Weekly Report - 05 February 2026 (WR-26-05)

If there were any doubt about the policy priorities of Chile’s President-elect José Antonio Kast he has put them to rest with his opening flurry of foreign visits. Either side of the turn of the year, Kast sought to persuade presidents Daniel Noboa and José Jerí during visits to Ecuador and Peru to back a proposal for a humanitarian corridor in an attempt to deliver on his electoral promise to repatriate irregular migrants, principally from Venezuela. In his latest mini-tour of Central America and the Caribbean, Kast visited a border ‘wall’ with Haiti being constructed by the Dominican government led by President Luis Abinader to keep out illegal migrants, and the maximum-security prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot), the centrepiece of the draconian security policies of his host President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.