When Chilean troops encircled La Moneda Palace in central Santiago on September 11, 1973, to overthrow the elected president, José Antonio Kast was just seven years old. He was too young to fully grasp what happened that day, the roles members of his family would play in the dictatorship, or that one day he’d campaign to be elected president himself.

Just like the young Kast probably wouldn’t have noticed when a few days later, his brother Christian, who was seventeen at the time, spent the evening at a Carabineros military police station in rural Paine. He was spotted by Alejandro Bustos, who was being detained there along with four other campesinos who’d benefited from recent land reform. Early the next morning, the Carabineros and their civilian accomplices dragged the men to Collipeumo Peak, lined them up, and shot them. Bustos only survived because another of the men, Orlando Pereira, fell on top of him, covering Bustos in his blood and allowing him to play dead. The assassins then flung the five bodies into the canal below, where Bustos helped the men’s families find them two days later.

The killings in Paine didn’t stop there. By the end of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in 1990, at least seventy Paine residents had been murdered or disappeared, of Chile’s more than three thousand disappeared or killed during that period. That gives the town the grim record for the highest number of dictatorship-era victims of any place in Chile relative to its population. José’s father, Michael Kast — who records say voluntarily joined the German Nazi Party at age eighteen in 1942 and saw combat before fleeing to South America to escape denazification — was accused of complicity in those crimes for lending the Carabineros a truck that may have been used to detain campesinos. Another of Kast’s brothers, Miguel, was a member of the Chicago School, a collection of right-wing economists who collaborated with the dictatorship to impose neoliberal reforms.