Comptroller’s Office authorized military deployment at borders to collaborate in control of illegal migration
The document was published amid the mass influx of people through unauthorized crossings in the north of the country.
Militares
This Thursday, the supreme decree that authorizes the collaboration and delegation of the Ministry of National Defense, giving them the power to control smuggling of migrants through the Armed Forces and the military deployment in the country’s border, was published in the Diario Oficial (Official Gazette).
The document indicates that officials are allowed to act in situations related to immigration through unauthorized crossing borders, as well as in activities that are linked to drug trafficking and transnational organized crime.
“This Office of the Comptroller General has implemented the document of the sum, by means of which the Decree No. 265, of 2019, of that Cabinet Ministry, is modified, which authorizes collaboration and delegates to the Defense Minister the powers in matters of, including the activities indicated therein, smuggling of migrants, insofar as it conforms to the law,” says the report.
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“However, it complies with the fact that the aforementioned decree No. 265, of 2019, authorized the collaboration of the Armed Forces with the competent civil and police authorities to act in relation to activities that are linked to drug trafficking and transnational organized crime, in the context of the authority that the Constitution and the law confer to them, so that those are developed exclusively in border areas of national territory, which has been omitted to specify in statement 6 of the document under study”, they added.
Finally, the document signed by the comptroller general, Jorge Bermúdez, states that «with the aforementioned scope, the administrative actor of the item has been acknowledged.”
The publishing of the decree occurred after the arrival of thousands of immigrants, who are condensed in Colchane, in the Tarapacá region, and want to enter the country through unauthorized crossing borders. The Government even confirmed the death of two people who were trying to get to Chile last Wednesday.
Regarding the situation, the Undersecretary of the Armed Forces, Alfonso Vargas, explained that “What is being done is that they (immigrants) report themselves in Colchane, then move to Iquique and we try to find the way most of them (could) return by plane in order to deport them. If they enter the country illegally, that doesn’t mean they can stay in Chile.”
*Traducción de Karina Sepúlveda
