General Pinochet’s Return

José Antonio Kast is Chile’s most right-wing president in 35 years. After two unsuccessful attempts in 2017 and 2021, he was elected in December 2025 on a hardline nationalist agenda that reflected growing public concerns over crime, the economy, and immigration. For some, his election exposed how incomplete Chile’s reckoning with its violent past remains: amid a climate of denial, support for Augusto Pinochet’s coup and subsequent 17-year dictatorship has not only persisted but has also increased, especially among generations born after the dictatorship. Kast was formally sworn in as Chile’s 38th president in March 2026.

Kast was born in 1966 into a large entrepreneurial German family that settled in 1950 in Paine, a rural area south of Santiago, Chile’s capital. His father, Michael, had been a member of the Nazi Party during the Second World War and served as an army lieutenant. Kast entered politics in the 1980s. His political project is rooted in the ideological and social networks of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-90), reflecting continuity through its law-and-order approach, economic model, and the appointment of senior officials with strong ties to the Pinochet regime. Two ministers in Kast’s cabinet previously represented Pinochet in court, including his legal defence during his detention in London from 1998 to 2000, when Spain sought his extradition on charges of crimes against humanity. ‘If Pinochet were alive’, Kast told voters in 2017, ‘he would vote for me.’

Friends and enemies

Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, and lived under house arrest until March 2000 when home secretary Jack Straw declared him ‘unfit to stand trial’ and allowed him to return to Chile, where he died in 2006. He had led one of Latin America’s most brutal military dictatorships. On 11 September 1973 Pinochet overthrew Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende through a CIA-sponsored coup. Allende was the first Marxist to be democratically elected in Latin America and the first to attempt a peaceful transition to socialism. He died by suicide on the day Pinochet took power.

Pinochet’s regime was marked by the dismantling of democratic institutions and civil rights, as well as widespread political violence and human rights violations. Four government-sponsored truth commissions, held between 1991 and 2011, identified more than 40,000 victims of torture and more than 3,000 victims of forced disappearance and execution, with figures still under review. Most victims were political opponents, but some were only the friends or relatives of those who were active opponents. Many of the regime’s crimes were committed in over 1,100 detention centres where victims were held and tortured. Around 2 per cent of Chile’s population was forced into exile.

Pinochet implemented free-market liberalisation and large-scale privatisation, taking advice from the ‘Chicago Boys’, a group of Chilean economists who had studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. One of the Chicago Boys was Kast’s eldest brother, Miguel, who later served as minister of state and president of Chile’s Central Bank under Pinochet. The regime’s economic ‘shock treatment’ contributed to low wages and unemployment levels reaching above 20 per cent in 1982-83, sparking widespread protests and escalating repression. Abroad, Chile’s neoliberal model influenced the policies of conservative governments, including those of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. The latter was a friend of the general, and was unhappy at his arrest in Britain. In 1999 she told the Conservative Party conference: ‘We will fight on for as long as it takes to see Senator Pinochet returned safely to his own country. The British people still believe in loyalty to their friends.’

In 1988 mounting domestic and international pressure forced Pinochet to hold a referendum on whether he should remain in power. Kast – then aged 22 – publicly supported Pinochet, appearing in campaign television adverts. Voters rejected Pinochet’s rule, opening the way to democratic elections in 1989. Chile has since had seven presidents of varying political leanings, shifting from centre-left consolidation to alternating centre-right and centre-left.

Since his defeat in the 2017 presidential election Kast has avoided discussing his support for Pinochet and has distanced himself from controversies over alleged assistance provided by his father and brother Christian to Pinochet’s security forces in 1973, in operations that led to the execution and disappearance of 70 peasants in Paine. No member of the Kast family has been convicted for crimes committed under Pinochet.

