The Venezuelan diaspora in Chile facing the presidential election: “We are the punching bag of the campaigns”
At the meat market in Santiago’s popular Franklin neighborhood, the noise never stops. But on November 21, when the ultraconservative José Antonio Kast, right-wing candidate, arrived in this labyrinth of butcher shops and warehouses, the agitation was thunderous. Jonathan González, Venezuelan and butcher, heard the mistakes, the cries against and in favor of the politician. He remembers that, while he was behind the counter where he works, he saw the standard-bearer of the Republican Party approach and took the opportunity to ask him not to expel him from Chile if he won the presidency, because not all undocumented migrants are the same: “There are good people and bad people everywhere.”
Kast listened to him for a few seconds and replied that his intention was to “put the house in order”, that illegal foreigners had to leave the South American country and that they could then return with a visa, to settle down and live here. But González, 43, remained worried. He only has a provisional identity document in Chile after entering on foot through an unauthorized crossing in 2019, on the border with Bolivia. “We are afraid because if this candidate wins, he will eliminate us from here. Xenophobia is very strong, too strong, and people are already afraid,” he said in a conversation with EL PAÍS four days before the December 14 presidential election. He does not imagine that the Republican could reproduce an anti-immigration policy of the magnitude of that carried out by Donald Trump in the United States, but he believes that he could be sent back to his country.
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