ANTOFAGASTA – Chile’s “campamentos” are a national tragedy, and their numbers have only increased in recent years. The government promises that it is working on a solution to close the camps and find homes for their inhabitants. Something that proves difficult, as these campamentos are in direct relation with the influx of migrants.
Like any advanced country in Europe or North America, Chile receives thousands of refugees every year, whether legally through migration visas and asylum applications or illegally through open border crossings.
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 5,628 refugees applied for asylum in 2017. Most of those applicants are from Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela, and need housing and services to start their lives in Chile, which makes it hard for them and for the government to bear.
Due to the relatively high price for housing in Chile, immigrants coming to the country often go directly to camps or “campamentos”, which, in most cases, lack the minimum necessary infrastructure. Often, the camps are built in the hills or otherwise far away from city centers and built of tin plates, wood, or fragile stones.
It is also often the case that a dozen or more immigrants live in a single house, suffering miserable conditions, especially in winter, when the camps are vulnerable to the weather and even risk being swept away.
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Why their numbers are increasing
In December 2018, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (Minvu) stated that seven years ago there were 657 campamentos, inhabited by 27,378 families, while currently 46,423 families live in 822 campamentos.
While presenting the results of the Catastro Nacional de Campamentos (National Campamentos Cadastre) of 2018, housing minister Cristián Monckeberg said the camps are a tremendous tragedy that thousands of families live throughout Chile.
“The main reasons are scarcity of land, which generates an increase in price, and the higher value of leases,” the Minister added.
Other reasons are that immigrants lack necessary papers to rent or buy a house, or that they simply accept living in camps because their lives are still better than what they left behind in their home countries.
Talking with radio broadcaster Cooperativa, Gonzalo Rodríguez, the social director of Techo-Chile, an organization that builds homes, explained why the numbers usually don’t work for refugees: “85 percent of the families that today live in camps came to live in this situation because they could not pay the rent, and those same families, before living in camps, were paying around CLP$ 178,000, on average, to lease, when the minimum wage in Chile is, more or less, the same figure.”
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Highest numbers in the north
A presentation by the housing ministry shows that most camps are in the north. Regions with the highest increase since 2011 are Antofagasta (50 more camps), Atacama (45) and Tarapacá (36).
The number of families living in camps in Antofagasta increased by 544% (6,831 families, equivalent to 15.9% of the total in the country); Tarapacá experienced a 240% increase (3,935 families, equivalent to 9.2% of the total); and, in Atacama, was a 201% increase (3,365 families, equivalent to 7.8% of the country).
Techo-Chile also said that 89.2% of those living in camps in the Antofagasta Region are foreigners and 10.8% are Chilean. Among the foreigners, Colombians make up 52.7%.
“Antofolombia” and Colombian migration
Solutions?
The housing ministry has said “there are a series of measures that we are going to adopt. The cadastre will help us so that we can make good decisions. We have to work on this information to find solutions. We are working with the private sector, with civil society and with NGOs on this issue and that is where good ideas come from.”
Minvu highlighted that 73 of the 822 camps are in the process of being closed, a number that exceeds by five the goal of 68 originally proposed by the government. In addition, 21 of the 73 were closed already in 2018 in Biobío Region.
Monckeberg said that the first 12 months of evaluation is what led to the closing of these 73 camps, and that it is helping the government decide how best to get all of the camps’ 46,000-plus families into more stable homes: “Today we are in the final stage, which is related to making a characterization, research, and conversation with families, to know the needs of these 46,000 families: What do they need, what is their housing solution, why are they there?”
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Mohammad Arafat, 26, is a graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza, where he studied English. He aspires to become “a voice for people, expressing their hopes and pains, helping them pursue their dreams in the face of adversity and demonstrating that every life matters.” A freelance writer, Mohammad already has self-published his own book, “Still Living There,” which he disseminates through Amazon.