Nearly 15.8 million Chileans are registered to vote on Sunday in elections for president, 23 senators, and all 155 members of Congress. The vote comes amid a regional wave of anti-incumbent sentiment and rising concerns about crime, immigration, and unemployment. Reflecting this polarized moment, centrist candidates appear to be fading in favor of more radical alternatives on both the left and right.
Jeannette Jara, the candidate representing Chile’s unified progressive forces, embodies this polarization. The 51-year-old Communist Party member shocked observers in June when she dominated the left’s inner-party primary, winning 60 percent of the vote and defeating more center-left rivals. Since then she has worked to soften her image, emphasizing that she seeks to be “president of Chile, not the party.” She has shifted to the center on key economic promises, pledged to deploy the Armed Forces to secure the country’s borders and modernize the police and prison systems, and slightly distanced herself from President Gabriel Boric.
Even so, Jara has responded to the insecurities of Chileans over migration and economic insecurity with a positive vision for the country’s future rooted in her own humble origins and long trajectory of political struggle. A communist since the age of 14 and a former student leader and union activist, Jara served as undersecretary of social security under former President Michelle Bachelet and later as President Gabriel Boric’s minister of labor—a role that is central to her campaign. Indeed, she has helped deliver several of the key achievements of Boric’s administration, including pension reform, a 40-hour work week, and a minimum wage increase, Though these battles have often been bitter, her campaign continues to stress hope and unity: at her closing rally on Tuesday, she distinguished her movement by declaring “we do not promote hate” and insisted that “Chile is not falling apart.”
Right-wing candidates, by contrast, have painted a deeply dystopian vision of the country and its future. Though Chile remains one of the safest countries in Latin America, a slight uptick in gang- and drug-related violence has been used to fuel anxieties over migration—especially the arrival of nearly 500,000 Venezuelans. The right’s two-leading candidates, Jose Antonio Kast and Johannes Kaiser, have been competing to see who can propose the most radical, anti-migrant policies. Evelyn Matthei, a center-right politician with more moderate positions on social issues who was at one point a front-runner, has also played into narratives of national crisis.
Kast, long seen as a favorite on the right, is a familiar figure, having run for president twice and advancing to the 2021 runoff after winning the first round. A defender of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, the 59-year-old opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and has praised Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele, visiting his prisons and promising a similar crackdown in Chile. He has also championed a Trump-style "Border Shield” plan that would respond to what he calls a migrant “invasion” by constructinghundreds of miles of ditches, barriers, and walls in Chile's sparsely populated north. A fixture of the global far-right with ties to Hungary and Israel, Kast’s economic agenda is run-of-the-mill conservative: he has vowed to cut the corporate tax rate and reduce government spending.
Although Jara currently leads first-round polling, Kast is projected to comfortably defeat Jara in a runoff. His immediate challenge, however, is the rise of Johannes Kaiser, a Milei-style libertarian who has surged in the polls. A sitting congressman who gained fame as a YouTuber, Kaiser is more populist and far-right than Kast and the Republican Party he broke from in 2024. He has questioned women’s right to vote, critiqued “gender ideology," called for migrants to be placed in detention camps, and promised to withdraw Chile from the Escazú Agreement, the Paris climate accord, and even the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. He has also proposed deep cuts to government spending and the widespread privatization of state entities.
Given the intense polarization, experts broadly agree that a far-right victory in the second round is the most likely scenario—which in part explains the decline in support for the more moderate Matthei. Still, upwards of 5 million new voters are expected to cast their ballots in Chile’s first presidential election with mandatory voting, a policy that drove turnout above 80 percent in the country’s failed constitutional referendums in 2022 and 2023. With turnout at only 47 percent in the first round of the 2021 election, these new voters will be decisive. Unfortunately for the left, mirroring trends in the United States, analysts expect many of them to lean conservative.
Led by presidential hopeful Jeannette Jara, Chile’s elections feature a new generation of young, female politicians who have found a home in the century-old Chilean Communist Party.
As false solutions proliferate, communities most affected by the climate crisis must be centered in advancing transformation.
CALL FOR PITCHES!
Submit your pitches by December 1st!
The Summer 2026 issue of NACLA Report, guest edited by Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Laura Juliana Torres Rodríguez, invites original academic or creative essays; visual, sound, or performance works; and interviews that reflect on or activate desiring temporalities and forms of play and irreverence.
Please send a brief pitch (250 words) outlining the thrust and tone of your proposed piece and why you are well positioned to write it by December 1 to managing editor Julianne Chandler at jchandler@nacla.org. We will respond to pitches by mid-December. Drafts of accepted articles (2,500-3,000 words) will be due on February 16, 2026.
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In 1950, Martinican author Aimé Césaire used the term "imperial boomerang" to describe a historical circuit, in which the tactics of imperial domination tested abroad return home, reshaping the very societies that invented them. Our winter issue, “Boomerangs of Empire and the Technofascist Turn,” takes Césaire’s insight not as metaphor but as method, tracing how this returning and disseminating violence is shaping the Americas today.
