–Get out of here you culiados Venezuelans!– someone yells from a car.

***

Jaidelín is the older of two siblings. She is Venezuelan, she is seven years old, she likes to wear pink and says that if God or "Santa" could give her one wish, she would choose a tablet like the one she had three weeks ago and that her parents, originally from Maracaibo, had to sell in Bolivia to be able to eat.

It wasn't the only thing they sold. They also got rid of their cell phones and other belongings in the hope of reaching Arica, a city where family and friends were waiting for them with the promise of a job.

Jaidelín only thinks about the rectangular and luminous artifact full of children's apps that she lost and that distanced her from the reality of the “trails”, as her compatriots call border crossings, trips that she has had to face together from a very young age to his parents and his two younger brothers, ages two and three.

“I want a tablet and nothing more,” repeats the girl who arrived in Iquique after passing through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, two weeks before the march on Saturday, September 25, which culminated in this northern city with the violent images of men wearing Chile shirts incinerating tents, diapers, cars and immigrant clothing in a bonfire.

Jaidelín saw those images on television, a box she likes less than her tablet. A box that since last Saturday began to terrify her as if it were a ghost or a monster under the bed. The monitor was hanging in the sanitary residence of the Hotel Playa where she and her family carried out their 14-day quarantine, according to the Chilean government's provision.

That Saturday was the last day they could sleep there, and the idea of ​​being forced to go out into the city of rage scared not only her, but her mother as well.

“I cried and everything. As I am pregnant, I got a depression to leave. I thought they could kill us," says his mother.

Without resources, Jaidelín and her family left for Iquique at 12:00 pm the following day, Sunday, September 26. Disoriented and without any resources or contacts, they walked aimlessly through the city.

Plaza Brasil, a place where several of his compatriots met until last week, had already been evicted by police officers and fenced off on the perimeter with a fence made of sticks and iron. A few blocks further south, Avenida Aeropuerto, where the protesters burned the belongings of their compatriots, was not an option for them either. They were terrified of thinking that a similar situation would happen again there.

By word of mouth with their compatriots, who since Friday have been roaming practically the entire city, they found out that many of them settled in the coastal rocks near Plaza Croata. There they spent the night in a tent, thanks to the good will of a woman who gave them the shelter.

When she woke up, Jaidelín played with other children from her country while the grown-ups organized themselves to get water or to light a small fire and cook some noodles. His father even started selling macramé bracelets to be able to pay for tickets to Arica.

At noon, Jaidelín saw an official from the Marine Police arrive, who reproached his parents and the almost fifty other Venezuelans who stayed there overnight -more than half of them children- for not taking down the tents during the day.

“Right now all the kids are awake. Help me a little with the environment of the coastal edge. I believe them at 7 in the morning, but it's already 12 noon. I am thinking about the order of the city,” the Navy official told them, concerned about the aesthetics of Cavancha beach, one of the great prides of Iquiqueños.

After the shouts of the uniformed officer, the girl's fears surfaced again. The Chileans scare her, thinking about the image of her bonfire even makes her rethink her cherished desire to recover her tablet. "I want to leave Chile, I think they can hurt me," says the girl.

Her parents explain that they don't like that she has that idea in her head, they say that they have tried to talk to her and that they still believe that in Chile they can find their destiny:

“It's hard to explain. There are people here who have also helped us, for this reason we tell them that not everyone is the same, that just as there are good people, there are also bad people”.

***

–Go to work!– they insult from another vehicle.

***

Unlike Jaidelín's parents, Germaris, a 16-year-old girl, says that Chile has nothing to do anymore. Despite her young age, she already owns her destiny and decisions.

Despite traveling with her mother, she feels free and empowered to decide what is best for both of them, also for her six-month-old baby and her 19-year-old partner. Germaris says that, with her 16 years in good shape, it is her turn to take charge.

Part of those responsibilities became evident just three days after the irregular anti-immigration march and four after the eviction from Plaza Brasil where he was taking refuge with his family.

