A border ‘ditch’ may prove to be the thing that brings the right back to power in Chile. Although the communist-affiliated candidate Jeannette Jara leads the polls going into this weekend’s election, a second-round run-off seems almost certain, with a consolidated right-wing alliance – running on a platform to cut illegal immigration – likely to win the final showdown.

Jose Antonio Kast, the leading right-wing candidate, is a hardliner who admires both Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. He has promised to rule with ‘mano dura’ (an iron fist). He says drug dealers will be held in in solitary confinement and has pledged to construct a series of ditches and walls to secure Chile’s northern border.

Kast’s frontier talk is playing well with voters, but his critics have pointed out that promising to ‘ditch and wall’ one of the world’s longest land borders at 4,000 miles is more likely a piece of political theatre. In recent years, more than half a million Venezuelans have arrived in Chile, driven by the economic collapse in........

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