Do you know where the name José Antonio comes from? Before talking about it, I would like to report that in the last presidential TV debate Boric told Kast that he does not intend to do so speculations about his family. He has had enough of personal matters. Several times Kast had made insinuations about drug use and Boric brought out his negative test in full broadcast. The heaviest personal issue had been that of the alleged charges of one sexual harassment happened ten years ago, but the feminist circles that rallied around Boric for the ballot have overturned it.
In a press release, the woman in question said that she clarified the terms of the matter with Boric: “male appraisals” and not sexual harassment. Invite to rate Boric like bulwark of rights against Kast. If Boric doesn’t want to talk about Kast’s family, I as a journalist and partisan can do it. Only in these days has emerged – from the Associated Press – the evidence that Kast’s father, who emigrated from Germany to Chile, had a card Nazi party. He was not just a Wermacht non-commissioned officer, a condition with no alternatives, as Kast has always said in interviews. Of course at 20 you can be wrong, and the sins of the fathers do not fall on the children, but on the Kast point he lied and on the Chilean media, often very boring about many things, he got away with it.
But there is a subsequent choice, made in 1966, which denotes a cultural and political setting: to give the name of José Antonio to one of the nine children of the German couple who immigrated to Chile. The other brothers had German names, with the exception of Miguel, who later became minister and president of the Banco di Stato, a central figure in the first phase of the dictatorship of Pinochet. José Antonio was the name of the founder of the Spanish Falange: Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, myth and hero of Francoism, shot by the republicans. It is not a customary name, José Antonio, and has been given to many sons of the Francoists. More usual the name of the elder brother, Miguel, but not in Germany and coincidentally it was the name of the Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, father of José Antonio.
As I reflect on these roots, I walk around the Nunoa neighborhood on Calle Domingo Canas, looking for a villa where I was a guest in August 1973. I can’t recognize it. I reconstruct on the phone with my friend Jaime Riera that in that house, after the coup d’etat, weapons were found. Uselessly held for an armed defense that proved impossible. Ghosts of the twentieth century. Like Primo de Rivera. Now José Antonio Kast, between a “thank God” and some upcoming attempts to disqualify his left-wing opponent with fake news, has given himself a new calm and centrist profile. He praised the era of the first center-left president after Pinochet, Patricio Aylwin, and even staged a jealous protest because the former socialist president Michelle bacheletreturned to her homeland to vote, she received Gabriel Boric at home for a private interview. “Then he should receive me too.”