The Venezuelan diaspora in Chile facing the presidential election: “We are the punching bag in the campaigns”
At the meat market in the popular Franklin neighborhood in Santiago, the noise never stops. But on November 21, when the ultraconservative José Antonio Kast, candidate of the right, arrived at this labyrinth of butcher shops and warehouses, the bustle was thunderous. Jonathan González, Venezuelan and butcher, heard the mistakes, the shouts against and in favor of the politician. He remembers that, while he was behind the counter where he works, he saw the Republican Party’s standard-bearer approaching and took the opportunity to ask him not to kick him out of Chile if he won the Presidency because not all migrants without documentation are the same: “There are good and bad, everywhere.”
Kast listened to him for just a few seconds and responded that his intention is to “put the house in order”, that foreigners in an irregular situation had to leave the South American country and that they could then re-enter with a visa, to settle down to live here. But González, 43, remained uneasy. He only has a provisional identity document in Chile after entering walking through a non-enabled crossing in 2019, on the border with Bolivia. “We are scared because if that candidate wins they will eliminate us from here. Xenophobia is very strong, too strong, and people are already scared,” he said in a conversation with EL PAÍS four days before the presidential elections on December 14. He does not imagine that the Republican can replicate an anti-immigration policy of the magnitude of that carried out by Donald Trump in the United States, but he does believe that he could be returned to his country.
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