Let’s suppose that Kast wins in Chile

On December 19, 2021, there will be elections in Chile. José Antonio Kast, 55, JAK for short, a lawyer representing the right, and Gabriel Boric (pronounced Borich in Croatian) on the left will face each other for the presidency. Boric, only 35 years old, doesn’t have a university degree, because he stopped studying law.

Who will win? It will depend on how many people turn out to vote and the voters’ age. If there are many, Kast will win. If they are a few and young, the victory will be for Boric. Despite the criteria of the College of Journalists, I suspect that Kast will win. It’s the opinion of a sober and serious young Chilean CNN analyst, José Manuel Rodríguez, that I make my own because I find it very persuasive.

Let’s suppose that the majority of Chileans will vote for Kast. Why would they do it? Because he embodies law and order. Chileans were very scared when, suddenly, many ‘outraged’ young people took to the streets to destroy and burn everything. Kast is not the “ultra-right,” but a conservative Catholic who believes in law and order, while Boric is not a communist, but a left-wing radical who is far from believing in law and order.

What is a “conservative Catholic”? Someone who believes in eternal life, in private property and, moreover, in the case of Kast, belongs to the Apostolic Movement “Schoensttat,” a kind of Opus Dei originating in Germany, which leads him to want to control the crotch of his compatriots, something that is always a detestable mistake. Taking the State out of the bedroom is expected in these times.

Kast, who is a graduate of the “Pontifical Catholic University of Chile”, one of the best in the country, opposed gay and lesbian marriage, abortion (he is ‘pro-life’) and believes in having all the children that “God sends.” So far God has sent him nine.

He also has ten siblings (he is the youngest), among them an economist, Miguel Kast (1948-1983), the eldest, who died very young of bone cancer. Miguel Kast presided over Pinochet’s Central Bank and taught him that the government must be small, and for that, everything must be privatized, and taxes be reduced. Public spending must be tightly controlled, and the market must be allowed to act freely. He was one of the “Chicago Boys” who surrounded Pinochet to prevent him from making mistakes. He left us a valuable study of extreme poverty in Chile.

His last name, of course, is that of his father, a German army lieutenant, Michael, who in 1942, at 18 years old, joined the Nazi party. He came to Chile in 1950 from Bavaria (hence his Catholic beliefs), married to another German expatriate, Olga Rist, with two young children, the aforementioned Miguel, and Barbara, his twin, to which were added another seven born in Chile.

The family established a successful sausage company (Cecinas Bavaria), founded in 1964 with hardly any resources, two years before YAK was born. The company has expanded into the restaurant and cafeteria sector through the franchise system. Today, Christian Kast, José Antonio’s brother, runs the consortium. His father died in 2014. Experience shows the importance of immigrants in the development of nations. They are full of what one economist called “the immigrant’s fire.” That fire is not extinguished until they die.

Chileans can die of success. They are distressed because there are hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans within their borders. Each one of them is a tribute to liberal thought. They don’t go to Bolivia or Cuba. They go where development took root. They go to Chile.