Kast's Hard-Line Security Plan Faces Reality Check on Migration and Crime

José Antonio Kast arrived at his election victory with a single, urgent promise: he would fix Chile's security crisis in ninety days. Two out of three Chileans told pollsters in October that crime and violence consumed their thoughts more than anything else. The incoming president had built his campaign on a straightforward diagnosis—uncontrolled migration and organized crime were the same problem, and he would solve both with force, speed, and political will.

The numbers told a partial story. Chile's homicide rate stood at six per one hundred thousand people in 2024, low by regional standards and far below Ecuador's thirty-nine per hundred thousand. Yet the perception of danger had metastasized. Organized crime syndicates, particularly the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, had taken root across multiple regions, running operations in extortion, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and contract killing. More than three hundred thousand people lived in Chile without legal status, a population Kast identified as both vulnerable to criminal exploitation and a vector for it. The diagnosis resonated. Kast won in every region and nearly every municipality—a mandate so broad that political analysts saw it as a blank check to move faster and further than campaign promises alone might justify.

Kast's security platform rested on three pillars. First, he would remake the police. Carabineros and the PDI would receive new budgets, equipment, technology, and personnel. More critically, they would gain expanded legal authority to conduct searches, make arrests, and use force, with legal protection shielding officers from prosecution for actions taken in the line of duty. The logic was simple: the police had the tools but had lost political cover after the social upheaval of recent years. Restore their confidence, and they would restore order.

Second, he would deploy the military. The armed forces would guard critical infrastructure, patrol borders, and support police operations in high-crime zones. Kast framed organized crime as a national security threat, not merely a law enforcement problem. Third, on migration, he promised rapid deportations. Streamlined administrative and judicial procedures would accelerate the removal of undocumented migrants, especially those with criminal records. The border would be sealed with police and military presence.

Experts offered a more complicated picture. Pía Greene, a researcher at the Universidad San Sebastián's Center for Public Security and Organized Crime Studies, acknowledged that Kast had diagnosed a real problem—the fusion of irregular migration and transnational organized crime—and had studied international models, from El Salvador's prison segmentation system to Italian border controls. But she warned that police and military already possessed substantial legal powers. What they had lost was political backing. Restoring that backing mattered, but it was not enough.

Greene cautioned against militarizing crime. Other countries had tried it and found themselves deeper in corruption, institutional decay, and escalating violence. She argued for a portfolio approach: control and enforcement, yes, but also effective prosecution, prison segmentation for gang leaders, rehabilitation, and prevention. The last point was crucial. "Prevention policies are the only sustainable and cost-efficient ones in the long term," she said. Without them, Kast would be treating symptoms while the disease spread.

On migration, Greene identified a harder problem. Rapid deportations sounded clean in campaign speeches but depended on cooperation from other nations. "Diplomacy will be key," she said. Chile could not expel people into a void. It would need bilateral and regional agreements, particularly with Peru and other neighbors. Security, she noted, had become transnational. No country could solve it alone.

Kenneth Bunker, a political scientist trained at the London School of Economics, saw Kast's victory differently. The scale of the win—every region, nearly every municipality—gave the president-elect room to move fast and possibly beyond what he had promised. Bunker believed Kast would pursue a two-track strategy: legislation for long-term reforms and executive decrees for quick wins. The ninety-day deadline was not arbitrary. It was a test. Failure to show results would breed frustration and damage Kast's political capital.

Bunker also detected a shift in Kast's migration rhetoric in recent weeks. The campaign had moderated its tone. Rather than mass expulsions, the emerging policy seemed to pivot toward incentivizing voluntary departure—cutting social benefits, making life harder for undocumented migrants, offering them a path out with the possibility of returning legally later. It was a softer edge on the same hard logic.

The real constraint, Bunker warned, was political. Kast lacked a Senate majority. He would have to negotiate with opposition parties that had no interest in handing him easy victories on security. And there would be tension between expanded police powers and human rights protections. That debate would come early and often. Whether Kast could thread that needle—delivering visible security gains while respecting constitutional limits—remained the open question as he prepared to take office.