Chile Just Held Its 53rd Coup Anniversary. Kast Answered It With a Far-Right Summit and 284 Arrests.

Fifty-three years after General Pinochet's tanks surrounded La Moneda, Chile's government marked the anniversary of the 1973 coup by not marking it at all. President José Antonio Kast's administration held no official commemoration — the first time since the return to democracy in 1990 that a sitting government has skipped it. In its place: riot police, water cannons, and 284 arrests over two days of protest, an 80 percent jump from the year before, according to Chile's own security ministry.

The timing wasn't an accident. Days earlier, Kast hosted the fifth Madrid Forum in Santiago, a summit of the international far-right that put Javier Milei on a stage a few kilometers from the National Stadium — the building where Pinochet's junta tortured and executed the government's opponents in 1973. Milei used the platform to praise the post-coup period as an era of stability and growth. Students, unions, and the families of the disappeared marched against the forum under tear gas; Kast's government pointed to a modest drop in "violent incidents" as evidence that repression is working.

That's the sleight of hand worth naming. Kast's ministry bragged that violent incidents fell 34 percent even as arrests rose 80 percent — meaning fewer clashes were met with far more detentions, including 31 minors and 16 foreign nationals. That's not de-escalation, it's a wider net thrown over a smaller crowd. It's the same logic behind the state-of-exception bill now moving through Chile's congress, which would let the government suspend movement and intercept communications for up to eight months without a legislative vote — the exact toolkit a dictatorship used, dressed up as public safety.

None of this is happening in isolation. Kast's presidency, six months old, sits inside a regional current: Milei in Argentina rehabilitating Pinochet rhetorically while gutting Argentine wages, Bukele's model exported as a security template, and a Madrid Forum built explicitly to network these governments together, alongside Vox, the Heritage Foundation, and Orbán-aligned MEPs. When the Chilean left calls the forum a coordinated threat, that's not hyperbole — it's the stated aim of the people who organized it.

The families gathered at Santiago's General Cemetery this year for Isabel Allende and Gabriel Boric didn't need a government ceremony to remember what the stadium was used for. What they got instead was a government treating a memorial march as a security problem to be managed down to an arrest count — and treating the men who still defend the coup's economics as honored guests.

Sources

Buenos Aires Times: Nearly 300 detained in Chile at protests marking Pinochet coup anniversary
Rio Times: Chile Records 284 Arrests Around the Coup Anniversary
Latin America Reports: Chile students protest right-wing forum as Milei defends Pinochet
El Ciudadano: Protests Greet Madrid Forum in Chile
WSWS: Workers Struggles — The Americas