Chile; A New Government Takes Shape

It is January in Santiago de Chile. Well actually, now it’s February.

It is hot, sunny, and the city has emptied out. It’s the time Chileans take nice, long vacations, customarily to the coastal resort towns like Zapallar, Con Con, Cachagua, Maitencillos, Viña del Mar, Algarrobo, and Santo Domingo.

But this year, the summer has added drama as president-elect José Antonio Kast begins to form his government, starting with the naming of his cabinet. Kast takes over the presidency from Gabriel Boric on March 11, 2026.

But, the normal slowdown of January in Chile was interrupted by a tragedy; again this year, a series of wild fires, most likely caused by malicious arson or just plain carelessness, swept through areas of the Ñuble and BíoBío Regions. Abundant winter and early spring rains in this area of central Chile, had produced ample growth of grass and brush which by January had been dried by extreme hot temperatures.  Swept along by high winds for several days on end, wild fires again burned large areas of plantation forest and farms.

Unfortunately, repeating a theme from two years ago, the fires also reached a residential area near Penco, as well as a large neighborhood where workers live above the port of Lirquén, on the coast just north of Concepción. The speed and intensity of the fire in Lirquén prevented safe evacuation of all residents in its path. Twenty-one inhabitants of Lirquén died in the fire.

Compare this to the situation in Santa Olga, in 2018, where fires completely destroyed that town, but the residents were able to escape before the flames reached their homes, and there were no fatalities. As reported in this blog at the time, the residents of Santa Olga benefitted from the fact that a major road went right through the town, giving them a way out from the path of the fire. And, there was sufficient warning of the rapidly advancing threat from the fast-moving fire. None of this was evident in the case of Lirquén this year.

After the fires were extinguished, 42,000 hectares had burned, destroying more than 2,000 homes. This type of disaster always brings out the innate desire within Chileans to provide assistance, expressions of solidarity to provide food, clothing and temporary shelter for the families left homeless, and of course special care for the pets, in this case mostly dogs and cats, also left homeless and in some cases ownerless. But the futility most of the victims experience is palpable. Humanitarian relief is fleeting, and the colder, rainy season is only a couple of months away; so many families have nowhere to go, and their situation is becoming serious.

The outgoing President, Gabriel Boric, of course rushed to the sites of the worst damage, promising rapid reconstruction of homes, schools, and health clinics. But the victims of this fire surely are aware that the recovery from the last big fire, on the outskirts of Viña del Mar and Valparaiso in early February of 2024, has been pretty much a failure, with many residents who lost homes in that fire still awaiting a solution to their housing needs. It was the same President Boric who made extraordinarily optimistic promises of reconstruction there also.

In the case of this year’s fires, the situation is complicated by the presence of a President-elect, José Antonio Kast, anxious to show rapid solidarity, with the obvious possibility of competition with President Boric for media time and photo ops at the scene of the disaster. However, in a show of political sensitivity, the two met, discussed the situation and the recovery needs, and separately, but in a coordinated fashion, visited the disaster area in Lirquén.

It’s not clear at this point how the outgoing Boric team will deal with the cleanup and provision of at least temporary housing for the victims of the Penco and Lirquén fires. They have made grand promises, but the heavy lifting required for reconstruction after these fires will fall to the in-coming Kast government.

Surely the Kast team, still not in place and without official standing, will stay connected with the Boric team responsible for the recovery. Their inclinations to try to work together, given that Boric must govern until March 11 and Kast only after that, bodes well for as smooth a transition as is possible, but the incoming team will surely be increasingly critical of the performance of the Boric team in reconstruction after wildfires.

On the immediate policy agenda is the new forest fire law working its way through Congress. It appears that the present version of the law may have some very good elements related to combatting wild fires, but very little that addresses the need for communities, small businesses, and individuals, especially those in the urban-rural interface, to be responsible for activities that prevent fires from getting started or advancing.

While the country was focused on the tragedy of Penco and Lirquén, President-elect Kast announced his entire cabinet, just short of a month after he was elected to the presidency. Analysts immediately noted a couple of characteristics of the group that stand out. Only 8 of the 24 appointees are members of a political party, and it is a corporate style, pro-business cabinet, much like that of the two prior presidencies of Sebastian Piñera.

