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Immigrants in Chile File Complaint against Mass Expulsions

SANTIAGO, Apr 11 2012 (IPS) - The Committee of Peruvian Refugees in Chile has filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that this country carries out mass expulsions of immigrants.

“Chile systematically deports large numbers of foreigners, but since December, operations to deport groups of 20, 30 or 40 people have been carried out once or twice a month,” the president of the Committee, Rodolfo Noriega, told IPS.

“That is a violation of the American Convention on Human Rights,” he said.

The complaint, filed on Mar. 30, states that the mass expulsions of Peruvian immigrants ignore “particular circumstances, family ties, and administrative or judicial action or decisions that may have been taken.”

It also said that before they were deported, the immigrants were illegally detained and held incommunicado, and were subject to undue pressure, threats and deception.

The complaint asks the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to issue precautionary measures in the case of three construction workers who were summoned by Chile’s international police service, in order to deport them.

Noriega said Chile was violating article 22 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which refers to freedom of movement and residence. Point 9 of the article states that “The collective expulsion of aliens is prohibited.”

The complaint also argues that rights guaranteed in international treaties ratified by Chile, “such as the right to life and personal integrity,” are also being violated.

Consuelo Labra, a lawyer with the Observatorio Ciudadano (Citizen Observatory), which is a sponsor in the case before the IACHR, told IPS that over the past year, the Interior Ministry has followed “a more denigrating policy of persecution of those who have no residency permit or are in the process of applying for one.”

The head of the legal section of the Interior Ministry’s Departamento de Extranjería y Migraciones (department on foreigners and migration), Rodolfo Quintano, told IPS that the Committee’s complaint is not founded on facts, because all of the orders to deport foreigners issued by the Chilean authorities “are of a strictly individual nature.”

Quintano said the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines collective expulsion as “any measure compelling aliens, as a group, to leave a country on grounds of nationality, ethnic background, religion, migration status, etc., without an examination of each particular case.

“In Chile, all of the expulsion measures are issued by the competent authorities, within the limits of their authority, in line with the grounds established in the law on aliens and based on the concrete precedents of each foreigner who has committed an infraction that is punishable by deportation,” he said.

The deportation orders, he said, “are individual in nature” and do not extend to the immigrant’s family.

According to Quintano, each foreigner in the process of being deported is given a document outlining the reasons for the deportation, the laws and statutes on which the measure is based, and the legal recourse to which they are entitled.

The official said that sometimes foreigners are deported by the police in groups to their country of origin, when the deportation takes place by land to a neighbouring country. But “in no case can this be confused with a collective expulsion of foreigners,” he said.

The IAHCR is now studying the complaint, and Noriega has until Apr. 14 to provide any additional information requested by the Commission. The IACHR will then request that the Chilean government submit a report, in order to call the two sides together for talks.

Only after all of these steps are taken will the IACHR, an autonomous Organisation of American States body, reach a decision on the precautionary measures that have been requested.

Experts say that underlying the current humanitarian crisis is the fact that Chile lacks a clear and explicit policy on immigration. The law on aliens currently in effect was in fact a decree issued in 1975 by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

The law principally addresses the question of granting visas and establishes criteria on the entry or expulsion of foreign nationals.

Noriega denounced that, for example, the international police service has kept Haitian citizens from entering the country since December 2011.

The department on foreigners and immigration “chose to leave the decision on who can enter the country as a tourist exclusively up to the police.”

Noriega cited the case of a Haitian man who has a Chilean son but who has twice been refused entry into the country, which has made it impossible for the son to even be registered in the civil register.

Labra complained that “Chile has publicly given full support to Haiti; there are Chileans forming part of the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti; and citizens from that country do not need a visa to enter Chile.”

But in practice, “planes coming from Haiti today are sent back with everyone aboard.”

No explanation is provided as to why they are not allowed to enter the country, and the courts reject any legal appeals, on the argument that the police have discretionary powers in the matter.

Chile has gone has gone from a country of emigration to one of immigration, since the return to democracy in 1990.

As of late 2009, there were 352,344 legal foreign residents in this South American country of 17 million people – two percent of the total population, according to the department on foreigners and immigration.

To that must be added the number of undocumented immigrants, for whom no estimates are provided by organisations dedicated to the issue. But in 2007, when the last amnesty for immigrants took place, nearly 51,000 applications for legal residency were submitted in a single quarter, mainly by Peruvians, followed by Bolivians and Ecuadoreans.

Of the legal residents, 73 percent are from other Latin American countries, and 61 percent of these are from neighbouring countries. The latest available figures indicate that Peruvian immigrants represent 37.1 percent of that group, Argentine immigrants represent 17.2 percent, and Bolivians make up 6.8 percent.

Carolina Stefoni, a sociologist who is an expert on migration, told IPS that since 1995, when people from other Latin American countries began arriving en masse, there has been a change in perception in Chile towards immigrants.

In Chile the image of the immigrant “is generally pretty negative, and the immigrant becomes a target of discrimination at all levels,” with many cases “falling into the sphere of xenophobia,” she said.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the phenomenon of migration has played an important role in the demographic makeup of the region, in the economy, and in the social and cultural characteristics of countries, according to the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre (CELADE).

In several countries of Latin America – Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay – the number of nationals who left the country between 2005 and 2010 surpassed the number of foreigners entering the country, according to the Santiago-based CELADE.

In Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela, the number of immigrants coming from abroad was roughly equal to the number of nationals who left, which meant that immigration did not affect the overall population total.

Chile, Costa Rica and Panama, meanwhile, were the only Latin American countries where the number of immigrants surpassed the number of emigrants, and the size of the population grew due to immigration.