Do we like them?Do we like José Antonio Kast?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A record of his own words and acts against trans rights, a rollback of environmental rules and a hardline migrant crackdown, with very little real good to set against it.
Kast was sworn in on 11 March 2026 as president, and AP called it Chile's sharpest shift to the right in decades. He comes from a family with deep ties to Pinochet's dictatorship: his brother Miguel was the dictator's central bank president, and a German archive card shows his father joined the Nazi party at 18 in 1942. The archive couldn't confirm it was the same man, and Kast has said his father was a conscript with no choice.
Pinochet is the thread that keeps tugging. In 2017 Kast said that if Pinochet were alive he would have voted for him, and The Nation reports he later visited convicted officers at Punta Peuco prison and promised pardons. Once in office he softened the line: in May he said he never made an absolute promise to pardon everyone, that each case would be looked at on its merits, and that nobody had been pardoned so far.
On the harm test, his own words are the problem. In a 2017 radio interview he said children are not born neutral, that they are born male or female, and that they have no judgment to change identity. That was aimed at Chile's gender identity law, and critics read it as a campaign against trans kids' recognition. His defenders see it as a conservative view of schooling and childhood, but it lands on trans people either way.
The planet and migrants don't fare better. According to AFP, in his first month his team axed more than 40 environmental decrees, scaled back protection for the vulnerable Humboldt penguin, and cancelled a plan to give legal status to 182,000 migrants. AFP also reports that Kast links rising murders, kidnappings and extortion to undocumented immigrants, and he ordered new border barriers.
The recent stoush is about the justice portfolio. A decree issued in the justice minister's name, 'by order of the President', cut the sentence of a 90-year-old man convicted of torture in 1973, and the opposition wants Rabat gone. Kast has kept backing him and says the political responsibility is his. Whether that is accountability or stubbornness depends on how you read the sentence cuts.
The good stuff is thin. He won a democratic mandate and took office peacefully, and he has shown some willingness to walk back absolutes like pardoning everyone. But we found no charity work or acts of kindness at a cost to himself, and no record of him standing up for the groups his policies hit. That's honestly the whole list.