Sawt Falasteen - Hard-right Chile leader sworn in on promise of change

Chile becomes the latest Latin American country to lurch to the right as voters back law-and-order candidates to fight the spread of organized crime.

"Things are going to change," Kast told reporters minutes before taking the oath of office to succeed leftist Gabriel Boric.

Kast, 60, trounced Jeannette Jara, a communist from Boric's coalition, in December's run-off to clinch the presidency on his third attempt.

He is Chile's most hardline leader since the brutal 1973-1990 dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet -- whom Kast greatly admires.

The ultraconservative Catholic father of nine was sworn in before Congress in the central coastal city of Valparaiso, to cries of "long live Chile!" from right-wing lawmakers.

Several leaders from across the region attended his inauguration, including Argentina's firebrand Javier Milei, gang-busting Daniel Noboa of Ecuador and exiled Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

Kast gives US President Donald Trump another ally in Latin America, where the Republican leader is reasserting American dominance in places like Venezuela, where he overthrew Nicolas Maduro at gunpoint.

Kast was among a dozen leaders from the region who traveled to Florida last week for the launch of Trump's Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.

He borrowed from Trump's playbook on the campaign trail, vowing to deport hundreds of thousands of mostly Venezuelan undocumented migrants and seal the northern border.

He represents "a conservative right wing unlike anything seen since the return to democracy" in 1990, Rodrigo Arellano, a political analyst at Chile's University of Development, told AFP.

Martina Vivar, a 20-year-old occupational therapy student, said she felt "rage" faced with the victory of Kast's "campaign of fear and terror, just like during the dictatorship."

Boric was Chile's youngest-ever leader when he was elected four years ago following a months-long revolt over inequality, which brought over one million demonstrators into the streets in 2019 and 2020.

Attempts to draft a new constitution to reflect the protesters' demands ended in failure, however.

- Cracking down -

Chile's new leader has promised to move fast to tamp down a rise in murders, kidnappings and extortion in what remains nonetheless one of Latin America's safest countries.

He wants to give the police more firepower, deploy troops to crime hotspots and deport large numbers of undocumented migrants, whom many Chileans blame for violence.

His proposals have resonated in a country which takes pride in being a stable and orderly outlier on a continent throttled by organized crime.

"My expectations are hopeful with Kast. We've had a lot of vandalism and crime in Chile for many years," Jose Miguel Uriona, a 65-year-old vendor in Valparaiso, told AFP.

The run-up to Kast's inauguration was clouded by a clash with Boric over a Chinese project to link Hong Kong and Chile via a submarine fiber optic cable.

Washington claims the project is a threat to regional security. Kast argued that Boric had withheld information about the project, which Boric denied.

On the campaign trail, Kast dodged questions about his admiration for Pinochet and his blanket opposition to abortion, including in cases of rape and risk to the mother's life.

His cabinet choices have tapped into nostalgia for the Pinochet era among many Chileans, sparking an outcry from the opposition and rights groups.

He named two lawyers that defended Pinochet's rule to the defense and justice portfolios, and the incoming women's affairs minister is an evangelical anti-abortion activist.

University of Chile political scientist Alejandro Olivares warned that Kast's cabinet has "very little experience in negotiation and political maneuvering" which could thwart his agenda.

Before taking office Kast resigned from the Republican Party, which he founded in 2017 -- a symbolic gesture often undertaken by Chilean presidents to project independence of party politics.

Y.Zaher--SF-PST