In the historic General Cemetery of Santiago, Chile, a high marble wall bears the names of the more than 3,000 people who were murdered or disappeared under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the iron-fisted general who ruled the country for seventeen years after leading a military coup in 1973. The monument is a somber tourist attraction, comparable to the 9/11 memorial in Lower Manhattan or the “Hall of Names” at Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, Israel. More than three decades after Pinochet left the presidency in 1990, Chileans still visit the General Cemetery with flowers and photographs of the dictatorship’s victims, which they pile in a colorful melange at the base of the wall.
But it is unclear what will happen to that wall—or the thousands of surviving torture victims who still bear the emotional scars of what happened to them under Pinochet—now that far-right politician José Antonio Kast is Chile’s new president. Kast, who won a landslide victory in December after promising a crackdown on crime and the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants, has extolled the late Pinochet’s leadership, even suggesting he would pardon the former military personnel still imprisoned for the crimes of the Pinochet era.
Kast is among a wave of far-right leaders to win election in Latin America, styling themselves after United States President Donald Trump and promising harsh security measures against rising crime and gang activity. Human rights groups cite this trend as a step backward in a region that had largely moved away from the repressive regimes of decades past. In addition to Kast, presidents in at least seven other Latin American countries—Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Guatemala, and Bolivia—have said they are modeling their response to drug trafficking and alleged gang activity on that of Trump’s favorite regional strongman, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, whose notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (more commonly known as CECOT) has been accused of widespread human rights abuses.
With Washington, D.C., engulfed in chaos amid Trump’s continual warmongering in Iran, the negative impact of his administration’s rhetoric and policies on human rights in Latin America has received alarmingly little attention from both the mainstream U.S. media and leaders in the Democratic Party. But the scale of Trump’s strong-arming is extraordinary, and the hypocrisy of his actions as leader of a party that bills itself as “tough on crime” is staggering. Last November, he went so far as to threaten to cut off foreign aid to Honduras if it did not elect far-right leader Nasry Asfura, a corrupt ally of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking by the former U.S. President Joe Biden’s Justice Department in 2024. Afsura won the election on November 30; two days later, Trump issued a pardon of Hernández.
As recently as a decade ago, human rights groups were lauding Latin American countries for transitioning to democracy, citing Cuba as the only remaining country without free elections. “Over the past forty years, peace and democracy has largely replaced dictatorship and conflict in Latin America, to the great benefit of the United States,” Arch Puddington, a researcher with the pro-democracy watchdog organization Freedom House, wrote in 2015; with relative stability across the region, he argued, the United States no longer had to manage the consequences of a “seemingly endless series of coups, states of siege, and dirty wars.”
But just seven years later, Human Rights Watch was telling a far different story. “Latin America is experiencing such an alarming reversal of basic freedoms that we now have to defend democratic spaces that we once took for granted,” said its acting director for the Americas, Tamara Taraciuk Broner, in 2022. “Even democratically elected leaders attacked independent civil society, the free press, and judicial independence.”
Even the far-right leaders who came to power during the four years between Trump’s first and second terms, including Argentina’s Javier Milei and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, have cast themselves in Trump’s image.
With Kast’s inauguration last month, Chile has become the most recent domino to fall in the region. Kast, a longtime leader of Chile’s hard right, served for sixteen years in the lower house of the national congress, and had previously run two unsuccessful campaigns for president 2017 and 2021. Throughout his career, he has advocated for slashing taxes and the size of government, and unsuccessfully fought for a return to a total abortion ban, and even voted against legalizing divorce in 2004. He has been unapologetic in his nostalgia for the Pinochet dictatorship, in which he served as a volunteer during his college years, even saying in 2017 that Pinochet would have voted for Kast if he were still alive.
After his unsuccessful campaigns in 2017 and 2021, Kast rode to victory in 2025 on the same two issues that have catalyzed rightwing resurgences in other Latin American countries: crime and border security. While Trumpian rhetoric about the scourge of crime in Latin America and the Caribbean bears little resemblance to reality, safety and security are pressing concerns for many voters throughout the region: In recent years, transnational drug organizations that were once limited mainly to Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia have migrated to across the region, bringing with them unprecedented levels of violence. In Chile, long regarded as the safest country in the region, the total number of homicides increased from 419 in 2015 to a record high of 1,330 in 2022.
Many Chileans have come to associate the crime wave in their country with an influx of undocumented migrants from Venezuela, who have sought refuge in Chile during the past decade in response to a crisis stemming from U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, plunging oil prices, and corruption or mismanagement within Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s administration. There are an estimated 700,000 Venezuelans currently living in Chile, roughly a third of whom are undocumented.
