Chile’s far-right presidential candidate, Jose Antonio Kast, one of the favorites to succeed leftist leader Gabriel Boric in November’s vote, vowed Monday to deport “all” undocumented migrants if victorious.
Some 330,000 foreign nationals, the vast majority Venezuelans, live illegally in the South American country, according to official estimates.
Kast, who is hotly tipped to win the presidency on his third attempt, said he would make illegal migration a crime and deport all undocumented migrants, including children.
The law-and-order candidate, who was narrowly beaten by Boric in December 2021, declared that all illegal migrants, including children, would be detained pending their deportation.
“All of them will stay in temporary detention centers until their expulsion to their country of origin or their return to the country through which they entered,” he told a press conference, echoing the hardline policies of US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Foreigners who commit crimes will be incarcerated in a special prison and expelled once they had served their sentence, Kast added.
Opinion polls show Kast neck-and-neck with communist former labor minister Jeannette Jara ahead of the first round of the election on November 16.
Conservative ex-mayor Evelyn Matthei is running in third.
While some of the surveys put Jara marginally ahead, all show Kast beating Jara if, as predicted, the election goes to a second round of voting between the two on December 14.
The ultraconservative father of nine has vowed to go to “war” against organized crime and build maximum security prisons, modelled on El Salvador’s notorious Terrorist Confinement Center, for dangerous offenders.
He has also previously vowed to build a wall along Chile’s desert border with Bolivia to keep out undocumented migrants but on Monday made no mention of the proposal.
Polls show rising insecurity, for which many Chileans blame foreign crime gangs, particularly Venezuelan, as voters’ top concern.
Chile’s murder rate, while one of the lowest in Latin America, has more than doubled in the past decade and cases of extortion and drug trafficking have also risen.
“Anyone who enters (Chile) through the window (illegally) will never be rewarded with any benefit in our nation,” the 59-year-old lawyer, the son of a suspected German Nazi who fled to Chile after World War II, said.
Chile’s immigrant population has doubled in the last seven years, reaching 8.8 percent of the population of nearly 20 million, according to the National Statistics Institute.
