Photograph provided by the Chilean Presidency of Chilean President Gabriel Boric (c) together with residents of the town of Colchane, in the Tarapacá region (Chile).Chilean Presidency (Chilean Presidency/EFE)
The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, will arrive at the end of the month at the XXVIII edition of the Ibero-American Summit in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, with the aim of addressing an issue that the region has not been able to face together: irregular immigration between Latin American countries, especially Venezuela.
The leftist president has said so on the tour to the northern border of Chile that he resumed this Wednesday, after suspending it last week to travel to Santiago and announce his Cabinet adjustment, just to commemorate one year in office.
“Our goal is that everyone who enters irregularly [to Chile] can be redirected to where they came from and that requires a high-level diplomatic conversation.
Boric has addressed this issue in the Tarapacá region, an area of Chile that is especially in demand due to the arrival of migrants.
It is the main land connection with the rest of the continent and where Colchane, the border crossing with Bolivia, is located.
Since Chile has the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Andes mountain range to the east, which marks the long border with Argentina, this area has become the main gateway for irregular migration, because there is an enabled passage that coexists with a border difficult to control.
In an interview with a local media outlet, the left-wing president recounted that, although people enter through Bolivia, when the Chilean authorities take them back to the border, this country only accepts the return of Bolivians.
Regarding the Ibero-American Summit, Boric assured:
600 soldiers on the northern border
Immigration control has become one of the primary issues for a government like the Chilean one that has hardened its position on this matter in the 12 months of its mandate.
In the Colchane area, on the northern border, in fact, there are currently some 600 soldiers deployed to help with migration and public order matters after the approval of a law promoted by this Administration.
One of Boric's activities in the framework of this tour has been, precisely, to check on the ground the presence of the Armed Forces in this territory.
“They have managed to order the immigration situation, identify migrants more rigorously, but, without a doubt, many challenges remain,” Boric said.
“We have to improve the infrastructure of the border crossing and, in addition, worry about Pica [another town in the area].
the burreros
[who traffic drugs] can try to find new routes, a little further south,” he added.
The 37-year-old president referred to the international organized crime that enters through this area of Chilean territory.
“I had a very sensitive meeting in the town of Alto Hospicio last week with the Prosecutor's Office, Carabineros and PDI [the police] to address the challenges against organized crime gangs that intend to establish themselves in our country and that, in some cases, have had a level of insertion”, he said in reference to the so-called Tren de Aragua, the bloody criminal gang of Venezuelan origin.
“We are going to persecute them relentlessly.
I want it to be the criminals who are afraid, not the citizens.
And for that we are carrying out different strategies,” Boric said about a law against organized crime that will be discussed by Congress in the coming weeks.
The issue of immigration has been latent on the Chilean political agenda.
The Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, attended as a guest the commission that investigates the situation in the north in Congress.
Boric's chief of staff informed the parliamentarians that between 2013 and 2022 there have been some 20,900 expulsions decreed by Chile of people who have entered the territory clandestinely that have not been possible.
Tohá explained that the problem is the cumbersome procedures to execute the measure, which the expelled take advantage of to make themselves unlocatable.
According to what was recently explained by the Director of Migrations, Luis Eduardo Thayer, so far this Government has carried out 140 expulsions, which have a cost per person of about 3,200 dollars.
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