Kast’s pardons

Supporters and critics of Kast alike expect that he will pursue pardons and legal mechanisms to release former agents of the Pinochet dictatorship convicted of human rights crimes or reduce and commute their sentences. Most convictions have resulted from court cases initiated by victims, families, and human rights organisations, later joined by the Chilean state through its Human Rights Programme, created in 1997 under the centrist government of Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, to pursue dictatorship-era crimes and support victims. At the time of writing, Kast’s administration has instructed the Programme not to oppose habeas corpus petitions from five former state agents convicted of human rights crimes, the last of which was from a former soldier convicted for 14 killings in the 1973 massacre in Paine, the cradle of the Kast family. Around 140 former Pinochet agents – most of them now in their 70s and 80s – are imprisoned in Punta Peuco, a special facility built in 1995 to house former agents of the dictatorship. Kast has stated his willingness to use the presidential pardon, framing the issue in humanitarian terms. His administration has also proposed the possible termination of the Human Rights Programme.

Singing praises

Among those who might benefit from pardoning or sentence commutation is Álvaro Corbalán, the former head of operations of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), the regime’s feared secret police, and commander of Cuartel Borgoño, one its most notorious torture centres. I interviewed Corbalán twice, in April and December 2014, in Punta Peuco where he is (at the time of writing) serving an estimated 150 years, including a life sentence, for the disappearances and murders of scores of political opponents.

Corbalán is also a prolific singer-songwriter and shares recordings of his songs, made against prison rules, on social media. As I learnt from a Punta Peuco guard, Corbalán is known as ‘el Mozart’. My reason for interviewing him was to elicit his memories of music in the dictatorship’s centres for political detention and torture. Music was used by the regime to control and harm people by blasting it during torture to intimidate and to mask suffering. It was also used for indoctrination and humiliation; prisoners were made to sing or listen to politically charged songs, including those linked to Allende’s era, to mock and psychologically break them. Yet music also offered prisoners a source of hope and resilience. Although my interviewee revealed little about his role in the repression, he talked extensively about his own songs, which repeatedly extol the Pinochet coup and subsequent regime.

He told me that on his release from prison he will sing his song ‘¡Hola! ¡Qué tal!’ (‘Hello! How Is It Going?’). In it, he tells his friends he has needed them and missed them during his long wait, justified as a painful consequence of being a military man and devoting himself to Chile and Pinochet, as witnessed by God. Corbalán also talked about his song ‘Canción por el reencuentro’ (‘Song for the Reunion’), which deals with political reconciliation. It tells those seeking truth and justice to leave grudges behind. Yet on the matter of providing information that could help clarify human rights cases and the location of Chile’s many disappeared people, Corbalán wrote in a 2018 essay that: ‘I forgot everything and what I did not forget … just as well.’

Memorial sites

Most of the dictatorship’s political imprisonment centres have been dismantled, destroyed, or repurposed. Few have been turned into memorial sites, such as the Villa Grimaldi compound in the capital’s outskirts of Santiago. There were plans for Colonia Dignidad, an enclave in southern Chile founded by ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer and later renamed Villa Baviera, to become a memory site. Under Pinochet, Colonia Dignidad settlers collaborated with the DINA secret police, the CNI’s predecessor, to detain, torture, and exterminate opponents, while residents were subjected to horrific abuse. Under Kast these plans have been halted. At the same time, he has dismantled a specialised government unit that dealt with illegal adoptions of around 20,000 babies and children, mostly the children of single mothers from marginalised areas, carried out during the Pinochet years.

Meanwhile, MPs from the far-right National Libertarian Party proposed the creation of a ‘Museum of Truth’ focused on the years preceding the dictatorship, emphasising what they describe as the suffering and ‘victims’ of Allende’s government. The details are scant, but the intention is clear: to shift attention away from the dictatorship’s human rights abuses towards grievances against Allende. At stake is how Pinochet’s dictatorship is to be interpreted for generations to come.

Katia Chornik’s latest book is Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet’s Chile (Oxford University Press, 2025).