Children in Mexico spend up to seven hours a day in front of a screen. In light of this reality, the government has decided to completely restrict the use of cellphones in elementary and middle schools. President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has avoided calling the initiative a “ban,” says she wants to fight phone addiction among young people to “protect their development and creativity.” The country thus joins Brazil and Chile among regional states with stricter rules on cellphone use in classrooms and moves ahead of others, such as Argentina and Colombia, where regulation is still underway.

As of November 3, elementary and middle school classrooms and playgrounds in Mexico will be screen-free. Sheinbaum and Education Secretary Mario Delgado have spent weeks presenting data, backed by experts, that outline the problem: more than 83% of parents are worried about their children’s device time and more than 70% of household heads support regulating use. It is not only an adult perception: four in 10 Mexican students say their classmates are distracted by digital devices in most or all classes. In addition, a survey of over 565,000 teachers found that 81% support the measure. Delgado also highlighted the impact of social networks on children and adolescents, noting that U.S. courts have ruled that these platforms are designed to be addictive and cause harm to mental health.

The PISA 2025 report, in which Mexico slipped in mathematics, revealed that almost half of the time students spend on screens at school (2.7 hours) is for leisure. Devices have shortened the attention span readers use to comprehend a text. Following the government forums and the release of the results of the international study, Mexico has joined more than half of the world’s countries that already have restrictions on the use of devices in schools. Depending on the region, the measures range from banning cellphones during the school day to total restrictions on certain social media platforms.

In Latin America, Brazil removed cellphones from schools at the start of the last school year in January 2025. The Lula government decided to ban them both in classrooms and during recess, in public and private schools, to protect students’ mental and physical health and to improve academic performance. The debate was intense, but the overall assessment is positive. On the first anniversary of phone-free schools, eight in 10 Brazilian students reported “paying more attention” in class and 65% of teachers said incidents of online bullying had fallen, according to an evaluation of the law commissioned by the parliamentary education bloc. Even students unhappy with the new rule acknowledged the benefits. Lívia de Souza Xavier, 14, said she concentrates more and her grades have improved significantly, according to testimony collected by the NGO Alana, which focuses on children. Another student said she now talks more with classmates and, if she cannot find them, she goes to look for them, as reported by Naiara Galarraga Gortázar.

Chile has moved in the same direction since February, when Law 21.801 came into force, restricting the use of phones and any other internet-enabled device in preschool, elementary, and high school education. The prohibition, however, is not absolute: the law exempts pedagogical use, meaning cases in which a teaching activity requires a device. The legislation also allows other exceptions that must be justified by parents or guardians and generally require authorization from the school administration. These include special educational needs, emergencies or disasters, the student’s health conditions, and personal safety. So far, enforcement and monitoring of the regulation have been left to Chilean educational institutions. With reporting from Ana María Sanhueza.

In Argentina, regulation is advancing at the provincial level. Most provinces have passed laws banning cellphone use at all levels and allowing it only exceptionally, generally in high schools, and always for pedagogical purposes and at the express request of educational authorities. That group includes, among others, three of the country’s four most populous districts: the City of Buenos Aires and the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe. Other important jurisdictions, such as Córdoba and Tucumán, have left each school to set its own phone-use rules. Finally, provinces like Mendoza have authorized cellphone use “to improve the teaching-learning process” but have faced growing resistance within schools. With reporting from Javier Lorca.

The Lula government, which welcomed the PISA results optimistically, noted that 81% of Brazilian students examined attended schools that restrict cellphone use.

The debate has recently begun in Colombia, where the decision is left to each institution. The exception is Bogotá: on September 7 it launched the policy “(Re)connect to learn,” which requires public and private schools at all levels to implement a ban on cellphone use throughout the school day, including breaks, for both students and teachers. It only relaxes the restriction for health, inclusion, or emergency reasons, and allows pedagogical use from eighth grade. Schools now have six months to adjust their rules and define how the restriction will be applied, while the Health Secretariat will assess results after one year. Reported by Juan Esteban Lewin.

Mexico’s PISA 2025 results, even with phones present in schools, show indicators below the OECD average in all areas, although the country outperforms almost all the mentioned Latin American countries in mathematics. For example, it scores higher than Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, though it is surpassed by Chile, as in science and reading.

Mexico is thus undertaking the experiment of removing phones from schools to try to restore space for concentration, coexistence, and learning. From November 3, the country will be able to measure whether limiting screens also translates into better learning outcomes.

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In just two years, the National Libertarian Party has become the right-wing party with the most members in Chile, slightly exceeding 50,000. Its leader, Johannes Kaiser, found a niche on the extreme flank of President José Antonio Kast’s Republican Party. He broke away from the party during the 2023 constitutional referendum, opposing his faction’s negotiation with the left-wing administration of then-President Gabriel Boric (2022-2026).

Using rhetoric that’s nostalgic for the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), and with the anti-progressive culture war as its central tenet, it secured fourth place in the first round of the 2025 presidential elections and nine seats in the National Congress (Senator Vanessa Kaiser, Johannes Kaiser’s sister, was also elected).

