Chilean police initiate investigation into burning of Venezuelan migrants’ belongings in Iquique

The Investigative Police of Chile (PDI) carried out the first proceedings on Monday in the framework of the case opened for the burning of the belongings of migrants venezuelans camped in the northern town of Iquique.

The agents carried out a registry of the affected people, ruled out that there were injuries and made an assessment of the burned objects after a violent march held on Saturday against illegal migration.

“It was also requested as a diligence that they collect the security videos of the municipal cameras that could have captured this fact”, Prosecutor Jócelyn Pacheco told reporters in a statement.

Almost 5,000 people took to the streets of Iquique in the midst of the growing migration crisis that suffers Chile and they burned tents, clothes and baby carriages, among other objects.

The events, which have shocked the country, aroused fiery criticism from the UN Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Migrants, Felipe González, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Amnesty International.

The demonstration, in which xenophobic screams were heard and many Chilean flags were seen, occurred after on Friday the Police evicted a square where families with children also camped in Iquique, the first large city that migrants encounter upon arrival from Bolivia. .

The border crossing between the small Chilean town of Colchane and Bolivia, an Andean area more than 3,600 meters above sea level with extreme temperatures and where at least 12 people have already died so far this year, has become in recent months on a regular route for foreigners to arrive in Chile irregularly.

Neither the pandemic nor the social crisis that lasted for more than a year in 2019 have discouraged the desire to migrate to Chile, one of the most attractive countries in Latin America due to its political and economic stability.

According to the PDI, between January and July of this year, 23,673 complaints were registered for entering the country through non-authorized steps, which is 40% than in all of 2020.

On Chile, there are 1.4 million migrants, which is equivalent to more than 7% of the population and Venezuelans are the most numerous, followed by Peruvians, Haitians and Colombians.

With the aim of curbing illegal entry, the Chilean president, the conservative Sebastián Piñera, enacted a new, stricter migration law in April that requires foreigners to obtain visas in their countries of origin.

The rule also allows the Government to deport migrants and since April more than half a thousand people of different nationalities have been expelled on at least five charter flights.

Delgado reiterated this weekend that the deportation policy will be resumed, despite the fact that a Supreme Court ruling rejected this procedure in June and that other organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have made explicit calls to put an end to “summary deportations ”.

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