Chile Is Sending Its Military to the Border to Stop Illegal Immigration

Chile deployed the military to guard its Northern border with Peru and Bolivia for the next 90 days this week in an effort to stop a flood of migrants, as thousands of people from neighboring nations seek alternatives to heading north to the U.S.

The militarization of the border by the government of President Gabriel Boric less than a year after taking office came as a surprise to many. The 37-year-old leftist leader generally portrayed himself on the campaign trail as a progressive who supports migration as a human right.

The move came just a month after the country’s congress passed a new law aimed at protecting critical infrastructure, which allows the armed forces to be deployed to parts of the country that are perceived as being in danger, including borders.

“For a long time, Chile hasn’t done what it should do to have good control," Chilean Interior Minister Carolina Tohá said in a press conference in the border town of Colchane in the Tarapacá region over the weekend. The government claims that the northern region of Chile has seen a rise in the trafficking of people, guns, and drugs. Tarapacá is the region with the highest number of homicides in Chile and has long been affected by organized crime.

Tohá explained that the military will be tasked with carrying out identity checks on people who may have entered illegally, searching luggage if they believe a crime may have been committed. Soldiers are also tasked with arresting people found with drugs or weapons, or who could be involved in human trafficking.

“What should start to happen is that there is less irregular movement across the border. Hopefully that is the result of this, that it has a dissuasive effect for people to go to the authorized borders and, if someone wants to enter our country, do so where they should be,” said Tohá. “The vast majority of people who migrate come to work to rebuild their lives because there is a tragic situation in their countries, but in between, they take advantage of bringing a criminal agenda and bringing organized crime practices or other types of crimes to the country.”

Immigration in Chile skyrocketed after the fall of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990. In the early 90s, immigrants accounted for just 1 percent of the country's population, but by 2020, that number rose to 9 percent. The majority have arrived since 2017, after which the foreign-born population nearly doubled in a three year span. Most of the migrants are coming from Venezuela, where the economic crisis in recent years has caused millions  to flee. While there’s also been a number of Haitian, Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants arriving in recent years due to unrest in their countries, of the over 56,000 people who arrived over unauthorized borders in 2021, roughly 80 percent of them came from Venezuela.

Cristian Doña Reveco, a Chilean scholar and the director of the Office of Latin/Latin American studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, told VICE World News that he doubted that the new measure would decrease crime in the region, and instead “it’s actually an increase in danger for migrants.”

The presence of the military will cause migrants to look for more clandestine and dangerous routes to get into the country, as well as pressure them to rely more heavily on human smugglers, explained Doña Reveco, comparing it to the crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border which causes more migrants to enter “hostile terrain.”

“It’s kind of odd in terms of the ideology and politics and the expected political results of this,” said Doña Reveco. “Boric has a history of at least speaking favorably on behalf of migrants, he has people within his government that are well known for their defense of migrants.” 

Illegal immigration was a hot button issue during the 2021 presidential election and a prominent talking point of Boric’s principal competitor, the ultraconservative right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast. But since entering office in March 2022, Boric hasn’t quite ushered in the more progressive era that was expected. Some decisions seem to be appealing more to “the traditional center of politics in Chile,“ said Doña Reveco.

“How is it that a supposedly left wing government is actually inviting the military to control certain areas of the country? When the memory of the dictatorship is not so old,” he said.

The rise in immigration in Chile has received significant backlash from parts of society. Anti-immigration protests have popped up repeatedly in the north of the country over the past two years.

“There has been a significant increase in displays of xenophobia and racism,” said Doña Reveco. “There is also the idea of the good migrant and the bad migrant.”

Venezuelan migrants in Chile, he said, are often divided in the public consciousness into those that arrived prior to 2017, which were often professionals and specialists moving legally, and those entering after, who are usually poorer and enter illegally to flee the country’s economic crisis.

The recent deployment of the military may have been intended to appeal to Boric’s detractors because “there are calls to be more strict on migration. This will be an issue in the next elections,” added Doña Reveco.

He doubted that the move would “be very successful in terms of image, in terms of perception,” although he was certain of one thing: it would be “bad for migrants.”