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.

Today, fifty-two years after the military came to power in Chile, José Antonio Kast is running for president for his Republican Party. He’s never distanced himself from his family’s suspected crimes (Christian was a minor at the time and was never charged, while their father died under investigation). In fact, he has denied them. He’s also a supporter of Pinochet’s policies himself. During the 2017 campaign, Kast said,“If [Pinochet] were alive, he would have voted for me.” As a young man, Kast even campaigned in favor of Pinochet during the plebiscite that ultimately ended his rule.

Felipe González Mac-Conell is a journalist and author of Kast: The Chilean Far Right. He told Jacobin that Kast is different from Argentina’s Javier Millei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or even Donald Trump in that his image isn’t based on a boisterous personality. And notably, Kast emerged from a political party, the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), and has always had strong institutional backing. And UDI itself had strong ties to the dictatorship.

“Many of the founders of the UDI were civilian collaborators with the Pinochet regime,” González said. And under Kast, the Republican Party, “isn’t necessarily proposing something new . . . but rather it’s trying to resuscitate a type of politics that was left behind by the transition to democracy, by globalization and modernism.”

But Kast’s past doesn’t appear to be enough to dissuade voters from supporting him — even in Paine. Because of the colonial-era latifundia system that set up a system of social relations that put bosses at the heads of their communities, some people there see him “as the heir to his family’s influence in Paine,” according to Diego Cabezas Contreras, who’s general coordinator of the Paine Memorial Corporation. But it’s also because Kast’s law-and-order rhetoric and claims that migrants steal jobs and cause crime appeal to rural voters: “People see only the fact that they may be safer, or that they’ll have jobs, and that migrants won’t be in the country.” Indeed, many analysts have linked those issues to the rise of the far right not only in Chile but globally.

Cabezas says some people aren’t considering the baggage that could come with Kast’s policies, from releasing prisoners being held for crimes against humanity during the dictatorship to restricting reproductive rights and cracking down on migrants. “Providing security creates the risk of who is going to impose this security? How is this security going to be controlled? How are the migrants going to be expelled?” And he doesn’t see that as a worthwhile trade-off.

“We know democracy is imperfect, fragile. But it’s our duty to take care of it,” Cabezas says, because “some people have had to pay with their lives to defend it,” including in Paine.

Still, Kast’s appeal reaches far beyond rural communities.

A September 7 poll shows Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara leading the field for the first round of voting set for November 16, with 28 percent. Kast is at her heels with 26 percent, followed by his fellow right-winger Evelyn Matthei with 16 percent. (Though Matthei had in the past denied supporting Pinochet, she said in an April interview that the military coup was necessary to avoid Chile’s full descent into communism: “My position is that there was no other option. That we were going straight to Cuba.”) If those trends hold, there’d be no outright winner in the first vote, and the election would go to a second round in December. And that same polling data determined that regardless of the matchup, Kast would win. Should Matthei come out ahead of Kast in the first round, it’s also predicted she’d defeat Jara.

San Diego State University professor emeritus Brian Loveman agrees with that data: He doesn’t think Jara stands a chance, especially as many Chileans feel disappointed by the government of Gabriel Boric, the current left-leaning president. This dissatisfaction is causing some to look to the Right. Boric came to power on the wings of a protest movement known as the Estallido Social, the Social Uprising, or simply “the revolt.” The protests began in October 2019 and were triggered by a subway fare hike but quickly exploded into a general movement against the neoliberalism imposed with US backing by the dictatorship. As a concession to protesters, Boric promised to deliver a new constitutional process to replace Chile’s current constitution, which was written and put in place under Pinochet in 1980. But his government failed twice to deliver.

“The left-center coalition of the 1990s is gone. Pinochet got 44 percent in the 1988 plebiscite [that led to his ouster],” Loveman told Jacobin. “The estimated vote for the two leading right-wing candidates looks about the same.”

But polling is no exact science. And even progressive and left-leaning Chilean voters have different views on the upcoming vote.

Public defense attorney Eduardo Saavedra Díaz is a columnist for several center-left publications in Chile, including Radio Cooperativa, which represented a moderate opposition to Pinochet. While he also views Kast’s rise as a vote against Boric, he thinks Jara has a shot at victory because she represents an anti-elite position that appeals to much of the Left. “She’ll follow the same line,” he explains, referring to a social democratic position and pointing out what he sees as her successes as part of Boric’s government. “[She is] backed by the Communist Party but also supported by the democratic socialists or social democrats who lost to her in the primaries.” As voters will also be casting ballots for parliament in November, Jara would also need to secure enough support from lawmakers to implement any anti-elite agenda.

From the Port of San Antonio in Valparaíso, schoolteacher and poet José Miguel Allende Lira calls Kast’s policies “very extreme.”

