The presidential elections will be held in Chile on Sunday 16th and the 2025 campaign, whose propaganda ended this Thursday, has been marked as never before by a central theme: the fight against crime. The three right-wing candidates of La Moneda are fighting for radical speeches – the moderate standard-bearer Evelyn Matthei, promised “prison or cemetery” to criminals – and the candidate of Gabriel Boric’s governing party, Jeannette Jara, a communist militant, have had to take charge of an agenda that does not traditionally belong to the left and offer answers to the main issue that worries citizens: crime, attacks and robberies.
The frightened population mostly agrees that “all public and private freedoms must be suppressed to control crime”, according to the latest survey by the Center for Public Studies, CEP. In this scenario, it is not strange that the right – that of the republican José Antonio Kast, the libertarian Johannes Kaiser and Matthei herself – are running as favorites to maintain the presidency in 2026-2030: they promise change and a firm hand. They all share a catastrophic vision of Chile, which Jara resists: “Chile is not falling apart; it is a great country,” he said Tuesday at the closing of the election campaign in Santiago, the capital. The following night, Kaiser, during his rally in the metropolitan sector of Salvador in the eastern part of the city, responded: “This country is not falling apart, but rather falling apart with bullets.”
Juan Pablo Luna, a Uruguayan academic based in the Chilean capital, studies the illegal markets in the region and explained to EL PAÍS that “until a few years ago there was consensus that some Latin American countries had sufficiently strong states with which they could resist this storm: Costa Rica, Chile and Uruguay”. “But illegal markets have become more important not only in Latin America, but in the world. And today we see that these three countries are not giving their all. They are driven by different logics related to the emergence and expansion of illegality,” analyzed Luna. So, what has happened in Chile in recent years?: “There are more businesses linked to organized crime and, therefore, more gangs competing for territory”, replies the academic from the School of Government of the Catholic University.
The Boric administration did not have public insecurity among its priorities when it took office in March 2022, but citizens’ demand to control crime has changed its action plan. In September of the first year of the administration, after the rejection of the proposal for a new Constitution supported by the left, the social democrat Carolina Tohá took office in the Interior, taking charge of public order in a different context: in the midst of the emergence of a new transnational crime, marked by more violent murders, with the use of firearms and crimes unusual in Chile (human trafficking, kidnappings for extortion and hit men, for example).
Him National report on victims of homicides committed in Chile in 2024 found a rate of 6.0 per 100,000 inhabitants, double that of 10 years ago. “Chile must aim to return to the rates of ten years ago, which were around 3.0, and to do so it must reduce violence and remove firearms from circulation, which are closely linked to the most violent crimes,” Minister Luis Cordero, who had just assumed the new portfolio of Public Security, told EL PAÍS in April.
But Chile’s homicide rate is not comparable to that of countries like Ecuador, in the same region, with 38 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. “Chile is a country that has extreme fear. We have the highest rate of fear of being a victim of crime in the world. It is the country that has the greatest concern in the world with crime and violence. And it is far from the country that has the greatest problem with crime and violence, whether we compare it to Latin America or to countries in the rest of the world,” said Daniel Johnson, executive director of the Citizen Peace Foundation, in an interview with BBC Mundo. “Although Chile has historically had relatively high levels of fear compared to its current level of crime, this has been exacerbated in recent years. Political campaigns have read and used this forcefully in all candidates,” Johnson said.
The presidential candidates’ proposals include maximum security prisons in the middle of the Atacama desert (Matthei), the application of the death penalty for some crimes (Kaiser) and the Relentless Plan (Kast), which provides for the revision of the expansion of self-defense. Jara, meanwhile, emphasized the abolition of banking secrecy, in order to go down the path of illicit money.