The all-important Ministry of Finance is always the appointment that provides the first “feeling” about the new government, with observers looking for an indication of stable macroeconomic understanding and management.  Jorge Quiroz, age 63, Kast’s appointee for this position, has economics degrees from the University of Chile and Duke University (PhD). His career has been mostly as an economic advisor to corporations, and to the Kast campaign. His in-depth involvement in the different important sectors of Chile’s economy, such as mining, infrastructure, housing construction, retail, and agribusiness, hopefully indicate an understanding of the micro-economic dynamics as they affect, and are affected by, the macro economy. In other words, a well-rounded economist, with connections in the important productive sectors of Chile’s economy.

The Ministry most responsible for maintaining cohesion of the executive branch in Chile is the Ministry of Interior. Hence, the closest thing to a Vice-President in the Chilean system is the Minister of Interior, who fills in for the president when the president is out of the country. This ministry will be led by Claudio Alvarado, age 62, one of the cabinet members who does bring political connections (UDI party) and years of legislative and local government experience, as well as in both Piñera governments. He is a graduate of the Business School of Valparaiso, and a close personal friend of Kast. He is leading the Kast transition team.

Francisco Pérez Mackenna will be the Foreign Affairs Minister. He is a graduate of the Catholic University in Santiago, and  has an MBA from the University of Chicago. His career has been mostly in corporate management. He has been active on the board of the  Chilean American Chamber of Commerce (Amcham), an institution with a special role in promoting US investment in Chile. This association with 520 members will be important for the future relationship between Chile and the US. US/Chile commerce is US$ 31,000 million. The new director of AmCham reports to be working with the new US Ambassador to Chile, to bring at least US$440,000 million fresh investment to Chile, and to bring down tariffs between the two countries as soon as possible to zero (where they were, by the way, under the US/Chile FTA, ignored by President Trump in his blanket application of new tariffs last year).

As the Boric government reached its final months in office, the president announced he would propose ex-president Michelle Bachelet as a candidate to replace the Portuguese Antonio Guterres as Secretary General of the United Nations, whose term ends at the end of 2026. Then, with no consultation with incoming-president Kast, Boric formalized the nomination along with public support of the presidents of Mexico and Brazil. This clearly complicates the agenda of Chile’s new president, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, as to whether or not to get on board with the nomination. Kast so far has deferred the decision to after he officially becomes president. This act of outgoing president Boric is what Chileans refer to as a “cacho”, sticking someone with something they may not want nor know what to do with it. (More on the Bachelet candidacy in a future blog posting.)

Some of the new appointees to Kast’s cabinet are recognizable political names from earlier governments. Ximena Rincón (Energy), as a member of the Christian Democrat party served in Congress as Senator, as Minister in both of Michelle Bachelet’s governments, and as administrator of the Metropolitan Regional government. She left the Christian Democrat party to help form the Democrat party, in part in reaction to the leftward drift of the Christian Democrat party.

Jaime Campos (Agriculture), is an old political warrior (75 years  of age) of the long-established Radical party. With a law degree from the University of Concepción, he has been a legislator, minister of agriculture in the government of Ricardo Lagos and Minister of Justice in the second government of Michelle Bachelet. He will face big issues related to water law and environmental regulations as they relate to food and fiber production, as well as the reorganization of the public institutions dealing with forestry, wildlands management, and of course, wildfire control.

Francisco Undurraga (Culture), 60 years old, also comes from the Chamber of Deputies, where he held a vice-president position. He is a member of the moderate Evopoly party, which was formed during the second Piñera government by moderate conservatives who were supportive of Piñera’s government, but were a moderating force to the more extreme tendencies of other members of that government.

At this point, it’s worth noting the appointment of Andres Jouannet, president of the Amarillos party, as Undersecretary for security. The Amarillo party was formed as a moderate centrist party, after the estallido social in 2019, by Christián Warnken, important poetry scholar and political commentator aligned until then with the left.

Each of these appointments brings strong connections with the forces in congress Kast will need to pass important legislation: the Radical, Evopoly, Amarillo and Democrat parties. In the first days after the announcement of these appointments, these appointees received considerable criticism from colleagues who consider Kast’s government and cabinet to be far right. However, this remains to be seen, and the presence of these moderates in the cabinet may be a sign that the new president may not be as extreme as some believe.

Three of these centrist parties, Evopoly, Amarillo and Democrat, now face dissolution, due to their low vote tally in the election. While one or more may appeal this action required under a new law established to trim the number of parties represented in Congress to a more manageable level, many commentators see this as the moment for the political center to again be represented, at first by a coalition formed by Evopoly, Democrat, and Amarillo parties. This group really represents the coalition of forces that were behind the rejection of the ill-fated constitutional rewrite proposed, and roundly defeated, in September of 2022.

