On January 3, hundreds of Venezuelans flooded the streets of Santiago, Chile, celebrating the removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in a dramatic U.S. military intervention. The illegal raid and kidnapping of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, brought an abrupt end to Maduro’s 13-year rule over the country. It also killed up to 100 people and led to Maduro and Flores being detained and tried in New York on trumped-up charges related to drug trafficking and terrorism.
For the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in Chile, the moment felt like the first sign that the economic crisis that forced them to flee might finally begin to ease, raising hopes of eventual return.
But in Chile, a different political shift was already underway. The inauguration of far-right President José Antonio Kast on March 11 has left many Venezuelan migrants anxious about what lies ahead, as the country moves toward a more hardline approach to migration after years of strained and often inconsistent policies under Gabriel Boric. Their focus has now turned less to events in Caracas and more to an increasingly uncertain future in Chile.
Chile’s Shift To The Right
Kast’s campaign centered heavily on pledges to crack down on irregular immigration, a rhetoric that has unsettled many migrant communities across the country. “To the irregular immigrants in Chile,” Kast said during his campaign, “I tell you that 103 days remain for you to leave our country voluntarily.”
Since taking office, Kast has begun trying to turn that rhetoric into policy. In meetings with regional leaders, he has proposed creating a “humanitarian corridor” with countries including Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia for migrants living irregularly in Chile and elsewhere in the region to return to their countries of origin. He has also called on Venezuela’s government to open its borders and accept returning citizens.
According to Tomás Hirsch, a member of Chile’s Chamber of Deputies and president of the progressive Acción Humanista party, migrants have increasingly been used as scapegoats in political discourse. “They are blamed for everything from employment problems to insecurity,” he said.
Kast’s politics represent a shift in the narrative surrounding migration in Chile. Just a few years earlier, the country appeared to be moving in the opposite direction. In 2022, left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric came to power amid widespread protests calling for deep political reform and a new constitution to replace the one drafted during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Kast’s politics represent a shift in the narrative surrounding migration in Chile. Just a few years earlier, the country appeared to be moving in the opposite direction.
Boric’s government initially signaled a more humanitarian approach to migration, including a proposal passed in 2023 to regularize migrants who had arrived illegally. An estimated 100,000 individuals were successfully registered. But as political pressure intensified ahead of the 2025 election cycle, Boric pivoted toward stricter enforcement, advancing plans for tighter security along Chile’s northern border and stepping back from the regularization effort.
While campaign rhetoric does not always translate directly into policy, in Chile it is now being followed by concrete action. Less than a week after taking office, Kast moved to tighten border controls, initiating construction of a border barrier along parts of the northern frontier near Colchane in the Tarapacá region, a key crossing point for migrants entering from Bolivia.
Although only a small section has been completed, Kast has framed the project as a turning point, telling reporters at the site near the border town of Arica: “For all of Chile, this is a milestone.”
The approach echoes the hardline policies of Kast’s close ally, Donald Trump. Kast has proposed building a physical barrier along Chile’s northern border and expanding deportations of irregular migrants, mirroring Trump’s focus on a border wall and mass removals along the U.S.-Mexico frontier.
For Venezuelans in Chile, many of whom entered through northern crossings such as Colchane, the speed with which these measures have been introduced has reinforced the sense that the environment is becoming more hostile.
Stigmatizing Migrants
“In recent years, there has been a process of stigmatising migrants, even criminalising them, blaming them for everything from employment problems to insecurity,” said Hirsch.
“Migrants have essentially been used as a scapegoat for the underlying issues that truly trouble the Chilean people, such as housing and the rising cost of living.” According to Hirsch, the political rhetoric pushed by Kast and his party bears little resemblance to reality, as the vast majority of migrants are not criminals but hard-working people who play an important role in the Chilean economy.