While only a small percentage of migrants are involved in any type of criminal activity, the high profile crimes of transnational gangs such as the Venezuelan-bred Tren de Aragua have led to widespread shock and outrage among the Chilean public. Mauricio Soria Macchiavello, the mayor of a coastal resort city in northern Chile where Tren de Aragua and other gangs have developed a foothold, told The New York Times in December that gang violence has rendered daily life there unrecognizable. “People tied up with a bullet in their head, burned inside a car, murdered, and torched,” Macchiavello said. “Things we never imagined.”
Kast’s predecessor, a democratic socialist and former student activist named Gabriel Boric who took office at the age of thirty-six, made what were widely viewed as political missteps early in his term, including a failed referendum to adopt a new national constitution and a misguided attempt by a member of his administration to meet with the family of an Indigenous activist killed by the police. As a result, Boric struggled with low approval ratings and meager economic growth throughout his four-year presidency. Still, he has been credited with taming inflation, boosting the minimum wage, shortening the work week from forty-eight to forty hours, and stepping up Chile’s law enforcement efforts against organized crime. During his presidency, the total number of homicides dropped from a record high of 1,330 in 2022 down to 1,091 in 2025.
At the time of Kast’s victory, inflation was ebbing, crime was going down, wages were up, and the Chilean economy—was improving, due in part to the high price of copper, the country’s chief export. Chile was still the safest country in the region, with a homicide rate of 5.4 per 100,000 people in 2025, on a par with the United States at a time of record low crime. Yet persistent fears of crime and lingering inflation stymied Kast’s opponent Jeannette Jara, a Communist Party leader and minister of labor in Boric’s government, who netted only 42 percent of the vote in the runoff election. Kast frightened voters with sensationalized television advertisements about crime and out-of-control immigration, blaming the country’s leftist government for rising crime and promising a “border shield” with trenches and military patrols on the country’s northern border with Peru and Bolivia.
Kast appears determined to keep his promise: Five days after taking office in March, he visited a desert area bordering Peru as construction equipment began digging the trench. And border security is likely just the beginning. In late January, Kast visited El Salvador to meet with Bukele and tour CECOT. Although he told reporters afterward that Chile faced different conditions than El Salvador, and did not need to precisely replicate the notorious prison, he signalled his intent to take points of inspiration from Bukele’s notoriously brutal system.
Plans to develop CECOT-like prisons are currently under active consideration among far-right leaders in Latin America. Patricia Bullrich, Argentina’s security minister, told reporters in 2024 that “we’d like to adopt the Bukele model” in Argentina; by April 2025, construction was underway on a megaprison complex near Rosario, a city plagued by drug-related violence. Honduras and Guatemala have both also begun construction of similar megaprisons, and Ecuador announced plans for its own complex in June 2024.
The problem is that after Bukele ramped up his security apparatus to round up gang members, he didn’t stop there.
Bukele’s security apparatus hasn’t limited its reach to gang members: After gaining enormous popularity for its successful eradication of gang violence, his administration turned its attention to Bukele’s political opponents. In May 2025, Bukele began arresting human rights activists and members of the media. In May 2025, Ruth López, a human rights lawyer who filed civil rights and ethics complaints against Bukele alleging civil rights violations, was arrested by the El Salvador Attorney General’s Office on embezzlement charges. Amnesty International has stated it believes there is no evidence behind these allegations.
That same month, reporters for El Salvador’s largest independent news site, El Faro, fled the country after learning that the government was preparing their arrest warrants. Shortly beforehand, the news site had published a three-part series linking Bukele to negotiations with the “Barrio 18” street gang while he was mayor of San Salvador.
Since taking office, Kast has moved forward with his right-wing agenda, including the promised crackdown on crime and undocumented immigration. Besides beginning work on the “border shield” in northern Chile, his government carried out its first deportation flight on April 16, transferring forty foreign nationals to destinations in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador. The government has also announced an agreement with the U.S. State Department to cooperate in investigations of transnational organized crime.
Perhaps most concerning has been the government’s disclosure on April 11 that it had arrested 6,000 “fugitives from justice”—including nearly 3,000 over just three days in March—as part of “Operation Total Security.” The extent of these arrests over such a short time period raises questions of due process. Should human rights groups and foreign governments fail to put pressure on Kast’s government to refrain from escalating his tactics, the repression that many Chileans thought was merely a ghost from their past risks becoming a matter of reality once again.