Chile's rightwing president-elect drew sharp criticism from human rights groups Wednesday for announcing a cabinet that features two lawyers who defended the late dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Jose Antonio Kast, 60, will be sworn in on March 11 as the first far-right head of state in Chile since the exit of Pinochet, whose brutal regime left deep scars on the South American nation.
On Tuesday, he named Fernando Barros, 68, as his defense minister and Fernando Rabat, 53, as minister of justice and human rights.
Both served as lawyers for Pinochet, who led a dictatorship from 1973 to 1990 that left more than 3,200 people dead or missing, and tortured or imprisoned tens of thousands more.
These attorneys represented the dictator in cases involving human rights violations and embezzlement.
As his minister of women's affairs, Kast picked Judith Marin, a 30-year-old evangelical teacher who is opposed to abortion -- a right supported by many Chileans and allowed albeit restricted under Chilean law.
"The appointment of two lawyers who defended Pinochet is a clear indication that the incoming government aims to justify extermination," Communist Party lawmaker Carmen Hertz told AFP.
"They are denialists of the extermination carried out by the dictatorship," added Hertz, whose husband, journalist Carlos Berger, was executed by the regime in 1973.
Alicia Lira, president of an association for relatives of people killed by the Pinochet regime, said she found it "truly disrespectful that someone who was part of the defense team for the most bloodthirsty dictator in Latin America" could be appointed justice minister.
Kast, a Pinochet admirer who won a landslide election victory last December, has in the past supported the idea of pardoning some 140 military people and other representatives of the state who were imprisoned for crimes against humanity committed under the dictatorship.
Pinochet died in 2006 at age 91 without ever being tried for human rights violations or any other crime.
Women's rights groups were particularly upset by the appointment of Marin.
"The lives of girls, women," said Fernanda Carvallo of 8M, a feminist organization, "cannot be in the hands of religious fundamentalists."
Kast won election on a wave of anti-crime and anti-immigrant sentiment, despite being more right on most social issues than the average Chilean.
He is staunchly anti-abortion, even in cases of rape, risk to the mother's life or fetal inviability -- the circumstances under which the procedure is currently allowed.