One such person is Kelvin Quintero, a 29-year-old from Valencia, Venezuela. Standing behind a food stall made from a shopping trolley, a gas tank, and a grill, Kelvin moves quickly between the sizzling meat and a stack of bread rolls, preparing hot dogs and hamburgers for a steady flow of customers near the Estación Central commune.
“We just want to work, look after our families, and build a stable life. We aren’t here to hurt anyone,” he said.
Tall and broad-shouldered, with tattooed arms and a disarming smile, he says his journey to Chile began in 2019 when hyperinflation consumed Venezuela’s economy.
Kelvin explains that by that time, the economic crisis in Venezuela had become impossible for his family to endure. As inflation spiralled and basic goods disappeared from store shelves, they decided they had no choice but to leave in search of work and stability abroad.
He pointed to one of his tattoos: an Indigenous woman with red face paint, her wolf’s head covering his forearm. He explained that this caused him plenty of problems back home. Having a tattoo and being young, he explained, was often enough to attract police attention. “They arrest you, accusing you of being a gang member, and if you can’t pay the bribe, often as much as $500, which for many people is several months’ wages, you can end up spending years in jail,” he said.
As inflation spiralled and the threat of being imprisoned for failing to pay the police’s bribes grew, Kelvin and his family sold all of their things and began their journey. First, they moved to Colombia, where he spent several years struggling to find stable work. Eventually, he decided to continue south while his family returned to Venezuela, travelling through Peru before reaching the northern Chilean border near the coastal city of Arica.
Surviving as a Migrant in Chile
Kelvin said he arrived in Chile with little more than the clothes he was wearing and the equivalent of about $15 in Chilean pesos. With nowhere to stay, he bought a small beach tent and spent several months living on the beach near Arica, using public beach showers to wash.
To survive, he began buying large boxes of chocolates and selling them individually on the street. “One for 500 Chilean pesos ($0.5), or three for 1,000 pesos ($1),” he said. At first, he struggled to sell much at all. But after saving enough money to buy some clean clothes, he noticed something had changed.
“When I started to look more presentable, more like a respectable member of society, people trusted me more,” he said. “They saw me as someone who was working, not as someone who had been sleeping in a tent on the beach for months.”
Eventually, Kelvin sold enough chocolates to pay for a journey south to Santiago, where he initially worked as a fast-food delivery driver using a motorbike he managed to buy with his savings. However, a few months later, he was stopped by police, who confiscated his motorbike due to irregularities with the papers.
When asked if he could recover it, he shook his head. The motorbike, he explained, is “history now.” Instead, he now works at a food stand with his friend and fellow Venezuelan, Josmar.
Bureaucratic Obstacles
Shortly after arriving in Santiago, Kelvin began a legal process known as an ‘autodenuncia’ — a voluntary declaration of illegal entry into the country. Since then, he has tried to meet every bureaucratic requirement to obtain some form of status that would allow him to work legally, but after years of waiting and completing paperwork, progress has been almost nonexistent.
Even under Gabriel Boric, whose government carried out a 2023 biometric registration that recorded more than 100,000 undocumented migrants as a step toward possible regularization, many remained in a precarious legal position, facing long delays and uncertain outcomes. While the broader political rhetoric at the time was less openly hostile, the underlying administrative challenges left migrants like Kelvin in prolonged limbo.
Even under Gabriel Boric, whose government carried out a 2023 biometric registration that recorded more than 100,000 undocumented migrants as a step toward possible regularization, many remained in a precarious legal position, facing long delays and uncertain outcomes.
“One of the main challenges migrants face is the difficulty of regularizing their migration status. This directly affects their access to formal employment, housing, and social protection,” said José Tomás Silva, Head of Resource Management at Caritas Chile, a Catholic charity that provides support to migrants across the country.
Kelvin explained that despite having no access to legal employment, he manages to get by on sales from the stand. But without a clear path to legal regularization, he cannot build a stable future for his family.
“Beyond the legal issues, I’m also often confronted with xenophobia. It feels like many people hate us just for where we come from and our accents. They think we are all criminals, but we aren’t here to hurt anyone. We just want to live in peace,” Kelvin said.
