Weekly Report - 12 March 2026 (WR-26-10)

José Antonio Kast took office on 11 March as Chile’s 38^th president for a four-year term, promising an “emergency government” to tackle crime, illegal migration, and the economy. Chile’s first far-right president since the restoration of democracy in 1990, Kast used his 22-minute inauguration speech to flatly contradict his predecessor, Gabriel Boric, a progressive leftist who had claimed in his farewell speech that the country was in a better place now than it was four years ago. Not so, Kast insisted, saying “they’ve left us a country in much worse condition than we could have imagined”.