The Wall Builder’s Shadow

 

Sometimes the sins of the father come home wearing a different face, speaking a different language, but carrying the same poison in their veins. This is one of those stories—the kind that makes you wonder if evil is something we inherit like brown eyes or a crooked smile, or if it’s something we choose, again and again, until the choosing becomes as natural as breathing.

Michael Kast was eighteen years old when he signed his name in blood—well, ink, but it might as well have been blood—and joined the Nazi Party in September 1942. Eighteen. Old enough to know better, you might say, but young enough that the world could still shape him like wet clay. Germany was hungry then, hungry for land and power and lebensraum, and it needed soldiers to feed that hunger. Poland had already fallen. The machine needed bodies.

Michael became one of those bodies, ground up in the gears of compulsory military service, fighting for a country that had sold its soul to a man with a funny mustache and eyes like ice chips. He saw things, did things—we’ll never know what exactly, and maybe that’s for the best. Some stories are better left in the dark places where they belong.

By April 1945, Berlin was burning. The Soviet Red Army had the city surrounded like wolves circling a dying elk, and they were closing in for the kill. Hitler ate a bullet in his bunker—took the coward’s way out, some said—and Germany surrendered on May 7th. The Nazi dream died screaming, and its followers scattered like cockroaches when you turn on the kitchen light at midnight.

What happened next depended on who you were and how good you were at running.

Some of the SS and party members ended up on trial at Nuremberg or in front of Polish courts, answering for Auschwitz and Treblinka and all those other names that still make your skin crawl. Others—and this is the really frightening part—they just melted back into society. Became shopkeepers. Teachers. Politicians in Austria, for Christ’s sake. As if all that death could be washed away with a change of clothes and a new address.

But many of them ran. South, mostly. To Argentina, to Brazil, to Chile. To places where the past couldn’t find them, or so they hoped.

Michael Kast was a runner.

He landed in Chile in 1950, five years of living with the stink of defeat and complicity on him. Went alone first, testing the waters. When the coast seemed clear—when it looked like he wouldn’t wake up to angry mobs or extradition papers—he sent for his wife and his two oldest kids. They settled in Paine, a nothing-special town south of Santiago where a man could disappear into the dust and the daily grind of rural life.

Here’s where the story gets its teeth: Michael Kast, immigrant and refugee and former Nazi, went on to have more children in his new home. Seven more, to be exact. The youngest was named José Antonio Kast Rist.

And José Antonio Kast—well, he grew up to hate immigrants.

You can’t make this stuff up. If I tried to put it in a novel, my editor would send it back with a note saying, “Too on the nose, Riyan. Dial it back.” But life doesn’t care about subtlety. Life will beat you over the head with irony until your ears ring.

In 2025, José Antonio Kast won Chile’s presidential election with 58.16 percent of the vote, beating his left-wing opponent Jeannette Jara so badly it wasn’t even close. His main campaign promise? A massive wall along Chile’s borders to keep out illegal immigrants. He wanted to create a special police force to “eliminate” undocumented migrants—his word, eliminate—modeled after ICE in the United States. He looked at Donald Trump’s playbook and thought, yeah, that’s the ticket.

The son of a German immigrant who fled prosecution wanted to slam the door shut on everyone else trying to find a better life.

Political analysts in Chile started whispering—then saying out loud—that this would be the most extreme far-right period in the country’s history since Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship ended in 1990. And if you know anything about Pinochet, you know that’s saying something. That’s like saying “the worst storm since the hurricane that ate the town.”

Pinochet ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, and during those seventeen years, people disappeared. Thousands of them. Picked up off the street, never seen again. Detained without trial. Tortured. Murdered. In 1996, the Chilean government officially acknowledged 3,197 cases of human rights violations, but everyone knew the real number was higher. There are some things you can’t quantify, can’t fit into neat little rows on a spreadsheet.

The dictator died on December 10, 2006, never having faced trial. He had immunity—a gift from the constitution his own military regime had written. The 1978 Amnesty Law, which he’d signed himself, kept him safe from prosecution. It was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, written in the blood of his victims.

And José Antonio Kast? He called Pinochet his idol.

“If he were still alive, he would vote for me,” Kast said during his first presidential run in 2017, when he only managed eight percent of the vote. “We would definitely have tea together.”

Tea. With a mass murderer. The kind of thing you say when you’ve lost the plot entirely, when the darkness inside you has grown so familiar you can’t even see it anymore.

But here’s the thing—and this is where the story stops being just about one man’s twisted politics and becomes about something deeper, something that reaches back through time like tree roots looking for poisoned water—the Kast family wasn’t just connected to Pinochet ideologically. They were in it. Up to their necks.

Miguel Kast, José Antonio’s older brother, was a loyal Pinochet man. He served in the dictator’s government in multiple positions: director-minister of the National Planning Office in 1978, minister of labor in 1980, president of the Central Bank in 1982. He founded Gremialismo, the ideological grandfather of the Independent Democratic Union, a party that might as well have been Pinochet’s fan club.

Another brother, Christian Kast, witnessed mass arrests in Paine on September 11–12, 1973—the days when Pinochet’s coup turned Chile into a slaughterhouse. Christian admitted in court testimony that he’d seen people being rounded up. He’d even brought food into the police station where they were being held—his family owned a food business called Bavaria. He knew what was happening. He knew people were being detained arbitrarily, that many of them would never come home.