For María Emilia Tijoux, a professor at the School of Sociology at the University of Chile, xenophobia has been growing for some time. “The climate toward migrants in Chile has been hostile for a long time, and in recent years it has intensified, making life increasingly difficult for migrant communities,” she said.
Tijoux has closely followed and supported efforts by civil society organisations to push for stronger anti-racism legislation since 2017, following the death of Joane Florvil, a Haitian migrant who died in police custody after what many activists described as a case of racial discrimination and state abuse.
Despite the controversy surrounding Florvil’s death, proposals for stronger anti-racism laws have so far failed to advance, stalled by a lack of political consensus in Congress. In 2024, Chile’s lower house rejected a bill that sought to strengthen the country’s main anti-discrimination law, the 2012 Ley Zamudio, sending it to a mixed commission after a tense congressional vote. The law, which forms the basis of Chile’s anti-discrimination framework, has long been criticized as limited in scope, and efforts to expand its reach have faced resistance in Congress
“With the arrival of Kast, migration policies are likely to become even harsher, and migrant communities are already very worried about the treatment they may receive,” Tijoux said.
As the number of orders piles up, Kelvin has to get back to work. He slaps half a dozen slabs of burger meat on the sizzling grill and says, “Maduro’s gone, but I’ve come too far to go back. For now, regardless of the political situation in Chile, I must stay and try to provide for my family.”
For Others, the Journey Ends Back in Venezuela
Isaac Medina, a 22-year-old Venezuelan wearing a black cap and stylish glasses, recalled his childhood in Caracas during the country’s economic collapse, a crisis exacerbated by widespread U.S. sanctions. “There was no food on the shelves. People were starving,” he said.
He left Caracas for Santiago at the age of 14 with his father and siblings and has not seen his mother since. To him, Maduro’s fall could only be a good thing, even if he suspects the motivations behind the operation were not driven by concern for ordinary Venezuelans. “We all celebrated when Maduro fell,” he said. “It gave us hope. Maybe things will slowly start to improve, even if we don’t know how long that will take.”
Despite arriving legally in Chile more than eight years ago, a series of administrative mistakes meant he was never able to regularize his status. However, due to the lack of clarity around the regularization process, Isaac has decided to return to Venezuela. Advisers at Fundación Scalabrini, the organisation helping him navigate the process, told him the best option was to pay a $294 fine for overstaying his visa, after which he would be given 10 days to leave the country.
Isaac admits that returning to Venezuela will not be easy, and he is not certain it will be a long-term solution. But after nearly eight years away, there is one thing he is certain about: he will finally be reunited with his mother.
“Things are still bad in Venezuela,” he said. “But now Maduro is gone, I’m less afraid to go back. I’ll get my passport renewed and then maybe try somewhere else. Maybe Argentina.”
Different Paths, Same Uncertainty
In the coming days, Isaac will pay the fine, gather his belongings, and board a flight home, returning to a country he left as a teenager and to a mother he has not seen in nearly a decade. He faces a multitude of challenges, but he remains optimistic that a brighter one may lie ahead.
On the other hand, Kelvin’s future remains tied to a country where, despite working long hours every day, he remains in legal and economic limbo. Behind the grill at his food stall near Estación Central, he says he hopes to return home one day. But even though he expects xenophobic rhetoric to grow more prominent under the Kast government, leaving now would mean abandoning years of sacrifice and the fragile stability he has managed to build.
For Venezuelans across Chile, Maduro’s fall briefly offered hope that the crisis that forced millions to leave their country might finally begin to ease. Yet as the country moves into a new political era under Kast, that moment of optimism has given way to a familiar reality: lives shaped by uncertainty and futures constrained by immigration laws that offer no clear path to regularization.
Peter Barker is a freelance journalist based in Barcelona, Spain, covering immigration, politics, culture, and travel. His reporting has taken him across the world, from Kyrgyzstan to Tunisia and Latin America.