The rapid emergence of this far-right party on the Chilean political scene prompted journalists Benjamín Bravo and Francisco Lucero to investigate the phenomenon. The investigation uncovered the family’s historical trajectory. It also looked at internal tensions within the party, its ties to the military, as well as its links to Javier Milei’s Argentina, among other findings. These have all been published in a book – translated from the Spanish as Johannes Kaiser and the National-Libertarians – which was presented in late August in Santiago, the Chilean capital.

The Kaiser family’s public account of their paternal grandfather’s arrival in Chile is that he escaped Nazi Germany and settled in the southern city of Villarrica. However, according to Bravo and Lucero’s research, this isn’t the case at all.

Federico Kaiser Richter was born on April 18, 1912, in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1933 – according to a membership record found in the United States National Archives – a Friedrich Kaiser, born in that same city, joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (SDAP)…in other words, the Nazi Party. Friedrich Kaiser was born just eight days after the birthdate that Johannes Kaiser gave to the Chilean Investigative Police (PDI) as being his grandfather’s birth date.

A year later, Friedrich Kaiser sailed to Chile, where he pursued a career in graphic arts and founded the Cervantes printing press. In 1942, he applied for Chilean citizenship, but Department 50 — a secret police unit tasked with investigating Nazi activities in Chile — informed the General Secretariat (the communications department for the government’s executive branch) that Kaiser was “a fervent supporter of the Nazi cause and a major propagandist of totalitarian ideas,” linking him to the dissemination of German propaganda via the Cervantes printing press. Furthermore, he appeared on two banking blacklists compiled by the United States against Nazi collaborators in Latin America.

In 1943 the government invoked Law 7401, which focused on national security, and decreed his forced relocation to the province of Curicó. Kaiser, who appealed the decision, unsuccessfully, would settle there. After lodging a defense in which he denied any Nazi affiliation and argued that he had moved to Chile for family and economic reasons, he obtained a transfer to Villarica, where his wife had relatives, but his relocation was mandatory, not voluntary.

Johannes Kaiser is often presented as a political outsider. But “there’s a historical trajectory of the Kaiser family’s pursuit of power,” Bravo points out. Johannes’ grandfather became mayor of Villarrica (supported, among others, by a nationalist group). His father Juan Cristián, a businessman, ran for Congress with the Party of the South, a right-wing regionalist party. He was unsuccessful at the polls, but he did serve as the party’s vice president in the early 1990s.

Juan Cristián Kaiser and Rosemarie Barends had six children: Johannes, Vanessa, Axel, Leif, Max and Etzel. The couple instilled in them their animosity toward Salvador Allende’s left-wing Popular Unity government (1970-1973), primarily because their family lands had been expropriated, according to the journalists’ book. At the beginning of the dictatorship, the expropriation was reversed and the properties were returned to them.

The Kaiser siblings’ childhood was also marked by their mother’s mental illness and their parents’ divorce. “They had a very bad relationship, full of conflict; [it was] a very hostile atmosphere. I remember that, at the time, all I wanted was to grow up. I didn’t want to keep being a child,” Axel once said, as the investigation points out.

Their mother’s health problems led Vanessa — the only girl among the six siblings — to assume a maternal role. The three eldest siblings eventually followed the path of radical right-wing ideas: Johannes, who didn’t complete university; Vanessa, a philosopher; and Axel, a lawyer. It was Axel who, in 2010, began to introduce libertarian ideology to the public. At that time, the authors recount, he was “a voice crying out in the wilderness.” However, his prominence in academia and the media through provocatively-titled columns, such as Education Is Not a Right, established him as an important libertarian figure. And not only in Chile, but also abroad.

“Axel is the purist libertarian leader, who has also positioned his siblings and the party internationally. He’s been key in establishing relations with Argentina, with Javier Milei’s government. The [Kaisers] told us that, for the [2025 Chilean presidential] campaign, they received advice from people in Milei’s government on how to prep and how to reach La Moneda (Chile’s presidential palace).”

Vanessa is like the [family’s] ear to the ground and the most philosophical one of them all. As she herself has said, being a woman allows her to say things that her brothers can’t… which makes her the most extreme. And Johannes is the [sibling] who ties the group together and takes on an important leadership role,” Lucero explains.

The emergence of Milei in Argentina was key to the Kaiser siblings’ libertarian impulses. In Chile, there was already an obscure Libertarian Party (PLIB), but what was happening on the other side of the Andes allowed them to dream big. The book recounts how they tried “every which way” to get Axel chosen as a presidential candidate, since he clearly represented the movement’s DNA, with very libertarian ideas in economics, but also when it came to social values. That didn’t work out, so their attention turned to his YouTuber brother, Johannes. From Europe, during the 2019-2020 student protests in Chile, he made a lot of noise online with his criticisms of the left’s agenda.

