Chile moves hundreds of inmates to a new prison as President Kast ramps up security push

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The Chilean government transferred nearly 300 high-risk inmates from around the country to a sprawling new prison on Thursday, as hard-line President José Antonio Kast seeks to regain momentum on his core campaign pledge to combat organized crime.

Kast traveled to the recently opened La Laguna Prison, among Chile's biggest, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of Chile's capital of Santiago, to oversee the transfer, which his government described as an effort to ease overcrowding in prisons and prevent incarcerated gang leaders from remotely running their criminal enterprises behind bars.

Footage released by the government showed inmates packed into rows with bowed heads and shackled feet, recalling images from El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has made a point of broadcasting his security crackdown on social media.

Bukele's mass incarceration campaign has sharply reduced violence but drawn allegations from human rights groups of arbitrary detention, abuse and the erosion of civil liberties.

Like other right-wing presidential contenders across Latin America, most recently in Colombia and Peru, Kast has invoked Bukele as a model for his own promises to fight organized crime.

While campaigning last year, Kast visited El Salvador to study Bukele's security policies and tour the country’s notorious mega-prison where visitation, recreation and education are not allowed.

“It's a way of sending criminals a clear message that things have changed: We are going to come after you, we are going to find you, you will be prosecuted and we are going to lock you up,” Kast said in a press conference about the transfer.

Kast's office said 298 maximum-security prisoners were moved early Thursday to La Laguna from facilities around the country, including 40 alleged members of criminal organizations, nine of them gang leaders.

Hundreds more prisoners are slated to arrive at La Laguna in stages as the government moves to fill the facility to its expected capacity of 2,097 inmates across over a dozen units, including maximum-security wings. It's equipped with 1,500 surveillance cameras, body scanners and technology designed to block cellphone signals.

The prison, billed as Chile’s most modern and secure facility, opened last year under Kast’s predecessor, left-wing President Gabriel Boric, and began receiving inmates months before Kast, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, took office.

Kast's bid to publicize the move comes as he seeks to make good on his flagship security pledges after a bumpy start.

“If there is one issue on which the public is demanding action from all of us, it is greater security,” Kast said Thursday. “And that is what we are delivering now: a secure transfer and a clear message to organized crime and terrorism.”

He fired his first security minister just over two months into his administration and has struggled to implement his core campaign pledge of rapidly deporting immigrants. So far, his government has deported about 878 of the estimated 300,000 immigrants in Chile without permission to be in the country. Another 7,501 immigrants left voluntarily during the first seven months of 2026.

With voters expressing frustration that Kast's security policies have so far differed little from those under Boric, Kast reshuffled the Security Ministry in May and last week unveiled a major security package that would give the state broader authority to combat crime.

The proposals, many of them already before Congress, call for a permanent police presence in Chile’s most dangerous neighborhoods, tougher penalties for gang membership and a new state agency to seize and destroy assets linked to organized crime.

The legislation would also loosen the rules governing police use of force and change the constitution to make it easier to declare states of emergency in response to grave security threats.

Chile remains among the safest countries in Latin America, but a recent increase in kidnappings, extortion and drug trafficking — along with the expansion of transnational gangs such as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua — has caused overcrowding in the country's prisons and fueled public anxiety about organized crime that helped propel Kast to electoral victory last December.

Chilean President José Antonio Kast visits with police officers after announcing a new security agenda and stricter immigration enforcement, at the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, Chile, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Los Angeles (AP) — California 's prison system has systematically failed to protect incarcerated women from sexual abuse and harassment by guards, the U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday.

The federal investigation also found that California's corrections department failed to provide victims with a way to report sexual abuse and harassment without retaliation. On top of that, staff who were tasked with investigating the misconduct were often themselves accused of sexual abuse or harassment.

The investigation, which began during the Biden administration, focused on two state prisons: the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and the California Institution for Women in Chino. It uncovered numerous instances where guards regularly sexually abused incarcerated women. In at least one instance, a guard was convicted of rampant abuse over roughly a decade and sentenced to 224 years in prison.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement that it “enforces a zero-tolerance policy as mandated by the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act,” a federal law passed in 2003 designed to prevent sexual assaults in prisons.

The state agency also said that audits conducted by independent entities trained by the DOJ found the two prisons were in compliance with federal standards as recently as 2024 and 2025.

“CDCR is fully committed to supporting victims of sexual assault and ensuring safe avenues exist for both incarcerated persons and staff to confidentially report misconduct,” spokesperson Will Matthews wrote in an email.

Over the course of the DOJ investigation, the prison agency independently investigated and prosecuted both staff and incarcerated people who violated federal rape prevention laws, he added.

But federal authorities said Thursday that there weren't sufficient mechanisms for victims to come forward.

Women were told to report misconduct on an online system that wasn’t confidential and that accused officers had access to, according to Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

Dhillon said that women are “fully aware of this gap in confidentiality, and this serves as a deterrent from women reporting this misconduct.” She named at least one sergeant whose job was to investigate misconduct who was himself sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to receiving child sexual abuse images at work.

“The upshot of our investigation is that California’s prison system, when it comes to women, has inadequate systems in place to deter, detect, and hold accountable rampant sexual misconduct and assault on female prisoners,” Dhillon said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The Associated Press has previously exposed similar patterns of rampant abuse by federal prison staff against women held in a Dublin, California, facility that at the time was nicknamed the “rape club.” The prison was closed following the AP investigation.

The federal government on Thursday gave California's prison system 49 days to remediate the conditions that enabled the rampant abuse, warning that a failure to do so could result in civil litigation.

The measures include expanded camera coverage, enhanced confidential reporting channels and strengthened investigative protocols.

The corrections department was implementing many of those changes before the federal investigation, Matthews said.

U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, appointed by President Donald Trump as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said California has to take action.

“The State must confront the persistent failure of its own employees to prevent and address sexual abuse at these facilities,” Essayli said in a statement, “and the systemic breakdowns that have permitted these conditions to persist.”

FILE - Bill Essayli, acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, speaks with reporters during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Nov. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, file)

FILE - Former Trump campaign lawyer Harmeet Dhillon appears at a House Committee on House Administration hearing on "American Confidence in Elections: Protecting Political Speech" on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, file)

FILE - Exterior views of the Central California Women's Facility prison in Chowchilla, Calif., on June 25, 2026. (Dan Hernandez/San Francisco Chronicle via AP, file)