She agreed with her family group, also made up of several younger siblings, to start the return trip through the Tamarugal desert with the final destination of Peru.

Living the experience of the eviction, where she affirms that a police officer pushed her, in addition to the incineration of belongings of some of her acquaintances the next day, made her understand that this is not a country for her or her daughter. She says that she is even willing to cross the infernal desert again to leave Iquique, the city where she has been for a month.

“We don't leave so much because they took us out of Plaza Brasil, I understand that this place doesn't belong to one. We're leaving because they were going to take us out like dogs. It seemed that they did not understand that we are people, that we have children. I had to run out with my daughter, I even fell with her in my arms when a police officer pushed me”, says Germaris, who does not have the look of a girl.

She says she wishes it wasn't like that, that she'd rather her worries were those of a teenager: thinking about her birthday party, what kind of eyeliner to paint her green eyes with, or what song to sing at some school festival, but he acknowledges that, in his context, those are just meaningless projections.

Leaving Venezuela, her unplanned maternity, poverty, the trails, discrimination, and the burned-out cars and tents, she says, took away her youth.

“I had to become an adult. I come from a neighborhood in Venezuela and there one has to know how to grow up. From the age of 12 I had to get ahead and fight, my school for me is the street and you can't be a girl on the street”, she says.

On Arturo Prat avenue in Iquique, where he has been sleeping since the eviction, he says that the life he leads today not only took away his childhood, but also his intimacy. "Here you have to bathe as you can, you relieve yourself in hiding, I can't even change my clothes in peace, I have to cover myself with a blanket."

Life for Germaris has become one of surviving, there is no longer room for instances of relaxation or abstraction. Or so he says until, in the midst of the tumult where he is, he walks with his daughter in his arms to the rocks where the Pacific bursts.

There, a couple of hours before returning to Colchane and beginning the trip to Peru, he sings a song that could well symbolize a hymn of his life, that of his daughter and that of the thousands of his compatriots who have left from Venezuela.

Between the rocks, with her fine voice, for a moment Germaris feels passion again. He returns, for a few minutes, to having faith:

I feel the Caribbean like a womanI am like this, what am I going to doI am desert, jungle, snow and volcanoAnd as I walk I leave my trailThe noise of the plain in a songThat keeps me awakeThe woman I want has to beHeart, fire and spurWith skin tanned like a flowerIn Venezuela

***

–They want all the eggs for free!– they shout from a car.

***

There are no certain figures regarding the total number of passages of undocumented children through Colchane, 237 kilometers from Iquique, since the start of the migrant crisis at the end of 2020. But yes some approximations can be made.

Yesterday in one of the many appearances in the press for the Santiago channels that arrived en masse in the Tarapacá region, the presidential delegate of Tamarugal, Natan Olivos, indicated that 11,786 immigrants who arrived through Colchane during 2021 carried out the process of the corresponding self-report to carry out their subsequent quarantine in a health residence.

According to information provided to The Clinic by the Judiciary of the Tarapacá Region, 3,520 of these self-reports correspond to minors. In other words, only among immigrants who self-reported their situation in the country, 3 out of 10 correspond to minors.

The information provided by the Judiciary adds that of the 3,520 children and adolescents accounted for; A total of 45 entered the country without any responsible adult, being referred to Sename residences.

Of those 45 children, 22 have already been reunited with their family groups in Chile. Another nine remain in Sename residences awaiting the search for their relatives abroad or in the country

The rest of them, 14, have evaded the residential systems, finding themselves with search warrants in force. In other words, 14 immigrant children arrived in Chile without anyone and the State does not know where they are.

Lieutenant Erick Marchant of the Colchane police sub-station is also making approximations of minors passing through Colchane. According to the uniformed officer, between 100 and 150 immigrant crossings take place daily in the border area. On this, Marchant estimates that:

“Of those 150, at least 50 children pass by. The groups of people are mostly made up of families and are obviously accompanied by minors. The situations in Colchane are very complex for minors; We have had quite a few children with health conditions, be it altitude sickness problems, we have even seen children with seizures.”