“My candidate and the candidate of many others is Jeannette Jara. And even though the political scenario looks unfavorable, those on the Right fear her because of her obvious support from a large number of people they did not value,” he told Jacobin. He thinks part of the reason Jara isn’t garnering even greater attention is because “the owners of the polling companies are the same businessmen linked to right-wing candidates.”

But no matter the outcome of the vote, says César Gutiérrez, who’s executive director of the Social Democratic Foundation in Santiago, the result is less important than what comes after. He says Jara has forged stronger ties between the social democratic center left and the communist left, so they “can all rally behind her to compete against the fascist avalanche that’s coming in the next election.” He also urged whoever loses the election to concede and accept the results.

The experience of Andrea Solar, a university student studying literature who works in a hotel in the capital, Santiago, is representative of her generation. She was born in 1990, the year the dictatorship ended. But her mother found herself in danger as a Communist Party member during the Pinochet years, forcing her to abandon her own university studies to stay safe.

Solar says she’s never fully supported any Chilean politician, and she even views the 2019 protests as suffering from a problem of elitism. But she also sees danger in the rise of the far right and Kast’s popularity, as many dictatorship-era criminals have escaped justice and families of victims have lived decades without answers:

Given this situation, where justice has yet to be served for many families, where the pain remains an open wound, it is disrespectful for those aspiring to be political leaders to minimize or downplay this part of history. For me, this speaks to the low ethical standards of these candidates, and they will not shy away from brutal punishments for those who protest.

But in Chile, that wouldn’t be anything new. And to Paola Palomera, it’s not a partisan issue that can be fixed in the November elections.

“If the elections were this Sunday, I’d tell you I don’t have a candidate,” she told Jacobin. But when I spoke with Palomera on the phone, she didn’t necessarily sound hopeless — just fed up.

In February 2021, her son Nicolás Piña became one of the most high-profile prisoners of the revolt after he was chased down by police drones and plainclothes officers after a protest. As Piña was being arrested, Palomera arrived and tried to intervene, but officers beat her too.

He’d later be charged with throwing a Molotov cocktail into a police vehicle.

In June 2023, Piña told La Izquierda Diario that he remembers thinking, “They’ll kill me here, or I’ll disappear.” It’s a testament to how deeply the dictatorship era still affects the national consciousness in Chile. (Coincidentally in the same interview, Piña remembered crying while reading A la sombra de los cuervos by Javier Rebolledo, which recounts the crimes the Kast family is suspected of committing during the dictatorship.)

After months of litigation and pretrial detention, Piña was sentenced to ten years in prison, alongside “four other kids,” as Palomera described them, “who are practically trophies” for the government.

As most mothers probably would, Palomera says her son is innocent. But she’s not the only one, and her claims aren’t without precedent in Chilean history.

For example, Chilean terror law has long been used to criminalize indigenous protest, allowing masked anonymous witnesses to appear in court to provide testimony, including during the presidency of Michelle Bachelet — who went on to serve as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In Piña’s case, Palomera says, the charges have been “proven only by the testimony of the intramarchas,” or police who “integrated themselves into the marches during the revolt, as undercover agents.” The protests were also violently and deliberately repressed, according to Amnesty International, on the order of then president Sebastián Piñera. The rights group accused the government of using torture, sexual violence and excessive force that left hundreds of people with serious eye injuries, or what Palomera refers to as mutilations, while more than thirty others were killed.

As a parliamentarian in July 2021, Boric met Piña in prison. His mother says Boric showed up to visit political prisoners, but they didn’t want to see him, as most were being held under recently passed anti-protest laws. Her retelling is supported by the fact that one detainee smacked Boric in the back of the head during his visit. So Piña took the meeting.

Still, the Boric government has not interceded on Piña’s behalf. Today the father to two young children is a fugitive. Palomera says she even received a notice his citizenship had been revoked.

“We are worse off than before,” Palomera said, though she admitted she didn’t like to compare. “What I experienced as a child under the dictatorship and, now, my son has experienced. . . . During the dictatorship, many detainees were disappeared and tortured. In this revolt, [repression] was based on the prisons, the arrests, on the set-ups. They come in talking about dignity, human rights, [so] people voted for [Boric]. And then when reality set in, he was supporting whoever — the Carabineros, the police, giving them all these resources — it was sad. Even in democracies, tyranny does exist.”

“As a mother, I am guided by continuing to live in resistance,” Palomera told me as we wrapped up our conversation. And she says she has relied on building solidarity with other mothers of political prisoners, while doing everything from studying Chilean laws to going on hunger strike to get justice for Piña.

“To be able to stand firm and have the guts a mother needs, to not fall into victimization . . . because once you fall into that weakness, well, they deceive you.”

“It’s better to live a truth that hurts.”