New anti-immigrant protest in Chile ended with eleven detainees and one injured

Following the xenophobic protests against Venezuelan migrants recorded last week, this Saturday, a group of people returned to the center of Santiago during a demonstration that left eleven detainees and one injuredChilean media reported.

The riflemen detailed that during the incidents recorded in the demonstration, one person was injured with a knife and his attacker was arrested. The victim was transferred to a hospital in the area.

“Today in Santiago we have a few violent groups who tried to confront the other group. Carabineros tried to prevent these groups from regrouping, there are arrested and we have wounded as a result of these attacks which, I insist, we reject and repudiate, in particular as regards migration ”, declared the Minister of the Interior, Rodrigo Delgado, quoted by the newspaper The third.

Police also reported that traffic was suspended in the area and that several metro stations were temporarily closed.

Last Saturday, a similar episode was recorded in the city of Iquique, in the north of the country, when some three thousand people launched xenophobic threats and burned the precarious property of a group of undocumented Venezuelan migrants.

In a climate of open rejection of the Venezuelan immigrant, protesters waved Chilean flags, as well as the Whiphala, a colorful flag of the indigenous Andean peoples, to express their opposition to undocumented migration, associated with crime with rumors citing all types of platforms.

Last Saturday’s protest took place a day after the eviction from Plaza Brasil, where the poorest and undocumented migrants who cannot reach Santiago spent the night and survive by selling candy, begging or cleaning. the windows at the city traffic lights.

In the police operation, disowned by local authorities and humanitarian organizations, Jeremy, a 4-year-old Venezuelan boy missing for more than 24 hours, who was found unharmed on Saturday morning. “Fortunately they found the child, but that sums up the mismanagement of all this humanitarian drama, the government considers that it is only a question of expelling some and expelling them from a place”, s’ complained Franklin Pérez, administrator of a building in the center of Iquique.

The governor of the Tarapacá region, José Miguel Carvajal, and the mayor of Iquique, Mauricio Soria, have blamed the government of President Sebastián Piñera for the migration crisis in northern Chile. No one was alerted to Friday’s eviction which encouraged xenophobia in part of the population.

On Wednesday, the government of Chile announced that in the coming days will set up several shelters in the north of the country to help the hundreds of Venezuelans who are stranded after crossing the border through illegal crossings in what is the biggest migration crisis in the country’s recent history.

“We have to take charge of a reality, thousands of people have entered, mainly Venezuelan citizens, although this is not the only nationality that enters, and for that we have defined a strengthening of humanitarian measures“, said the Chilean Minister of the Interior, Rodrigo Delgado.

Delgado explained that shelters will be set up in the border towns of Colchane and Huara where will they be delivered basic necessities, but also in Iquique, the first big city that migrants encounter when they arrive from Bolivia.

Will also be built children’s centers in collaboration with Unicef ​​and Hogar de Cristo and vouchers will be issued so that migrants can stay in hostels associated with the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The Venezuelan community is the largest in Chile, with more than 400,000 people, although a much longer date is estimated given the increase in income from illegal crossings since 2020, when Chile closed its borders due to of the pandemic.

With information from AFP and EFE

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