The complex situation with minors in the area has also uncovered cases of child trafficking networks. In August of this year, for example, a Haitian woman was arrested by the Alto Hospicio Britrap for trafficking a 7-year-old boy of the same nationality.

At the hearing to formalize the case, the prosecutor specializing in these crimes, Camila Albarracín, explained that the defendant promoted the child's illegal entry into the country, charging a sum of money from his mother who lives in Chile.

According to the Prosecutor's Office, it was the child's mother herself who denounced the facts, indicating that she had paid $950 to an alleged travel agency in Haiti to bring her son to Chile. The minor traveled for months with strangers, passing through the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Brazil and Bolivia.

The child was mistreated on the trip so badly that after being found he had to be hospitalized due to his poor health, which included a skin infection and severe malnutrition.

According to the Prosecutor's Office, only in 2021, 13 cases of children and adolescents, including Venezuelans, victims of human trafficking have been prosecuted.

***

–Chile is for Chileans!– another shout, from a truck.

***

Verónica Breton is a member of the Humaniza group, which periodically delivers food and shelter to immigrants in Iquique, giving priority to groups with the largest number of children.

The collaborations had been taking place prior to the demonstration on Saturday the 25th. However, with the media explosion that dragged on with the burning of belongings, the aid and collaborations multiplied.

“The aberration on Saturday prompted us to act with more force and organization. Our mission is to stop this hatred against our immigrant brothers from becoming stronger,” he says while distributing noodles with tomato sauce to the immigrants who slept in tents on the coastal rocks of Iquique.

The woman, who has seen thousands of immigrants in the city, acknowledges that as of Saturday she has noticed a particular fear of children towards Chileans.

“There is fear, not only because of what happened with the bonfire. We bought a box of cookies for an 18-year-old boy to sell at a traffic light, he was doing that when a car started yelling at him, they got out and between two men they hit him with combos and kicks. These attitudes of a few frighten children”, he says.

Nerson Carreño is the young man who claims to have been beaten. He is indeed 18 years old and although he is of legal age, he left Venezuela as a child. He says that since he was eight years old he has not lived with his parents. Today he sleeps alone with the groups of families that settled in the Iquiqueño coastal sector and that included him in the group.

He has been in Chile for a month and was one of those evicted from Plaza Brasil. "I was there for 20 days," he says.

Regarding the attack, he denounces that: “I was selling cookies and two men got out of a white car and started yelling at me, 'Get out of here, chuchatumadre. We don't want Venezuelans. They beat me, they kicked me hard.”

The beating has him pensive, he thinks about returning to Peru through the Colchane desert. The possibility of being one of those returned to Venezuela even crosses his mind, whether wearing white on a Chilean plane set up by the Piñera government or in another position by Maduro, who in the last few hours announced the reactivation of a massive return plan called “Vuelta a la Patria”:

“It is very hard to live here. I feel sorry for working so hard to get here and having to leave. But it was what I had to do,” he says.

In the same camp where Nerson sleeps, men and women wash their clothes as best they can with the water they get from the city's irrigation systems. "You can be poor, but not dirty", is the slogan that is repeated.

Despite the deficiencies, most of them worry about removing the stains from the pants and leaving the slippers or shoes neat. Men avoid being photographed, saying they are embarrassed by the unkempt strands of hair growing on their heads and patchy beards. Some say that if they had money, the first thing they would do would be to go to the hairdresser.

The one who doesn't care about his looks is Greike, a 7-year-old boy who is in awe of the Iquico beach and who spends most of the day practicing boobies in a pool.

“I like being in the water and feeling the cold. I had never swum in my life and I like it. I like Iquique because it has a sea and my parents are looking out for me and they tell me to stay on the shore”, says Greike.

