Pining for Pinochet: how crime fanned nostalgia for Chile's dictator

One Saturday morning in September, four men burst into Miguel Ángel Bravo's home in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood of Santiago, Chile’s capital.

The 61-year-old accountant, who lives with his wife and daughter, had set the alarm and locked the gate the night before.

But four armed attackers easily overcame those defences, stormed into his bedroom, beat him with an iron bar, stole his wallet and phone, and fled in his car.

Such attacks were almost unheard of in Chile a decade ago.

But in recent years, the country has seen a surge in armed robberies, kidnappings and murders, turning security into a national obsession that is driving voters to the right ahead of presidential elections on November 16.

After nearly four years of centre-left rule, polls show Chileans clamouring for order and authority, with growing numbers openly expressing nostalgia for the 1973–1990 dictatorship of the late general Augusto Pinochet.

The frontrunner, far-right candidate José Antonio Kast, is an ardent defender of the general who overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973.

"If he [Pinochet] were alive, he would vote for me," Kast has boasted.

Kast is polling second, behind left-wing candidate Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party, in the first round of the presidential election.

But surveys indicate that Jara would lose to Kast or any other right-wing rival if, as expected, the contest goes to a second round on December 14.

 

Seeking ‘peace of mind’

Chile remains one of South America’s safest countries, but murders and kidnappings have more than doubled in the past decade, unsettling a nation long seen as a model of stability.

According to the National Urban Survey of Citizen Security (ENSU), 87.5 percent of Chileans believe crime has increased.

This growing unease is shaping the election campaign. Kast has pledged to tighten border controls and strengthen prison security.

Bravo, who still bears a scar on his forehead from the home invasion – known locally as a "turbazo" – echoes the fears of many Chileans who feel their country is being lost to crime. He is now planning to move to a different neighbourhood.

"They take away your peace of mind," he said of the criminal gangs.

He won’t reveal who he’ll vote for but believes the candidates are "taking advantage of the security issue" only to ignore it later.

Many Chileans blame the rise in violence on transnational crime gangs from Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia, whose arrival has coincided with an unprecedented migration wave, particularly from Venezuela.

Kast has vowed to expel more than 330,000 irregular migrants estimated to be in the country, most of them Venezuelans.

According to a study by the Criteria Consulting firm, 82 percent of Chileans believe the increase in crime is mainly due to irregular migration.

A separate survey by the Center for Public Studies found that 44 percent of Chileans are "very worried" about having foreigners in their neighbourhoods.

 

Crack down

From Jara on the left to Kast on the far right, all eight presidential hopefuls have promised to crack down on crime.

Bravo, who plans to move into a secure apartment complex, dismisses such pledges as pure electioneering.

But on social media, calls for a return to the iron-fisted policies of the past have grown louder.

Messages declaring "we need another one like him" abound on the “Don_Pinochet1973” TikTok account, which has nearly 10,000 followers.

Some of Pinochet’s admirers weren’t born when he and other generals ordered warplanes to bomb the presidential palace on September 11, 1973, and had thousands of opponents rounded up, murdered or disappeared.

"I didn’t live through that time, but we need someone who takes a firm hand like he did," said Vicente Sepúlveda, a 20-year-old engineering student.

Sociologist Matías Rodríguez, a lecturer at the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano (Academy of Christian Humanism University) in Santiago, attributes Pinochet’s appeal among younger Chileans to a lack of awareness about the gravity of his crimes.

Its glorification by younger generations, he says, stems from a “trivialisation” caused by a lack of “critical memory.”

In schools, the dictatorship “is studied without an explicit condemnation of human rights violations,” he noted.

 

The Bukele model

Pinochet died in 2006 without being convicted of any crime.

A September survey by Cadem pollsters of Chile’s most admired figures placed him tied for second with former right-wing president Sebastián Piñera, behind 19th-century naval hero Arturo Prat and Nobel Literature laureate Gabriela Mistral.

In middle-class neighbourhoods like Peñalolén, in eastern Santiago, turbazos have prompted residents to form social media groups to alert one another to suspicious activity.

Antonio Vásquez, a 51-year-old computer programmer who leads a neighbourhood crime-watch association, said he would vote for Kast so that people could "rest easy" again, as they did "during the dictatorship" and in the early years after Chile’s return to democracy.

Kast, meanwhile, has looked to El Salvador for inspiration in tackling crime.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele – admired by former US president Donald Trump – has locked up tens of thousands of suspected gang members without charge in a vast prison complex cut off from the outside world.

On a visit to El Salvador last year, Kast praised Bukele for helping millions of Salvadorans "regain their freedom" from gangs.