He never reported it. Never said a word.

And their father, Michael—the former Nazi who’d traded one authoritarian regime for another’s shadow—he was linked to it too. According to a 2014 investigation by the Chilean newspaper El Mostrador, one of the trucks used in executions and enforced disappearances in Paine belonged to Michael Kast. He knew about the violence. Maintained close ties with civilian networks involved in the repression.

The former Nazi party member, the man who’d fled prosecution for the crimes of one regime, stood by silently while another regime committed its own atrocities. Some people never learn. Or maybe they learn exactly the wrong lessons.

José Antonio Kast tried to hide all this, naturally. Refused to answer questions about his father, about the family history. Only after journalists started digging into his father’s identity documents did he finally say anything, and even then he denied the Nazi connection.

“When there is a war and conscription is mandatory, a 17- or 18-year-old has no choice,” he said in 2018, his voice probably smooth as oil. “They would be tried by a military court and shot the next day.”

But here’s the lie in that statement, the poison hidden in the pretty words: membership in the Nazi Party was voluntary. Military service was mandatory, sure, but signing up with the party? That was a choice. Michael Kast chose that.

Just like José Antonio Kast chose to campaign against immigrants despite being born into an immigrant family. Chose to admire a dictator despite knowing what dictatorships do to people. Chose to ignore his family’s participation in atrocities, their complicity in murder and disappearance.

In 2025, when Kast won his election, far-right leaders across Latin America celebrated like it was Christmas morning.

Argentine President Javier Milei practically did a victory dance. “One more step for our region in defending life, liberty, and private property,” he crowed, attacking the left with the kind of glee usually reserved for kids pulling the wings off flies. “I am confident we will work together so that the Americas embrace freedom and liberate themselves from the yoke of 21st-century socialist oppression.”

Freedom. That word gets thrown around a lot by people who wouldn’t know real freedom if it bit them on the ass.

The truth is, none of this happened in a vacuum. The rightward shift in Latin America has been carefully cultivated, watered and fed like a poisonous plant by American money and influence through an organization called the Atlas Network. Based in Washington, it’s a sprawling web of at least 450 think tanks worldwide, all pushing business-friendly libertarian ideas—which is just a fancy way of saying ideas that help the rich get richer while everyone else fights for scraps.

In 2016 alone, Atlas funneled more than five million dollars to partner organizations. A 2017 investigation exposed how conservative billionaires were using the network to spread their ideology like a virus, infecting democracies across the developing world.

The results speak for themselves. In just the past year, three Latin American countries elected right-wing presidents—Bolivia and Ecuador joined Chile in the club. Argentina, under Milei’s leadership, is marching in lockstep, especially with Donald Trump directly involved in the country’s 2025 midterm legislative elections.

The walls are going up. Not just the physical ones Kast wants to build along Chile’s borders, but the invisible ones between compassion and cruelty, between remembering history and repeating it, between the light and the dark.

José Antonio Kast campaigned on the promise of eliminating undocumented migrants, claiming they’re the source of Chile’s crime problem—despite the fact that Chile ranks as the third safest country in Latin America according to the World Population Review. The facts don’t matter when fear is selling. Fear always sells.

Consuelo Thiers, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, said Kast would be Chile’s most right-wing president since Pinochet. Given everything we know—about his family, about his ideology, about the darkness he’s willingly embraced—that assessment seems generous.

This is a man whose father fled Nazi Germany only to stand by while Pinochet’s Chile committed its own crimes against humanity. This is a man who inherited a legacy of complicity and chose to build on it rather than reject it. This is a man who looks at a wall and sees safety instead of what it really is: a monument to fear, built from the stones of hypocrisy and cruelty.

The Chileans who voted for him saw something else, of course. They saw strength, order, a return to some imagined past when things were simpler and better—even though that past never really existed, or if it did, it only existed for some people while others suffered in silence.

That’s the thing about walls. They keep people out, sure. But they also keep people in. They trap you with your own worst impulses, your own inherited sins, your own carefully cultivated hatreds.

Michael Kast crossed an ocean to escape his past, but he brought it with him. It lived in his house in Paine, in his food business, in the truck he owned that carried away the disappeared. It grew in his children, in their choices and their silences. And now it’s blossomed fully in his youngest son, the one who wants to build walls to keep out people just like his father used to be.

Sometimes evil doesn’t wear horns and carry a pitchfork. Sometimes it wears a suit and tie and wins elections. Sometimes it speaks in the language of law and order while it plans elimination and erasure. Sometimes it looks like your neighbor, your president, your father.

And sometimes—most terrifyingly of all—it looks in the mirror and sees a patriot.

The wall hasn’t been built yet. José Antonio Kast takes office on March 11, 2026. But the foundation was laid a long time ago, stone by stone, choice by choice, in a rural town south of Santiago where a former Nazi made a new life and planted seeds that would grow into something dark and twisted and terribly familiar.

History doesn’t repeat itself, the saying goes. But it rhymes.

And the rhyme scheme here is written in blood that spans generations, crosses oceans, and refuses to wash away no matter how many years pass or how many borders you cross or how many walls you build.

Some stories don’t end. They just wait in the dark, getting ready for their next chapter.

This is one of those stories.

And it’s far from over.