Chile: José Antonio Kast picks two Pinochet lawyers to join his cabinet

Chile’s president-elect José Antonio Kast announced the list of 25 ministers that will be part of his cabinet after he takes office on March 11. Among them are two attorneys who represented deceased dictator Augusto Pinochet. Fernando Rabat, who defended Pinochet in a 2004 embezzlement case, will be minister of justice and human rights. Fernando Barros, who was part of Pinochet’s team of lawyers when he was arrested in London in 1998, will lead the defense ministry. Far-right Kast, who will succeed current left-wing President Gabriel Boric, has been accused of defending Pinochet on several occasions. In recent years, during his past presidential campaigns, he said that, if the former Chilean leader were alive today, Pinochet would vote for him.  He also refused to call his rule a dictatorship, instead saying it was an “authoritarian government.” Pinochet’s dictatorship lasted from 1973, when he deposed President Salvador Allende, to 1990, when a democratic government rose to power following a 1988 referendum in which 56% of Chileans voted against the continuation of the regime. In 1988, a young Kast, then a university student activist who was taking his first steps in politics, appeared on a TV show backing the continuation of Pinochet’s dictatorship. “I am convinced that the government’s work directly benefits the youth,” he said. However, in 2021 Kast denied being a Pinochet supporter and questioned the human rights violations committed during his rule.  “Chile needs decision, character, it needs a government that acts with urgency,” Kast said during the cabinet presentation on Wednesday. “That is why today I am presenting a cabinet for an emergency government, called to end the inertia and begin rebuilding Chile.” The new ministers Kast’s choice of ministers — especially in such sensitive areas such as justice and human rights and defense — appears to go in line with the 180° turn taken by Chile, which went from having a progressive, left-wing government for the past four years under Boric to a conservative, far-right administration after Kast takes office in March. Chile’s next Defense Minister, Fernando Barros, was part of Pinochet’s defense team in 1998, when the dictator was arrested in London following his indictment by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón for human rights violations committed in Chile. Pinochet was held under house arrest there for a year and a half. However, British Interior Minister Jack Straw decided to release him in 2000 on the grounds that a medical report showed the 84-year-old man was in no condition to undergo trial. He was then authorized to return to Chile, where he was also charged with several crimes. Fernando Rabat, the next justice and human rights minister, was part of the team of attorneys defending Pinochet during the “Riggs Case,” which investigated a number of secret accounts Pinochet had under fake names in the Riggs Bank in the United States. The accounts were found as part of a U.S. investigation of suspicious money movements following the 9-11 terrorist attack. Pinochet was prosecuted after it was discovered that he had several bank accounts under different false identities, in which he kept over US$27 million.  Several high-ranking military officers who used to be under his rule were also investigated and convicted. In 2025, a Chilean court ordered his heirs to return US$16 million to the national public coffers as part of the Riggs Case. Although Pinochet was investigated for the embezzlement case and the extreme violations of human rights committed during his dictatorship, he died in 2006 without any convictions. “It is an act of disrespect that a person who was part of the defense team of Latin America’s bloodiest dictator is named in that position,” said Alicia Lira, president of the Association of Relatives of People Executed for Political Reasons (AFEP in Spanish), about Rabat.