translated from Spanish: Chile reinforces surveillance on border with Bolivia for illegal mass entry


Chile announced on Wednesday that it will reinforce surveillance on the border with Bolivia, where hundreds of migrants, mostly Venezuelans, enter illegally every day. We’re going to increase the guard at the border, we’re going to increase the checkpoints and observation points at the border. For that we are moving to the border, especially to the Colchane sector, a new camp that will be able to accommodate something like 50 police officers,” Interior Minister Rodrigo Delgado told the press.Por Colchane, a town of 1,600 inhabitants located at 3,650 meters above sea level, hundreds of migrants enter every day who cross the Andes mountain range from Bolivia and the Atacama Desert to reach to Chilean cities in search of a better quality of life.” The Army is also sending more troops to be able to increase and double the checkpoints in that area,” said Delgado, who admitted that the country has “a crisis of clandestine entry” in the north. The minister said that in addition to Colchane, the crisis also reaches the mining cities of Antofagasta and Iquique. The latter was the scene of a violent protest against irregular migrants on Saturday. A group of protesters burned belongings of Venezuelans who had been camping in the street for a year. After this protest, the UN expressed its “concern about the violence and xenophobia” towards immigrants in Chile, while President Sebastián Piñera condemned the events and promised that they would not go unpunished. People’s income to Chile through clandestine passages totaled 23,673 as of July 2021, almost 7,000 more than those registered during all of last year, according to a report by the Jesuit Migrant Service (SJM). The minister said that a “modular Transitional Health Stay Center will be opened to be able to attend to those who have crossed the border.” Migrants entering the center will have to comply with five-day preventive quarantines due to the pandemic, as well as travelers who enter the country legally.” There will also be reception centers in conjunction with UNICEF and also shelters in hostels,” added Delgado.Visit of far-right candidate Meanwhile, the far-right presidential candidate José Antonio Kast visited Iquique and Colchane on Wednesday, where he lambasted the current right-wing government and the previous one of the socialist Michelle Bachelet for this “humanitarian crisis.” The irresponsibility and inefficiency of the different governments have generated this humanitarian crisis that we have to face and resolve,” Kast said in a video he posted on social media. Kast, who does not hide his admiration for the former dictator Augusto Pinochet (whose period was between 1973 and 1990), is third (with 13%) in the preferences for the elections of November 21, according to the pollster Cadem, behind the leftist Gabriel Boric (26%) and Sebastián Sichel (17%), of the official right. Kast displaced Senator Yasna Provoste, from the weakened center-left coalition that had dominated Chilean politics since 1990, to fourth place in the preferences. Last week, Minister Delgado warned that the government will go ahead “with the plan of expulsions” of undocumented migrants and that it would evict any public places they occupy illegally. A day before the protest, the police had evicted hundreds of Venezuelan migrants who had been camping for a year in a square in Iquique.Read more: 100 dead in a prison brawl in Guayaquil, Ecuador Commander of the Municipal Police seriously injured after colliding in Culiacán



Original source in Spanish

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