A fire reveals the open wound of irregular migration in northern Chile

Aerial view of the Laguna Verde fire in the hills of the city of Iquique, Chile, in January 2022.FERNANDO MUNOZ (AFP)

More than 400 people are seeking refuge after the fire that consumed at least 100 homes in an irregular camp in northern Chile. The fire occurred on Monday afternoon in Laguna Verde, a settlement populated by migrants on the outskirts of Iquique, the last Chilean city on the border with Bolivia and Peru. With at least 15 injured and no reports of deaths, the Chilean authorities evacuated the affected families in two schools set up as shelters. "No one has come, the firefighters didn't even have water!" Shouted a neighbor in a video circulating on social networks.

The drama of the fire reveals an open wound in northern Chile for decades, which played a major role in the elections on November 21: irregular migration. The Bolivian Foreign Ministry estimates that almost all of those affected are Bolivian nationals. "There are more than 100 families of nationals," said Eva Chuquimia, vice minister of Institutional and Consular Management, in a television interview on Tuesday. "In those lands the constructions are precarious of wood and iron, so the fire has destroyed all the houses, our compatriots have practically been left with nothing," the Bolivian consul in Chile, Eloy Poma, told local media on Tuesday.

We are working on the free replacement of identity documents and provision of supplies to the families of compatriots affected in the Laguna Verde camp fire 🇨🇱

# CancilleríaContigo

Read it 👉https: //t.co/LzvbqCPG7a pic.twitter.com/Sn0GoosoTS

- Eva Chuquimia (@eva_chuquimia) January 12, 2022

To the west of the Atacama Desert, between the Chilean coast and the arid Andean highlands, Laguna Verde is just a camp among a dozen neighborhoods overcrowded by Bolivian, Peruvian and, more recently, Venezuelan or Haitian migrants, in the foothills of the periphery of Iquique. The town is one of the first stops for thousands of migrants seeking to regularize their status in a city in central Chile. In the emergency to put out the fire, the Ministry of the Interior declared the yellow alert and clarified about "the presence of irregular homes and the difficult access to the place."

Laguna Verde does not have basic services such as piped drinking water, which made it difficult for the firefighters to respond. "It had a very rapid spread, considering the conditions that were presented to us on stage, such as the problem of the terrain to access our emergency units and the deployment of material," said the commander of the Iquique Fire Department, Jorge Medina, according to the agency France Presse. Medina also confirmed that at least six firefighters were injured "due to thermal stress and the physical effort they had to carry out" to get the materials to the top of the hill, where the trucks could not access.

In Chile, 81,643 families live in 969 camps, according to the National Land Registry of Camps made by the NGO Techo and the Housing Foundation in 2021. Irregular migration in the mining north of Chile was a topic on the agenda during the presidential elections that the progressive Gabriel Boric won.

Except in the city of Arica, the far-right José Antonio Kast prevailed throughout the region.

In Iquique, where anti-immigrant demonstrations led to the burning of mattresses and other belongings of homeless Venezuelans last September, Kast prevailed in the second round by a tight 50.42%.

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