The authors of the recently-released book explain that they spoke with many young national libertarians “and it was very clear, in all of them, how deeply the social uprising had affected them.”

“Many of them told us that they felt deeply rejected and criticized by the average person hailing from their generation. And, out of this accumulated frustration, they finally found a political outlet in Johannes Kaiser and the National Libertarian Party (PNL). It was like putting a face to [their long-standing concerns],” the journalists explain. “Without the National Libertarian YouTube channel, the party wouldn’t exist,” they add, explaining that there’s a whole digital ecosystem that’s related to the political movement.

“Now, even though there’s this phenomenon of the National Libertarian [YouTube] channel, social media hasn’t just been important for that reason. There’s a whole ecosystem of outlets aligned with libertarians that have gradually been establishing themselves since 2017. The libertarians understood that the digital landscape – until then – hadn’t been explored. And so, they began to spread their ideas.”

Johannes Kaiser added the word “National” to his party’s name, along with an agenda based on very conservative values. This caused a stir among traditional libertarians, who support the right to make decisions about your own body. “What fundamentally unites them,” Lucero points out, “is anti-communism. And, failing that, the defense of the former dictator, Pinochet. It’s absolutely present in everything the party does. The [members we interviewed] told us: ‘In this party, there’s no one who’s against Pinochet.’”

The party is overwhelmingly male, with only 26% of its members being women, the lowest percentage of all political parties in Chile. “The values-based component of the National Libertarian Party’s rhetoric stems from their conviction that society, even Western society, has been experiencing a regression for a long time, because of what they describe as a ‘culture of death,’ feminism, the pro-abortion agenda… for [the leadership], it’s essential to embrace these elements, because without them, the National Libertarian Party wouldn’t exist,” Bravo notes. “In the National Libertarian world, the culture war is paramount. And they won’t compromise: they’ve demonstrated this throughout their time in Congress. They’ve been the main drivers of that agenda,” Lucero adds.

While Kast has built his inner circle around former members of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI), a 43-year-old party that believes in the ideology of guildism, inspired by conservative Catholic social teachings, Kaiser’s inner circle is primarily composed of former members of the Armed Forces and law enforcement, or those from military families linked to the Pinochet dictatorship.

Regarding the contrast between the National Libertarian Party (PNL) and Kast’s Republican Party, Lucero argues that one of the main differences lies in their conceptions of power. “The Republicans understand that, to govern, they must do so with Chile Vamos (the traditional right-wing coalition). For the PNL, that’s almost [unacceptable]. In fact, many people left the Republicans and went to the Libertarians because of Kast’s closeness to Chile Vamos in the 2021 election, which he lost to Boric. They felt very disappointed,” Lucero states.

One of the key (and less visible) figures in the National Libertarian movement is Ítalo Omegna, a former legislative advisor and PNL member. According to the authors, he spent time studying in Argentina, where he became politically active. There, he forged connections with the libertarian movement.

Omegna was the last president of the now-defunct Chilean PLIB. From that position, he built bridges with those who would later form the core of the far-right movement. His affinity for libertarian ideology, Bravo points out, stems from a strong admiration for Axel Kaiser. When Milei was sworn in as president of Argentina just a week before the 2023 constitutional referendum in Chile, Omegna traveled to the neighboring country “with the express objective of preventing Milei from being photographed with José Antonio Kast,” because a photo with Milei would be seen as a political endorsement. That scene “perfectly summarizes” Omegna’s role as a solid link to the international libertarian world, given his ties to networks in Argentina, Brazil and Guatemala, among other countries.

Omegna gained greater notoriety recently, when a video went viral in which he mocked children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and made direct allusions to pedophilia. This was during a birthday celebration for a member of La Cofradía, a YouTube streaming show, which Omegna has appeared on. After the video surfaced, Omegna apologized, arguing that he failed to distinguish between his comedic role on the show and the public responsibility that came with his position. He resigned from his post as legislative advisor to Congressman Hans Marowski, vice president of the PNL, and was dismissed from the Mises Institute of the Southern Cone, the libertarian think tank where he had served as director of community outreach since June of 2025. However, he hasn’t been expelled from the party.

The disillusionment generated by the concentration of power within the party has triggered at least two crises, one of which resulted in the departure of 6,000 members in six months, according to the book. There are former members who call it the “Totalitarian National Party” or the “Family-Run Business,” because, they claim, if you don’t have access to the Kaisers, it’s very difficult to be heard. The family has also been criticized for not consulting the rank-and-file members on important matters, such as whether or not to be part of Kast’s government.

“There’s this very big wave of discontent. We were told that not only was the leadership inaccessible, but so were spaces like the party’s top committee. They chalk it up to the fact that many of these spaces are filled with agents from Kaiser’s inner circle. After the book came out, we learned that many of our sources had left the party precisely because of this,” Bravo warns.

The authors mention that there are former members of the PNL trying to revive the old Libertarian Party. And at least one left to build a project that “truly embodies the legacy of the dictatorship.”

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