SHOT FOR A GOLD CHAIN
“Just a few steps from my house, a young boy was recently killed because he was wearing a gold chain; he was shot. And three years ago, on my street, a young girl was almost kidnapped,” Rosario Isidora Herrera Munoz, who voted in Santiago with her six-month-old baby, told AFP.
“I hope that some day we’ll go back to the way we were before,” said Mario Faundez, an 87-year-old retired salesman.
“If we have to kill (criminals), so be it,” he added.
Jara on Sunday accused her rivals of “exacerbating fear” and spreading “hate,” and said their proposals did not amount to a full plan for governing.
The vote is seen as a litmus test for South America’s left, which has been sent packing in Argentina and Bolivia, and faces a stiff challenge in Colombian and Brazilian elections next year.
Jara served as labor minister under outgoing center-left president Gabriel Boric, who cannot run for a second consecutive term.
Ultra-right candidate Johannes Kaiser, who was closing in on Jara and Kast in the final days of campaigning, told AFP the election was about ending Latin America’s “disconnection … from the United States and the free world.”
Source: CNA
