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FOR the first time in 35 years, Chilean voters this month decisively voted into power an admirer of their despicable former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Despite the US president’s growing penchant for intervening in foreign elections, it wasn’t a Trump card that proved decisive for José Kast.
There were various other factors at play, not least the failure of Gabriel Boric’s left-leaning government to deliver on many of the promises behind its mandate for a progressive transformation.
Rising to power on the back of a popular revolt propelled mainly by economic woes, Boric declared in 2021 that if Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, it would also be its burial place. It now turns out that economic doctrine has never been laid to rest, and the Latin American graveyard instead is littered with the remains of the pink tide that roused hopes globally when it first washed across the continent earlier this century.
The Boric government delivered some relief to those who needed it most, but turned centrist after a year of struggling to shift the structures it had inherited. It sought to replace Chile’s 1980 basic law with a progressive constitution, which was rejected in a referendum; a more conservative variant suffered the same fate. So Chile is still stuck with a reactionary Pinochet-era constitution, and Kast — whose father was a Nazi, and whose brother served under Pinochet as one of the ‘Chicago boys’ who endeavoured to replace every vestige of Salvador Allende’s socialism with capitalism on steroids — will make the most of it.
However, Kast’s electoral success doesn’t necessarily mean the worst-off Chileans who switched allegiances, or felt obliged to vote under recent laws that make it compulsory, wish for a return to the dark days before their nation regained its democracy. The voting public appears to have been open to authoritarian solutions in the face of alarm over growing crime and immigration, notably the influx of 700,000 Venezuelans seeking refuge from the depredations of the Maduro regime.
Has Latin America’s pink tide receded beyond a point of no return?
Too many other supposedly left-wing governments in the region have been replaced by the right for related reasons. In Bolivia, for instance, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) might not have gone down the gurgler had Evo Morales, credited with meaningful achievements towards reducing poverty and social inequality in his first two terms, not sought a third despite losing a referendum. After being ousted in a reactionary coup in 2019 that was thwarted soon afterwards, he contributed to MAS infighting that facilitated the emergence of Rodrigo Paz Pereira.
Vaguely similar trajectories can be discerned across nations that both contributed to the pink tide and then helped to reverse it by failing to meet the broadly social-democratic expectations they had raised. Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador and Panama have gone pretty much the same way, and next year’s elections in Peru, Colombia and Brazil might deliver equally unpalatable results. Trumpian interventions benefited the exceedingly obnoxious Javier Milei in Argentina and may yet ensconce Nasry Asfura in power in Honduras. It has been pointed out that Donald Trump’s reprieve of Asfura’s predecessor Juan Orlando Hernández makes a mockery of his claims to be combating drug trafficking in the region, but the president hardly cares about facts. Monumental hypocrisy has always been a key component of US foreign policy, but the difference now is that Trump and his henchmen have few inhibitions about revealing their policy aims.
This is clearly visible in the crusade against Venezuela, which may lead to open warfare. Nicolas Maduro has a lot to answer for — the mantle he inherited from Hugo Chavez lies in rags, mostly — but the impetus for regime change is based on absurd fentanyl-related assumptions, and perhaps guided by Trump aide Marco Rubio’s determination to weaken Cuba beyond redemption. The Caribbean island that successfully challenged American hegemony in the western hemisphere more than six decades ago has been viewed ever since as an exemplar that must be obliterated. It has survived so far in the face of mounting economic warfare and diminishing allies, but faces an increasingly uncertain future.
The far right resurgence isn’t, of course, exclusively a Latin American phenomenon. With some differences, a similar trajectory is visible in Europe, where the abject failures of former social democrats and the centrists threaten to overwhelm the continent with far-right ideologies a century after Nazi hegemony. Trump and his acolytes are determined to accelerate that trend. Again, the failures of the centre-right and the purported left stand out as accelerants. The indicators suggest that the depressingly bleak world we live in may turn out to be just an appetiser for what lies ahead.
Published in Dawn, December 24th, 2025
