An opponent of abortion, Judith Marín has been named Chile’s new women and gender equality minister.
Appointed by the country’s incoming far-right president José Antonio Kast, who is also a staunch abortion opponent, Marín was included among his first cabinet on Tuesday.
Marín, 30, is an evangelical former student church group leader. She belonged to the Eagles of Jesus, which is a far-right Christian group.
She’s known for defending a “natural family”, the view that a man and woman should head a household.
She has also publicly questioned the future of the ministry that she is now set to lead. She has repeatedly stated her anti-abortion views and was once ejected from Chile’s senate for screaming “return to the Lord” during a vote to decriminalise abortion under restricted circumstances.
Abortion in Chile has been decriminalised since 2017 for three specific cases: the mother’s life is at risk, the pregnancy is a result of rape, or the foetus will not survive.
The country’s congress is currently debating a bill that would decriminalise abortion in any circumstances up to the 14th week of a pregnancy.
In December 2025, Kast, who claims to be inspired by US president Donald Trump, won Chile’s presidential run-off election. It was Kast’s third attempt for the office, and he is a renowned supporter of the country’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet.
A Catholic, opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion, Kast’s win is widely seen as part of a broader shift to right-wing politics in Latin America.
He’s seen as the most right-wing president since Pinochet’s dictatorship, with Consuelo Thiers, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, telling Al Jazeera, that he “is the first president since the end of the dictatorship to have openly supported Pinochet.”
Kast has now named 24 people to his cabinet, 13 of whom are men and 11 women. Their average age is 54, with the majority being right and far right voices.
“This unity cabinet was not formed to administer normality. It was brought together to face a national emergency,” said Kast on Tuesday.