His father Gabriel Oliveros and his mother Katherine de Souza decided to leave Venezuela when they realized that their salaries did not allow them to send snacks or pay for detergent to wash their shirts.

They settled in Ecuador for a while, but the economic instability made them think of Chile. His father's only desire is to make his boy's childhood last as long as possible.

“We did not leave Venezuela to be on the streets, this is temporary. We left there because we want the child to really feel like a child, to have his things, his toys, his breakfasts, his innocence, ”she says.

Greike's parents understand that this longing is very complex in the context in which they find themselves living, for the same reason they avoid talking to him about what happened on Saturday and whenever there is a point of conflict they try to keep it on the sidelines .

“My son did not experience what happened in that march and, thank God, no similar instance has happened. He has not seen violence or anything and when he sees situations that are not appropriate for a child, we and my wife grab him and hug him because he is very nervous, so we try to avoid problems so that he does not get scared, "says Gabriel .

Though Greike's parents seek to protect him, keeping him out of what happens to them as a family and his compatriots is a daunting task.

After two hours playing in the sea, his father takes him to remove the salt in one of the showers set up in Cavancha for bathers. On one side of the showers, two women wash their entire family's clothes in buckets and with soap. On the other, a group of surfers and riders removes the salt from the sea holding their boards.

Greike chooses to shower next to them. Too bad at 7 years old, like the surfers from Iquica, he is already a man of the sea.

***

–Now that TV is on, you become the victims, Venezuelans!– The insults continue.

***

Until September 24, Plaza Brasil was the main meeting point for Venezuelan immigrants. Today the square is surrounded by a fence and it is hard to believe that a gigantic camp was set up there.

The happiest with the fence is the owner of the only kiosk in the square. The man who sells drinks, coffee, single cigarettes and the newspaper, assures that he could not live there, that the wall of his premises was a pissing hole and that many times he had to deal with other needs near his premises.

Several of the residents of the sector arrive at the kiosk, they all comment on how good the bars seem to them, how unfair the press has been with Iquique, and that although they do not justify the burning of belongings, they do agree with measures "more extreme" such as lattice your plaza.

“What happens is that Venezuelans are human rights and Chileans are not human rights,” explains the tenant while attending to one of his neighbors, who assures that there were episodes of excessive violence and problematic drug use in the place .

“Nobody wants to live next to that,” says the man who also attended the anti-irregular immigration march, but who claims he did not participate in the burning of belongings and that they did it to no more than 20 protesters who, according to him , broke the peaceful spirit of the demonstration.

Further south of Plaza Brasil, at the intersection of Aeropuerto and Rozas streets, is the zero point of the bonfire. The mostly Venezuelan immigrant camp is guarded by a mobile police checkpoint, which seeks to avoid a new confrontation.

In that place, the press meets daily to deliver their dispatches to Santiago, which on Tuesday the 28th included a campaign event for presidential candidate Marco Enríquez-Ominami with the immigrants' tents as a backdrop.

Yenderlin Conteras is 17 years old and is in that camp. He left Venezuela three years ago. He first settled in Cali with his four siblings and his parents: they had a better life, until a situation forced the family to leave Colombia.

“They killed my dad. They robbed him when he was coming home from work,” says Yenderlin, who was forced to emigrate once more, now alone with her mother and her siblings.

“He was the breadwinner of the house,” says the young woman, who recounts her journey in charge of children ages 1, 7, 10 and 13.

While recounting the hundreds of kilometers they had to walk through the desert from Colchane to reach Iquique, a car passes from which a man yells at the camp:

–Go back to your country!

“They have been yelling things from the cars all day,” explains Yenderlin, who at 17 already carries the weight of having crossed a continent to get to Iquique, of seeing her brothers dehydrated and burned by the sun , to comfort his mother when she faltered and to carry the burden of his father's death.

“Those screams hurt a lot. More with what happened on Saturday. Now all I want is to go back and be safe at home with mom. We are not welcome here."