Fears over migration and crime push Chile's presidential race to the right

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SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Fans sported MAGA-style caps. AC/DC blasted from the speakers. Red, white and blue flags flapped in the wind. Crowds whooped and cheered as the man of the hour lamented the surge of migrants across the border.

“This country isn’t falling apart,” he bellowed. “It is being shot to pieces, by bullets.”

You’d be forgiven for assuming this was a rally for U.S. President Donald Trump.

But this eruption of visceral rage at immigrants took place in Santiago, Chile, at the final campaign event for Johannes Kaiser, a radical libertarian gaining traction before Sunday's presidential election in Chile, where rising fears of uncontrolled migration have pushed everyone in this race — even the governing coalition's Communist candidate, Jeannette Jara — to the right.

Kaiser is “the only one with a firm hand, the only one who can pull us out of the United Nations, close the borders to all the Venezuelan criminals,” said Claudia Belmonte, 50, peering out from beneath the brim of a red cap emblazoned with Kaiser’s promise to “Make Chile Great Again.”

Such demands for a “mano dura," a “firm hand,” against disorder have reshaped Chilean politics as transnational gangs like Tren de Aragua surged across borders from crisis-stricken Venezuela and elsewhere in recent years, importing kidnappings, car jackings and other violent crimes previously unseen in one of Latin America's safest nations.

“People in Chile never had problems with foreigners. But you hear about a gang burying someone alive in your neighborhood and it changes you,” said Carlos Jadué, 49, a lemon vendor in central Santiago.

The anti-immigrant backlash has transformed a nation that just four years ago elected the bright young hope of the Latin American left, President Gabriel Boric, a millennial protest leader who handily defeated the ultraconservative lawyer José Antonio Kast with vows to “bury neoliberalism" after the nation's 2019 social upheaval.

This time around, experts say heightened nativist fears give Kast a better shot. Even if he won't clinch the 50% of votes needed to win outright in Sunday’s first round, polls show him likely facing off against Jara in a Dec. 14 runoff.

A Kast victory would bear out a regional trend that has seen recent right-wing electoral wins in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador.

“There are regional structural factors pushing politics rightward in Latin America,” said Michael Albertus, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, citing widespread perceptions that a surge in immigration has made crime worse.

In Santiago, few vestiges remain of the 2019 mass protests against inequality — known here as “el estallido” or “the explosion" — in which as many as a million Chileans marched to vent a generation’s worth of economic and political grievances.

One is the stone plinth in the city's Plaza Italia where protesters battled nightly with police, torching buildings and braving birdshot. The bronze statue of a 19th-century Chilean war hero was defaced, then taken down for what authorities promised would be a quick restoration.

Four years later, the plinth, scarred by anti-government graffiti, remains empty and freighted with symbolism. Protesters see a reminder of all that's unaddressed. Chile retains the neoliberal constitution adopted in 1980 by military dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet after Boric twice failed to change it — a key demand of the uprising.

Critics see a reminder of the lawlessness of that time.

“I was left-wing until the ‘estadillo,' when I watched chaos taking over our streets,” said Sebastian Jaramillo, a 36-year-old at Kaiser’s rally on Wednesday. “I started watching YouTube videos about the decline of our country, I got politicized.”

In the rallies of Kaiser and Kast, some recognize a familiar revulsion at the centrist consensus that has held sway since the dictatorship.

“The anger from the ‘estallido’ didn’t disappear. It stayed, it festered,” said Juan Medina, 40, who works at a theater in downtown Santiago. “Instead of turning our anger on inequality, the economic system, the political class, we’ve redirected it toward migrants.”