Paulina Lizana, a congressional candidate and member of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) from the northern city of Antofagasta. Lizana, photographed here in the PCCh headquarters in Antofagasta, is a part of a wave of women breathing life into the century-old party. Read more about Lizana, the wider wave of candidates running as communists, and the campaign of presidential candidate Jeannette Jara in Phineas Rueckert's article for NACLA. (Phineas Rueckert)
AROUND THE REGION
U.S. AIRCRAFT CARRIER IN CARIBBEAN—The USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, has arrived in the Caribbean nearly three weeks after departing the eastern Mediterranean at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Its deployment marks a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro under the guise of a “war on drugs.” While the U.S. government’s sabre-rattling has so far eschewed direct strikes on Venezuelan soil in favor of provocative flights by bombers off the coast and extrajudicial drone attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats, the distinction between “symbolic” shows of force and an outright invasion is rapidly narrowing. Wanting no part in Trump’s potential war, the Colombian government moved this week to restrict intelligence-sharing with the United States, a move that was partially echoed by the British government. In anticipation of further escalation, the Venezuelan government has placed its entire military on alert, including nearly 200,000 soldiers and militia forces, and strengthened its defenses with technology from Russia, Iran, and China. Though serious, the Ford itself may be the perfect symbol of a dying empire: its construction was a fiasco, characterized by production delays and massive overspending, and many of the ship’s technical defects remain unresolved.
NOBOA’S NEW PRISON—Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa announced Monday that 300 “high-risk” inmates, including the country’s former vice president, had been transferred to a new maximum-security prison in the country’s southwest. The announcement came one day after at least 31 inmates were killed in a bloody riot between rival gangs. The violence at Machala prison, reportedly triggered by news of the impending transfers, was the second bloody outbreak in less than two months; another 14 people were killed there in late September. As Ecuador’s security crisis deepens and nearly 500 people have died in its prisons, Noboa’s hardline response has increasingly targeted social movements, eroded human rights, and concentrated power in the hands of the executive—while doing little to stem the violence. Nonetheless, Noboa continues to emulate Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian style. This week, Noboa posted a photo of shaved hair on the ground and “welcomed” former Vice President Jorge Glas to his “new home.” Glas, whose kidnapping from the Mexican embassy in Quito last year drew international condemnation, is serving time on a corruption charge that critics have decried as “lawfare.” Noboa’s taunting post was slammed by Glas’s lawyer as a violation of his human rights.
COP30 BEGINS—COP30, the world’s biggest climate conference, opened Monday in the Brazilian city of Belém. Over the next two weeks, representatives from more than 190 countries will debate responses to a climate crisis marked by unprecedented droughts, hurricanes, floods, fires, heatwaves, and the hottest year on record. Though billed as a historic event, the lead-up has been rocky: most countries, including the world’s largest polluters, missed a UN deadline to submit national climate plans; the United States did not send a delegation for the first time; President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who sees himself as a global climate leader, recently approved new oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon; and Belém was ill-prepared for such a large influx of people, causing housing shortages for attendees and the displacement of locals. These contradictions quickly surfaced on Tuesday evening, when Indigenous protesters and their allies clashed with security after being excluded from an event. On Wednesday, more than 100 boats carrying activists linked to the “Climate Justice Flotilla” arrived for the opening the “People’s Summit,” a parallel gathering held at a local university that will center the communities and structural solutions sidelined from official talks. For more on COP30 and the People’s Summit, see NACLA’s recent article by Nona Chai, Lara Aumann, Fernando Tormes-Aponte, and Catalina de Onís. Additional coverage can be found in the Fall 2025 issue of the NACLA Report, “Green Capitalism in the Americas.”
CRYPTO IN EL SALVADOR– San Salvador’s historic center played host to the world’s first state-sponsored cryptocurrency conference this week. On Wednesday and Thursday, attendees of the “Historic Bitcoin” event, organized by the government’s National Bitcoin Office, took part in panels and cultural activities promoting the “social and philosophical vision” of cryptocurrency and reinforcing El Salvador’s status as “Bitcoin country.” A second event, the “Adopting Bitcoin” conference, will take place outside the capital Friday and Saturday. While these gatherings celebrate the “monetary independence” El Salvador has supposedly gained since adopting Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, the reality is much more complicated. In January, amid negotiations over a $1.4 billion loan from the IMF, Congress—firmly under President Bukele’s control—quietly abolished Bitcoin’s status as an official currency, making its use voluntary and banning its use for tax payments. Still, the government continues to buy crypto for its reserves and has endowed the state-backed crypto sector with political autonomy, tax privileges, and vague regulation. While the lack of transparency has made it hard to track, experts estimate that the experiment—pitched as a tool of financial inclusion for the “unbanked” but largely adopted by foreigners—has cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars.
