In a move that surprises absolutely no one with a functioning cerebral cortex, Chile’s president-elect Jose Antonio Kast has decided to turn the nation’s governance into a pitch-black comedy special. The selection of former lawyers for the late Augusto Pinochet to lead the ministries of Defense and Human Rights isn’t just a middle finger to the concept of historical memory; it’s a full-body dry heave directed at the very notion of 'progress.' For those who haven’t been paying attention to the cyclical rot of human politics, Chile has decided that the best way to handle its traumatic past is to put the people who defended the trauma in charge of the future. It is a masterclass in audacity, or perhaps just a very clear sign that the electorate has the collective memory of a concussed goldfish.

Kast, the first far-right head of state to sit in the big chair since Pinochet shuffled off this mortal coil, is apparently not interested in subtlety. Why bother with the tedious dance of 'healing' and 'reconciliation' when you can simply hire the legal architects of an era defined by 3,200 missing people and state-sponsored torture? Appointing a Pinochet lawyer to lead the Ministry of Human Rights is a level of irony so dense it threatens to collapse into a singularity. It’s the political equivalent of putting a tobacco lobbyist in charge of lung health, or a fox in charge of a chicken coop where the chickens have been legally prohibited from growing feathers. It is efficient, I’ll give them that. Why waste time investigating past abuses when you can have the guy who argued they weren't abuses in the first place handle the filing?

Then we have the Ministry of Defense. Again, Kast has dipped into the Pinochet legal pool, because apparently, in the entire country of Chile, there are no other qualified individuals who haven’t spent their careers justifying a military junta. This isn't just a cabinet; it's a high-school reunion for a dark age. It signals a return to a specific kind of 'order'—the kind of order that requires a heavy boot and a very flexible interpretation of habeas corpus. The message is loud and clear: the scars left by the 1973-1990 regime are not meant to be healed, but rather treated as a blueprint for the 2020s. It is atavistic, it is predictable, and it is exhausting to witness.

Of course, we must acknowledge the role of the Left in this pantomime. While they wail and gnash their teeth over these appointments, their own brand of performative incompetence is precisely what cleared the runway for Kast’s landing. If the previous administrations had managed to do anything other than squabble over identity aesthetics while the economy stagnated and social structures crumbled, perhaps the public wouldn’t have reached for the nearest authoritarian security blanket. The Left’s shock is as tiresome as the Right’s cruelty. They act as if this is some sudden, inexplicable deviation from the norm, rather than the inevitable result of a society that has been offered a choice between useless idealism and efficient brutality. They paved the road, and now they’re complaining about the destination.

This entire scenario serves as a bleak reminder that humanity is fundamentally incapable of learning from history. We don’t learn; we just wait for enough time to pass so that the old horrors feel 'retro' enough to be fashionable again. The Pinochet era isn't a cautionary tale for the Kast administration; it’s a source of nostalgia, a golden age of 'stability' where the only people who had to worry were those pesky individuals who believed in things like dissent or not being thrown out of helicopters. By elevating these lawyers to ministerial positions, Kast is effectively telling the world that the defense of a dictatorship is the best qualification for managing a democracy. It’s a brilliant bit of nihilism.

As Kast prepares to be sworn in on March 11, the world will watch with its usual blend of apathy and performative outrage. There will be protests, there will be op-eds, and there will be a lot of shouting on social media. None of it matters. The machinery is already in place. The lawyers who once spent their days crafting legal loopholes for a brutal regime are now the guardians of the state’s conscience. It is a fitting end to the dream of Chilean exceptionalism. Humanity doesn't march forward; it just walks in a very small, very bloody circle, eventually tripping over the same corpses it buried forty years ago. Congratulations to Chile for proving that no matter how far we think we’ve come, we are always just one election away from hiring the devil’s legal team to run the choir.