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In his first General Assembly address as Chile's president, José Antonio Kast declared "Chile is back" and accused the United Nations of failing today's challenges, proposing three reforms that include an overhaul of the Security Council.
- He backed the pitch with first-half figures (an 11.5% drop in homicides, an 86% fall in irregular border entries and a corporate tax cut to 23%) and urged foreign investors to return.
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Chile's Congress split along coalition lines: opposition lawmakers said he disparaged the country abroad, allies praised the reform push, and the Shield of the Americas summit and Michelle Bachelet's failed UN bid shadowed the trip.
José Antonio Kast stepped up to the General Assembly rostrum in New York on Tuesday for the first time as Chile's head of state and closed with a short slogan: Chile is back. In an address of roughly 18 minutes on the opening day of the 81st session's general debate, the conservative leader blended a promotional pitch for a government barely six months old with an unusually direct critique of the institution hosting him.
In Santiago, lawmakers' verdicts tracked their political camps almost exactly.
A 1945 blueprint in a 2026 world
Kast reserved his toughest language for the UN itself. "This organization has not lived up to the challenges of our times," he told delegates. In his view, the body still runs on the balance of power left behind by World War II, talks at length while delivering little, and has let its bureaucracy and a swelling roster of secondary causes crowd out the founding mission of keeping the peace, safeguarding lives and defending freedom.
Rather than urging Chile to step back, he laid out three fixes: trim the bureaucracy and steer money toward places where lives are in danger, freeze agendas he considers non-essential, and redesign the Security Council so its rulings carry force again. He reminded the hall that Chile was among the San Francisco signatories of the UN Charter and promoted Valparaíso's bid to host the executive secretariat of the high-seas biodiversity pact known as BBNJ, a race in which the port city is up against Brussels and the Chinese city of Xiamen.
He also devoted a stretch of the speech to artificial intelligence, which he framed as both an ethical and a geopolitical test, and argued for a measured pace of adoption that still captures its economic upside.
The scorecard he brought to New York
Much of the address worked as a progress report. Kast said homicides fell 11.5% in the first six months of the year and that irregular crossings at the border are down 86%, gains he credited to the Border Shield Plan, a package of frontier trenches, new laws and surveillance technology. He added that Chile is now expelling roughly 50% more people than it did a year earlier.
On the economy, he pointed to a reform that lowered the corporate tax rate from 27% to 23% and said investment applications now exceed $44 billion, inviting foreign capital to give the country a fresh look.
He set those results inside a longer arc. Chile, he said, was a regional success story through the 1990s and early 2000s until choices that raised taxes, piled on regulation and made entrepreneurship harder left the economy stalled. He cast the social unrest of late 2019 as a stretch in which chaos ruled. Published accounts of the speech do not show him naming his predecessor, Gabriel Boric; opposition figures nonetheless heard the diagnosis as a direct swipe at the previous government.
"Speaking badly about Chile"
Criticism from the center-left and the left arrived within hours. "We regret that he used this platform to speak badly about Chile," Broad Front deputy Jorge Brito said, according to Radio Contacto, defending the global standing the country has earned over decades.
Communist deputy Daniela Serrano dismissed the address as thin and lacking self-criticism, arguing that the president keeps blaming the previous administration instead of owning his own decisions since taking office in March. Independent senator Fabiola Campillai mocked his claim to have spent six months putting the house in order, citing insecurity, soaring food costs and a jobless rate she put near 10%.
Centrists split the difference
Two centrist party leaders who traveled with the presidential delegation gave more mixed reviews, La Tercera reported. PPD leader Raúl Soto found the speech broadly sound but said its opening leaned too heavily on rhetoric and symbolism aimed at domestic politics, the kind that divides rather than unites. In the second half, he said, Kast sounded like a statesman.
Christian Democrat leader Álvaro Ortiz called the speech politically correct and noted its upbeat economic tone, though he questioned whether the Assembly floor was the right place to court business. He also warned that Kast had once again openly aligned himself with governments such as those of the United States, Peru and Argentina, a stance he said would deepen polarization.
Washington and Bachelet cloud the trip
The friction reached beyond the podium. After the speech, Kast attended a meeting of the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas security coalition, chaired by President Donald Trump, where Chile took part as an observer while Peru was admitted as a member. Soto welcomed the fact that Kast kept the initiative out of his UN remarks and argued that Chile should stay out altogether because it belongs to the Rome Statute and recognizes the International Criminal Court. He noted that Trump, in his own address that day, had called on nations to quit the court.
The visit also came three days after former president Michelle Bachelet ended her bid to become UN secretary-general, following an informal Security Council poll in which she received just one encouraging vote. Nominated under Boric, she had kept campaigning without Chile's official backing, which the Kast government withdrew, leaning mainly on support from Mexico and Brazil. In a joint statement read by Socialist Party chief Paulina Vodanovic, opposition parties called that withdrawal unacceptable and held the government responsible for the outcome.
Allies see a statesman
Lawmakers in the governing coalition read the speech very differently. UDI deputy Guillermo Ramírez said Kast "hits the nail on the head" by demanding more of the UN and welcomed the message that Chile is once again orderly, reliable and worth investing in. Republican deputy Stephan Schubert, who chairs the lower house's foreign affairs committee, called the address prudent and said it took courage to pair criticism of the UN with concrete proposals for changing it.
Fellow Republican Benjamín Moreno said the president used the forum properly to lay out the problems Chile has faced in recent years, while National Renewal deputy Diego Schalper saw the appearance as a vote of confidence in multilateralism and agreed that the organization needs updating.
