The Brooklyn Rail

The December 2025 election of José Antonio Kast in Chile was largely reported as a successful climb to power of a figure who skillfully utilized the contemporary (Trumpian) authoritarian playbook, with its particular emphasis on being tough on migration and crime. Identified as a representative of the so-called New Right in Latin America (alongside, to name a few, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele) and with clear ties to the US Heritage Foundation, Kast is presented as the latest expression of a global tide of far-right politicians.

There is, however, a distinct difference between Kast and the others. Rather than an outlier who emerged from the political wilderness to fill in the electoral gap created by crisis-ridden mainstream (neo)liberalism and the perpetual failures of a parliamentary left to embody a viable alternative, Kast represents a direct continuation of Chile’s long trajectory of neoliberal authoritarianism and, crucially, a family tradition.

Just as José Antonio Kast is portrayed as following in Trump’s footsteps, a common depiction of the process of Chile’s neoliberalisation through dictatorship takes its introduction to be the consequence of an ideological transfer from the global north, with Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics at the forefront. Combined with evidence of direct US/CIA intervention, a narrative of external imposition is created, sidelining specific developments within Chile and the role of domestic actors. Yet, neither Kast’s trajectory and convictions nor Augusto Pinochet’s neoliberal class offensive can be adequately understood by ignoring the domestic framework.

The following attempts to situate Kast’s victory within the long trajectory of Chile’s violent neoliberalisation. It looks at how the process was intertwined with personal biographies, domestic historical developments, and specific actors who, while in dialogue with the transnational neoliberal framework before and during the Pinochet dictatorship, made original and distinct contributions to its practical implementation in ways that would be emulated by other proponents of neoliberalisation in later years.

A lot of ink has been spent on Friedman’s and Friedrich Hayek’s visits and advice to the junta, further embedding the narrative of an externally transfused set of ideas. More consistent research, however, has contextualized these events as attempts to legitimize decisions already made by attaching them to world-renowned economists with the aim of improving the international image of the regime. Rather than a dictatorship in search of an economic doctrine, the policies implemented were developed long before Friedman’s or Hayek’s involvement, primarily reflecting how a specific section of the political and business class responded to the particular decline of the Chilean conservative right and the expanding class struggles of the same period. The result was an interpretative adaptation of the fusion between Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory and transnational neoliberalism, a combination much more relevant to understanding the remarkable persistence of the neoliberal framework long after the fall of the dictatorship than Friedman’s monetarist prescriptions.

The “Chilean project” represents the most successful operationalization of an invariant characteristic of the neoliberal framework since the 1930s, namely, the idea that a market economy requires a strong state tasked with repressing both inherent self-destructive tendencies of the market along with any social antagonism threatening capital and private property. And while the implementation of a similar framework in other countries in the years to follow demonstrates that the brutal violence of a military dictatorship is not a sine qua non precondition, it remains equally misleading to ignore the fact that its existence in Chile was an indispensable accelerant—something tacitly or openly admitted by neoliberals themselves ever since.

 

Like Father, Like Son(s)

Clinging to the fence like a monkey, mad Norberto laughed and said, the Second World War is returning to the Earth. All that talk about the Third World War was wrong; it’s the Second returning, returning, returning. And it has fallen to us, the people of Chile, to greet and welcome it.
—Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star

Michael Kast, José Antonio’s father, was born in Thalkirchdorf, Germany in 1924. Joining the Hitler Youth in his early years, he became a full NSDAP member at eighteen and, shortly after, joined the Wehrmacht, serving the Nazi army and its brutality in France, Russia, Crimea and, finally, Italy. Captured by Allied forces in 1945, he escaped arrest twice and made his way back to his hometown where, in 1947, a sympathetic official is said to have destroyed his Nazi records. Yet, while the denazification process had already been abandoned by a US occupation authority more concerned with the continuation of the German state in the context of the Cold War, Kast decided to leave West Germany.¹ Equipped with travel documents issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)², Michael Kast took advantage of of the infamous “ratlines”³ and arrived in Chile in 1950. Joined by his wife and his first three children a year later, he opened a deli and sandwich shop, then eventually a Bavarian sausage factory, Cecinas Bavaria. Successfully expanding these ventures, by the early 1960s Kast owned businesses in Talagante, Rengo, and San Francisco de Mostazal, apart from the main factory in Paine. 

