Chile presidential hopeful vows to expel 'criminal' migrants to El Salvador / Photo: Raul BRAVO - AFP
Chile presidential hopeful vows to expel 'criminal' migrants to El Salvador
Chilean far-right presidential candidate Johannes Kaiser defended the use of lethal force against criminals Thursday in an AFP interview, and said he would deport migrants with criminal records to El Salvador's brutal anti-gang prison.
Kaiser, 49, has tapped into widespread frustration among Chilean voters about crime and immigration.
In the last days of campaigning ahead of the November 16 first round election, he has narrowed the gap with the two frontrunners, Jeannette Jara, a communist representing a broad center-left coalition, and fellow far-right candidate Jose Antonio Kast.
Kaiser, who shot to fame as a YouTuber, is seen as more extreme than Kast.
He has railed against feminists, migrants and critics of the country's late military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
In an interview on his campaign bus around 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of the capital Santiago, he told AFP his goal was to protect the human rights of "law-abiding citizens" and not "preventing the attacker from getting shot."
"Preventing someone from mugging you at night, stabbing you in the back, raping your wife in your own home, or sexually assaulting your daughter at school: those kinds of things are protecting human rights," he argued.
The spread to Chile of organized crime gangs originating in Venezuela, Peru and other countries, has sown terror among a population fond of order, causing a lurch to the right.
While Chile is still one of Latin America's safest countries, the murder rate and the number of kidnappings have doubled in the past decade.
Kaiser added that he wanted to emulate US President Donald Trump by sending "illegal foreigners with criminal records found in Chile" to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) where tens of thousands of prisoners are being held without charge.
El Salvador's iron-fisted President Nayib Bukele struck a pact with Trump earlier this year to incarcerate hundreds of Venezuela migrants deported from the United States at CECOT.
Some claimed they were tortured during their four months in the mega-prison before being freed and returning to Venezuela in a swap deal with Washington.
- Cut ministries for women, environment -
Kaiser's platform combines a "tough on crime" approach with an ultraliberal economic ideology and a conservative social agenda.
He has proposed reducing the number of government ministries from 25 to nine, including eliminating the ministries for education, women, and the environment.
He has also said he is open to releasing people jailed for human rights abuses during Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship, including Miguel Krassnoff, a former intelligence officer sentenced to over a thousand years in prison.
On Thursday, he angrily refused to discuss the Pinochet regime, however, saying he was "tired of the subject."
Women's rights, climate change and high levels of inequality -- issues which got outgoing left-wing President Gabriel Boric elected in 2021 -- have been largely absent from this year's campaign.
Kaiser said he would follow the Trump administration out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
"I don't like the climate change trend," he declared, saying he found it "unreasonable" that Chile was phasing out coal-fired power stations while African nations and China continue to build new coal facilities.
Before being elected as a congressman in 2021 for Kast's Republican Party, Kaiser caused outrage by declaring on YouTube that rapists of "a group of particularly ugly women" deserved "a medal of honor."
He later claimed the remark was ironic.
In 2024, he resigned from the Republican Party to found his own National Libertarian Party, which has sought to outflank Kast's movement.
(E.Ndlovu--TPT)