The most interesting, and hence, contentious, of Kast’s appointments are the Minister of Justice and Human Rights, Fernando Rabat, and the Minister of Defense, Fernando Barros. Rabat was on a legal team defending Augusto Pinochet and family in cases of embezzlement of public funds, and Barros was a lawyer on the team that tried to get Pinochet released from his arrest in London in 1998. (For an interesting account of the Barros legal work on behalf of Pinochet’s release, the recently published “38 Londres Street”, by Philippe Sands, is highly recommended.)

The appointment of Trinidad Steinert as Minister of Public Security, until recently the public prosecutor in the security-challenged northern area of Tarapaca bordering with Peru and Bolivia,  suggests Kast is seriously focused on the relationship between illegal entry through the northern borders, and the increase of organized crime in the country.

Two interesting appointments worth watching are Louis de Grange in Transport and Communications, and Ivan Poduje in Housing and Urbanization. Both are independents, and both graduates of Catholic Universities. And both have been, over the last four years, ubiquitous in the op/ed pages of media in Chile, highly critical of what the Boric government has done in these two areas. In fact, de Grange was director of the Metro, Santiago’s expansive public mass transport system, so he will again be in charge of that gem of an urban transport system, but one not without problems related to sustainability and growth. Poduje will immediately sink his teeth into the highly criticized post-wildfire reconstruction programs ongoing around Valparaiso and the Lirquen/Penco area, as well as the moribund public sector-subsidized housing programs.

President-elect Kast, after appointing his cabinet and many of the under-secretaries who do most of the work, traveled to El Salvador, Hungary, and Panama. He met with Presidents Bukele in San Salvador (visiting the infamous mass jails there), Orban in Budapest, and Mulino in Panama City. His decision to visit Orban and Buchele, after having also met with President Milei in Argentina, of course fed the social media frenzy of those who believe Kast will be much too similar to those leaders.

In Panama, Kast made a major speech at the International Economic Forum of Latin America and the Caribbean 2026, an important meeting of regional business and government representatives, emphasizing his intentions to pursue better regional security through cooperation with other countries, especially neighboring countries. While at this meeting, he met with President Paz of Bolivia, announcing afterwards that they had agreed on several options for improving relations between Chile and Bolivia, where full diplomatic relations are still severed.

Kast has pronounced that his will be an “emergency government”. He defends the need for “emergency” actions on the analysis that Chile has, for over a decade, had only mediocre economic growth, stalled productivity, too-high under- and un-employment, and the perceived security problems related to high rates of relatively uncontrolled immigration and crime control methods begging modernization. Onerous regulatory regimes are holding back sustainable growth in the wood products, salmon, and fresh fruit sectors, where Chile has obvious potential for innovation and investment.

Of course, the term “emergency” causes the usual negative knee-jerk reaction of those already convinced Kast will be some sort of extreme right-wing, oppressive government that will limit rights and reverse the liberal agenda put in place by the Boric government. Kast will certainly attempt to implement a conservative agenda. His personal conservative views on family (he has nine children), marriage (he and his wife hold hands, heaven forbid), and of course his religion-based opposition to abortion (practicing Catholic), have the social architects on the left almost livid with fears that their whole social liberalization effort, begun with the return to democratic government in 1990, will be set back.

On the other hand, Kast has shown a more moderate inclination with the choices for ministers of his cabinet. He is conservative, and he was elected on an agenda first and foremost to address security, immigration, and economic stagnancy. If he doesn’t do something early about these three concerns, he will be in trouble. So, we can expect some actions that will awaken the already alert left which always turns to concerns for human rights violations whenever a government, especially a right-wing government like Kast’s, puts controls, or limits, or restrictions, on activities.

But to be fair, let’s wait and see what the new president has in store for Chileans who are, in general, anxious for their ability to earn a fair salary and pension, be safe at home and on the way to work or school, and have access to satisfactory and timely health care, to improve. If they don’t perceive improvements in all these basic needs, we can expect the streets around Plaza Italia to begin to be filled with protestors, wall-painters, and the accompanying thugs and arsonists who seem to always be in the shadows.

March 11, 2026, begins another new story for Chile, well worth watching. We wish them well.

_____________

Posted on February 20, 2026, in Santiago, Chile.