Chile's political shift towards its most conservative era since the Pinochet years is beginning to materialize. José Antonio Kast, an admirer of the dictator and winner of the autumn elections, has already set to work on one of his main electoral promises: expelling all immigrants in an irregular administrative situation, whom he associates with a supposed increase in crime in the country. This is one of the latest episodes in which a correlation is established between origin and crime – which experts repeatedly deny – and it occurs in a country where the perception of insecurity is higher compared to other countries in the region, despite having some of the lowest crime indicators on the continent.

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.