, he especially disappointed revolutionaries by attacking the Bolivarian government in Venezuela, which meant making his views acceptable to the U.S. ruling class.

With all of this said, who exactly is José Antonio Kast?

Kast has a long history of calling reactionaries his friends. Among them is Miguel Krassnoff, a man responsible for countless crimes against our Chilean comrades under the Pinochet regime and who is currently serving multiple life sentences for crimes against humanity.

Kast also comes from a long line of right-wingers. His father, Michael Kast, was a Nazi officer who fled to Chile in the aftermath of World War II. Kast family members were not merely supporters of the Pinochet dictatorship — they actively participated in and facilitated countless crimes against the Chilean people. José Kast’s older brother, Miguel Kast, became president of the Central Bank under Pinochet.

Beyond his publicly-expressed admiration for Pinochet, Kast openly supports the United States and the Trump administration’s kidnapping and persecution of migrant workers. He has already stated his intention to expel 350,000 undocumented immigrants and has expressed enthusiastic support for U.S. imperialist aggression against Venezuela.

So the question becomes: What can we do? For revolutionaries in the major imperialist countries like the United States, we should adopt policies that build international solidarity and avoid dividing the working class by borders, which is how the ruling class divides workers.

What we can do is educate people in the imperialist core about what is happening in Chile and throughout Latin America — and how the dominant imperialist system creates problems throughout the Global South. At the same time, we must educate ourselves so we can meaningfully support our comrades in Chile, who are already in the streets, already organizing and already resisting reactionaries — both at home and across the continent.

That is what we can do for our comrades: learn, analyze and support the Chilean working class when it organizes against the Kast government and especially do all we can to keep U.S. hands off Chile and all of Latin America and the Caribbean.