When the military coup overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in September 1973, Michael Kast and other members of the Kast family jumped at the opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance. Driven by both personal interest and political affiliation, Kast joined forces with other businessmen of the area and provided practical assistance to the military coup and its abducting/killing machine. As later trials would reveal, not only did Michael Kast provide local police and military units with trucks and drivers for arresting and disappearing left militants and radical workers and farmers, but he made sure to add workers from his own factory to the lists handed over. Moreover, as the unlikely survivor of a mass execution, Alejandro Bustos, would testify years later, Kast’s son (Christian Kast, sixteen at the time) was present during interrogations, torture, and executions.⁴

The case which brought their active collaboration to public light was that of Pedro León Vargas Barrientos, a twenty-three-year old member of MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) and union organizer at one of Michael Kast’s businesses. Although Pedro had already been fired for his union activities, his name still ended up in the military’s lists. Two days after the coup, he would be violently abducted in broad daylight by a policeman and two civilian collaborators while buying bread at a bakery. Proceeding to beat him senseless before throwing him in a car, his assailants drew their weapons and fired in the air to terrorize a crowd that, screaming “asesinos,” tried to confront them. 

As was common, when Vargas’s family inquired about Pedro at the police station, they were informed, despite many witnesses, that no record existed of his arrest—while he was, in fact, inside and undergoing brutal interrogation and torture. A few days later, a policeman would unwittingly confirm to his sister that Pedro was in fact at the station, but the revelation made no difference. On the same day that his presence was confirmed, he was taken away by the military, executed and his body discarded.

Though such evidence would eventually reach the Chilean courts, the perpetrators (and their civilian collaborators) would largely remain unpunished. In the case of Michael Kast, his death while the trial was still ongoing meant that no conviction would emerge, while his son Christian would be exempted for being a minor at the time.

Michael Kast’s older son, Miguel, was not in Chile during the first days of the coup. Having studied business administration at the Catholic University of Chile with Sergio de Castro and Pablo Baraona, he had secured a spot in the exchange program between the Catholic University and the University of Chicago, a collaboration inaugurated in 1956 and spearheaded by Arnold Harberger. Before becoming a Chicago Boy, however, Miguel Kast had already developed his political perspective within gremialismo, a far-right student movement.

 

The Emergence of Chile’s Far Right

The 1964 candidacy of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva had gathered the wide support of the conservative, Catholic right-wing—among whom were Miguel Kast—who were primarily enticed by its anti-Marxist credentials. Running against the socialist candidate Salvador Allende, the Christian Democrat had also qualified for US financial support, but it would soon transpire that Chilean Christian Democracy stood before a historical crossroad.

Transformations within Catholicism had brought forward tendencies towards a corporatist embrace of social justice, pushing interpretations that urged members of the elite to embrace a noblesse oblige attitude towards raving inequality.⁵ The first official expression of such a perspective came with Frei’s proposals for agrarian reform, a decision also based on the realization that the existing phenomenal discrepancy between wealthy landowners and those who worked the land—however typical of most Latin American countries at the time—was becoming a real obstacle to economic modernization and productivity enhancement. The simultaneous pressure from below and from modernizing factions of private capital had already initiated discussions around agrarian reform during Jorge Alessandri’s previous presidency (1958–64), but it was during Frei’s rule that the conflict would generate bitter debates, leading to the inaugural steps towards the development of Chile’s far right.

While rather mild in its scope, Frei’s proposal to penalize landowners of abandoned or poorly exploited land through a minimal redistribution program that included potential nationalizations triggered an almost existential sense of doom for parts of established conservative elites. In this context, a crucial constituency (including Miguel Kast) became indignant at what they interpreted as the forced expropriation of private property, generating a split within the Chilean right-wing.

Conservative opposition to Frei found its initial expression in the Fiducia group. Publishing a journal with the same name, Fiducia was formed in 1963 by a small group of young conservatives eager to confront what they saw as a widespread “moral crisis,” urging a return to a strict interpretation of Catholic dogma and moving steadily towards the far-right. Among the most important members of Fiducia was Jaime Guzmán, a young law student at the Catholic University of Chile from a long-established conservative family with an open admiration for Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.⁶ Writing for Fiducia, Guzmán would pen numerous articles attacking the Frei administration for promoting “collectivization,” promoting instead a version of Catholicism grounded on an unwavering defense of private property, private initiative, and the principle of “subsidiarity”⁷—all of which were defined as natural rights and an ontological cornerstone of Christian civilization. Following on the steps of European neoliberals who had developed a similar critique since the 1930s, Guzmán would declare that all threats to private property are essentially “Marxist” and, therefore, totalitarian.⁸

In the eyes of the emerging Chilean far right, the second sin of the Frei administration was an attempt to implement a reform of the university system, a decision also influenced by social Catholicism and the perceived need to modernize economic activity and industrialization (and, therefore, the training of those meant to lead it). While part of the reform centered on inviting external funding from private foundations (particularly from the US and Germany), it also included a drive towards opening access to higher education towards lower-income people. The eventual conflict that would emerge around the Reforma Universitaria of 1967 would also have a particular locus point: the traditionally conservative and elite Catholic University.

