Migrants fleeing Chile ahead of election stranded at Peru border: officials

Dozens of migrants trying to leave Chile for fear of being expelled by far-right presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast after December 14 elections are stranded at the border with Peru, authorities reported Friday.

A video posted by the governor of the border region of Arica, some 2,200 kilometers (1,370 miles) north of Santiago, showed dozens of people attempting to exit from Chile at the Chacalluta-Santa Rosa border crossing. 

A Venezuelan migrant told the online news outlet The Clinic that the group was trying to leave Chile "for fear that they remove us by force" if Kast becomes the next president.

"They don't want to let us into Peru," the migrant, who preferred to remain anonymous, said. 

The Peruvian station Radio Tacna broadcast images of migrants carrying children on the highway near the border crossing. 

"There has been a concentration of migrants, who want to leave the country and have had difficulties entering Peru," Chilean Security Minister Luis Cordero told reporters, without specifying a number. 

Peru is both a source of, and country of transit for, migrants fleeing poverty or violence in other parts of Latin America to Chile, one of the region's most prosperous and stable nations. 

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The reverse migration trend comes just over two weeks before the presidential run-off, pitting Kast against left-wing candidate Jeannette Jara.

But the migrants looked to be trapped between a rock and a hard place. On Friday, Peru's interim president wrote on X that he planned to declare a state of emergency on the border with Chile to prevent an influx.

Kast, a 59-year-old ultraconservative ex-MP on his third run for president, has given the country's around 330,000 undocumented migrants an ultimatum to sell up and self-deport or be thrown out and lose everything if he takes office.

He blames illegal migration for a surge in violent crime over the past decade.

"To undocumented immigrants in Chile, I say you have 103 days left to leave our country voluntarily," Kast said in a video posted on Friday on his social media. 

He was referring to March 11, the date when the successor of outgoing center-left President Gabriel Boric, is sworn in.

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