Chile’s president-elect names staunch abortion opponent as gender equality minister

Original article by John Bartlett in Santiago

Chile’s incoming far-right president José Antonio Kast has named a vehement opponent of abortion who has repeatedly stated her support for life “from conception to natural death” as the country’s new women and gender equality minister.

Judith Marín, 30, was once ejected from Chile’s senate by police for screaming “return to the Lord” during a vote to decriminalise abortion under restricted circumstances.

She is an evangelical former student church group president who belonged to the Eagles of Jesus, a far-right Christian group which recruits at universities around the country.

Marín has publicly questioned the future of the ministry she will now lead, and defended the “natural family” – the idea that a man and woman head a household – as a central tenet of society.

In October, she said: “Our country is going through a spiritual, social, moral and political crisis, and more than ever we, the children of God, need to stand up.”

Late on Tuesday, Kast, a Catholic father of nine children who himself has been a staunch opponent of abortion throughout his career, named his first cabinet in a ceremony in an upmarket neighbourhood of the capital, Santiago.

“This unity cabinet was not formed to administer normality,” he said. “It was brought together to face a national emergency.”

Kast won a resounding victory in December’s runoff vote with his anti-crime and anti-migration message.

During the campaign, he avoided discussing the hardline conservative social values he is known for, only saying, “I have not changed my convictions,” during a televised debate.

Since 2017, abortion in Chile has been decriminalised in three specific cases: if the mother’s life is at risk, if the pregnancy was the result of rape, or if the foetus will not survive.

Chile’s congress is debating a bill presented last year by the outgoing president, Gabriel Boric, which would decriminalise abortion in any circumstances up to the 14th week of a pregnancy.

Kast’s ministers, 13 of whom are men and 11 women with an average age of 54, are mostly drawn from the right and far right with minority representation of centrist voices.

Two are lawyers who represented the former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Fernando Barros, 68, who will become defence minister, defended Pinochet when he faced extradition from London in 1998. The new justice minister, Fernando Rabat, 53, represented the former dictator in a vast embezzlement case which began in 2004.

Chile voted to remove Pinochet from power and democracy returned in 1990.

The former dictator died in 2006 at the age of 91 without facing trial for the litany of human rights violations perpetrated under his dictatorship or the public finance scandal which followed him towards the end of his life.

Kast, who won the presidency in December at his third attempt, is a renowned supporter of the former dictator, and campaigned to keep him in power before a 1988 referendum on the continuation of the dictatorship. During his first run for the presidency in 2017, Kast said that the former dictator would have voted for him if he were still alive. He will be sworn in on 11 March to serve a four-year term.