This text is an invitation to remember why we took to the streets, to not let ourselves be governed by fear, to not trade dignity for apparent security, because if we do, if we allow it, then we will have lost not to a man, but to the worst of ourselves.
How did we get here?
Chile woke up. So we said. The people shook off their lethargy, shouted dignity with thunderous voices in the face of power, broke the anesthetized normalcy to demand a different country. For days, for weeks, millions took to the streets. Without leaders, without unified banners, but with a common cry: enough abuse, enough fear, enough inequality. It was an abrupt and challenging awakening.
But it was also the opportunity the most radical sectors of the anti-establishment had been waiting for: to sow violence, damage the social fabric, and confirm their worst fears. And so, four years later, we see the far right sitting at the table of power, flashing golden smiles, promising order with an iron fist.
José Antonio Kast did not emerge from a vacuum. He grew like mushrooms after a storm: in the darkness of disenchantment, in the dampness of resentment, in the subsoil of unresolved frustrations. His program does not propose structural solutions: it appeals to fear, punishment, obedience. It does not call for thought, but rather to obey the dictates of the most primitive instinct. And that is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
Kast’s discourse is deliberately simple, almost childish. Chile is plunged into chaos, he claims. Criminals govern, immigrants litter, feminists disrupt order, the Mapuche set fires, progressives destroy. And his solution? Order. A firm hand. Traditional family. Homeland. God. The 21st century makes him uncomfortable. He dreams of a country that never existed, except in the golden nostalgia of the privileged: white, heterosexual, obedient, productive, and conflict-free. A country in which everything uncomfortable is silenced, locked away, or expelled.
But the “order” he offers is not synonymous with peace: it is repression. He doesn’t seek security, but submission. It’s not a commitment to the future, but a restoration of the past, redolent of mothballs and with the tone of a barracks. Under the guise of protecting us, he seeks to dismantle the state in its social dimension and strengthen it as a machine of control. In his vision, citizens cease to be subjects of rights and become obedient subjects. The most disturbing thing is that many, tired of uncertainty, are willing to accept it.
The far right is not born from reasoning, but from everyday insecurity, from social frustration, from the resentment of those who feel the country has moved forward without asking their permission. It is the cry of those who do not understand the new language of rights; of those who see a threat in every migrant, a provocation in every diverse flag. It is the roar of someone who has lost the symbolic privilege of ruling the family table and is looking for someone to blame.
And that impulse is latent in everyone. As Jung warned, deep within the human being lives a shadow: a primitive region that yearns for hierarchy, punishment, and control. Faced with the complexity of the contemporary world, many seek leaders who simplify, who impose, who shout. Kast speaks to that shadow. He doesn’t convince it: he awakens it.
His voter is not a citizen at peace: he is someone wounded. They may be poor or rich, educated or ignorant. What they share is a wound—real or imagined—that they no longer want to understand. They prefer to punish. They don’t seek justice: they desire revenge. And the far right offers it to them, wrapped in the Chilean flag and adorned with the verse of the brave soldiers from the national anthem.
What if his program became reality?
Without intending to instill fear, which is what we criticize, a simple examination of the program reveals the true face of the project. There would be no doubt, no prosperity, no authentic order. There would be misery disguised as authority and military occupation of the popular communes. Kast proposes a scorched-earth policy: crippling public services, privatizing essentials, cornering state universities, abandoning the weakest, returning control of health, education, and old age to the market. A country where those who cannot pay simply will not have the right to ask. And those who dare to protest will be repressed. That’s what the “Relentless Plan” is for, camouflaged under the guise of combating crime.
But the most brutal blow wouldn’t be economic: it would be moral. Chile would become smaller, colder, more hostile. Women would see their rights threatened; sexual dissidents forced back into the closet; migrants persecuted as internal enemies; indigenous peoples criminalized in their own land. A democracy would be sold, but it would be governed with fear. Perhaps without tanks, but with gag laws, with militarization, with contempt for diversity.
The result: a broken community, disciplined by blows, silenced by fear. It wouldn’t be a typical dictatorship. It would be something more subtle, more insidious, but just as dark.
Kast doesn’t represent Chile’s future. He is its darkest echo. Its distorted reflection in the mirror of unresolved fears. His eventual rise wouldn’t be his own victory, but the symptom of collective failure: the failure of a left incapable of offering a clear horizon; of a progressivism that spoke without listening, that bowed its head long ago; of a society that was unable to build justice before resentment filled the void.
This text is not just a denunciation of Kast. It is an indictment against the authoritarian temptation that always lurks in times of crisis, against the simplistic idea that punishment redeems, against the cowardice of those who prefer obedience to critical thinking.
And, above all, it is an invitation to remember why we took to the streets, to not let ourselves be governed by fear, to not trade dignity for apparent security, because if we do, if we allow it, then we will have lost not to a man, but to the worst of ourselves.