Chilean President José Antonio Kast on 21 October named Gonzalo Arenas Hödar under-secretary of the General Secretariat of Government (Segegob) and spokesman for the executive, in place of José Francisco Lagos. The presidency press office issued the appointment. This is an official naming, not the rumour of the previous days.

The statement thanks Lagos for his work in the under-secretariat and says he will keep working with the president on other matters. Leaving Segegob is not a disappearance from the team. T13 and Emol repeat the same wording.

Emol writes that Arenas reached La Moneda palace at 7:28 and was received by the interior and Segegob biminister, Claudio Alvarado. La Tercera also flags a working meeting with Alvarado on Thursday. Wednesday’s arrival is not, by itself, Thursday’s meeting.

Arenas, born in 1972 in Valparaíso, is a lawyer of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and holds a history doctorate from the Autonomous University of Madrid. He was a deputy for La Araucanía (2006–2014) and a special adviser on indigenous affairs, then at Segpres and Interior, in Sebastián Piñera’s second term. From June 2024 he was dean of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at Universidad San Sebastián. The ministry’s official biography confirms the 21 October appointment.

Until now, T13 says, government voices went through Alvarado and, at times, Interior under-secretary Máximo Pavez. In the coalition there has been an argument over whether the spokesman should be a minister, not an under-secretary. That is a design dispute, not the content of today’s naming.

The Segegob page already lists him as under-secretary and spokesman. Until another appointment, the closed fact is the presidency’s announcement: Arenas at Segegob, Lagos still a collaborator of Kast.

Image: Draceane, La Moneda palace, Santiago, 21 January 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; the 2019 facade, not a photograph of the 21 October 2026 appointment.

Sources consulted: Kast confirms Gonzalo Arenas as under-secretary General of Government - La Tercera; Under-secretary Gonzalo Arenas Hodar - Ministry General Secretariat of Government.