La Moneda, the presidential palace of Chile, has a new host since Wednesday after the ultraconservative Catholic José Antonio Kast has taken office. The country thus materializes the political shift expressed at the polls in December and kicks off the most right-wing executive that Chile has had since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In fact, Kast, with a discourse similar to that of other far-right leaders in favor of deregulating the market and cutting public aid, and in which he conflates immigration and crime, has openly defended the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende.

A couple of years ago, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín premiered The CountA film that portrayed, in a farcical or grotesque tone, the dictator Augusto Pinochet as an aging vampire who hovered over the country in his general's cape. He also squeezed the hearts of his victims and, with their blood, made smoothies that gave him the vigor necessary to carry out his nocturnal flights. The film's metaphor was obvious, but nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of that, it worked powerfully: after all, Pinochet—like other dictators, from Franco to Putin, and any others you can think of—did indeed possess a certain vampiric appearance. And his regime, which ravaged Chile between 1973 and 1990, was indeed a bath of blood and squeezed hearts. And broken, and drowned, and shot, and tortured.

"Assassins of reasons, of lives, / may he never have rest in any of his days / and may our memories haunt him in death." These verses are part of Death bells, of Lluís Llach, a song commemorating the murder of five people in March 1976 in Vitoria following a workers' strike. In a country in transition from dictatorship to democracy, those responsible were never held accountable for their crimes, and only at the turn of the century was an official tribute paid to the victims. Later, faced with the impossibility of resorting to Spanish justice, an attempt was also unsuccessfully made to seek international redress through the so-called Argentine complaint.

When the police arrested Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, Philippe Sands, an international law expert and writer (London, 1960), received a call. Pinochet's lawyers offered him the opportunity to participate in the case and argue for his immunity as head of state. "My wife [the daughter of a Republican exile] threatened to divorce me if I did it, so I didn't accept," he explains with a smile. He followed the entire trial. Almost two decades later, in 2015, he came across the name Walther Rauff. It appeared in a letter from an SS leader, Otto Wächter, recommending a route he could take to escape justice. "At the time, I didn't recognize the name, but later I remembered that I had read it in Bruce Chatwin's books (In Patagonia) and Roberto Bolaño (Chilean Night). I eventually found out that he had ended up as the manager of a crab canning company in Patagonia," Sands recalls.