José Antonio Kast, the arch-conservative favoured to become Chile’s next president, wants to rewind his country’s last decade.
One of Latin America’s safest and most prosperous nations, Chile has over the past 10 years been shaken by an unprecedented wave of organised crime, anti-government protests, a big increase in immigration and an economic slowdown.
“Everything that was the Chilean economic miracle began to fall apart,” Kast told the Financial Times in a brief interview in his office, a spartan white-walled room in an affluent residential neighbourhood of Santiago. “Chileans are yearning for radical change . . . to get back what we have lost.”