In step with wider socio-political changes, the Catholic University of Chile had also seen a significant increase in the number of students (more than 10,000 by 1967) and successful graduates (594 by 1967, compared to 250 in the late 1950s). While it retained its elite composition (more than 70 percent of Catholic University of Chile students came from the upper classes), it was the influence of social Catholicism present in some Christian Democratic students that exacerbated the intra-elite conflict.

In control of the student federation (FEUC) at Catholic University of Chile, Christian Democratic students promoted reforms to accommodate what they saw as their obligation to engage in social programs to support the marginalized, to increase student participation in decision-making, and to initiate a (modernizing) dialogue between Catholic faith and science. In the summer of 1967, their conflict with the university authorities reached an impasse, leading to a strike and occupation of university premises.

Equally irreconcilable was their program with the perspective developed by the emerging far right which, under the leadership of Guzmán and after the Fiducia engagement, had formed the gremialismo⁹ movement. Set up against the transformations taking place within Christian Democracy, the gremialistas preached commitment to values such as “respect, education and chivalry,” conservative abstractions meant to obscure the concrete demand to restore student obedience to established hierarchies.

Most interestingly, however, the gremialistas advanced a comprehensive worldview which laid the foundations for a far right (and far-reaching) intervention into the Chilean socio-political landscape. Typical of fascist mythmaking, the gremialistas presented themselves as strictly concerned with demarcating the academic environment from “political” conflict,¹⁰ with their Declaration of Principles presenting their project as “alien to any ideological and political conceptions.” As with contemporary pretenses of “depoliticization,” however, the actual content of the gremialistas’s framework was profoundly political, immersed in a nationalist perspective, committed to defending established hierarchies and identifying specific political actors as its enemies. There is no universe where the violent defense of the status quo (let us not forget that the gremialistas attacks on Christian Democrats were driven precisely by the accusation that they did not adequately defend that status quo) can be proclaimed as “depoliticized,” for the reason that there is nothing “natural” about this order. None of that prevented the gremialistas, however, from proclaiming their purported apolitical positions as “universal and permanent.”¹¹ As a final note, a further significance of the gremialismo movement goes beyond their adoption of a highly confrontational attitude towards existing conservative powers, like the Christian Democrats. In contrast to other fascist movements of the period, Guzmán’s gremialismo placed “youth” at the forefront of the struggle, further exacerbating the split with the traditional conservative right-wing along age lines.¹²

For all the above reasons and having befriended Guzmán at Católica, Miguel Kast was immediately drawn to the gremialistas, eventually becoming secretary general of the FEUC. Taking advantage of a split within the pro-reform student body,¹³ Kast and the gremialistas would further develop their fascist/corporatist perspective, consistently insisting on its apolitical perspective. Winning every FEUC election since 1968, the Catholic University of Chile would become (and remain) one of the main centers of conservative power, acquiring a central role in the right-wing opposition to the Allende regime. Miguel Kast, however, would not be present during this whole development. Less than a year after the election of Salvador Allende, he would receive a Ford Foundation scholarship to continue his studies at the University of Chicago,¹⁴ and it was there that the military coup found him, thereby preventing him from joining his other family members in their direct participation in kidnappings and other forms of violence.

 

Return of the (Not So) Prodigal Son

Miguel Kast had just completed his studies when he accepted a job in Mexico City, but the military coup changed his plans and he immediately returned to Chile to help the dictatorial regime alongside his other colleagues who had studied at the University of Chicago. Yet, even though he would not land in an official position until later, he had already participated from Chicago in the drawing up of an economic program meant to guide a post-Allende government that came to be known as El Ladrillo [The Brick].¹⁵

Completed in 1973, El Ladrillo was divided into two main parts, the first one being a (neoliberal) diagnosis of the problems of the Chilean economy, the second a series of (neoliberal) proposals for overcoming them, all inspired by the teachings of the University of Chicago. According to reports, it was distributed to military personnel a day after the coup by Roberto Kelly, a former Navy officer and crucial liaison between the junta and the Chicago Boys.¹⁶

Nonetheless, the ability of the Chicago Boys to access policy making and implement their neoliberal recipes did not begin immediately after the installation of the dictatorship.¹⁷ Not only was the military regime initially preoccupied with hunting down and eliminating its opponents, but the military traditionally had a corporatist and protectionist economic outlook, favoring state ownership of strategic resources and direct intervention in economic activity (to maintain specific privileges). 

After 1975, and due to the concerted efforts of Kelly and Guzmán, El Ladrillo would constitute a reference point for the implementation of the economic policies of the Chicago Boys, having painted the broad strokes of Chile’s privatisation onslaught (including the privatization of education, health care, and the pension system), a process of decentralization which left the state in charge of encasing and regulating (rather than controlling) market mechanisms and the drastic curtailment of public expenditure.¹⁸ As the next part of this article will show, Miguel Kast would play an indispensable role in the whole neoliberalisation process in both ministerial positions and as the president of Chile’s central bank until his death in 1983.