Santiago de Chile, Jul 31 (EFE).- Venezuelan citizens in Chile are in anguish, worried and angry since the embassy closed on Monday and all bureaucratic procedures were indefinitely suspended.
Some anxiety was alleviated on Wednesday after the Chilean government announced that it will allow Venezuelan citizens with expired passports to leave the country.
“I came to do some paperwork, but unfortunately the paperwork is not leaving the embassy, because they are only going to deliver the papers that already have an apostille or a passport to pick up. I had an appointment for this, for Monday and for today, but they are not going to carry out any kind of paperwork,” Catherin Suárez, a 35-year-old Venezuelan who has been living in Chile for a year and a half, told EFE.
At the doors of the Embassy, Suárez shared the sadness and helplessness she feels about the situation in her country, although she is convinced that “they will be saved with God’s help, but we must continue the fight.”
The diplomatic mission announced in a statement that these procedures have been suspended, which means that “passport appointments, AFP appointments, passport withdrawal appointments, visa appointments and travel document appointments will not be processed.”
Equally worried, José Arias (53 years old from Venezuela), who has been living in the southern country for six years, explained that he had two appointments, one on Monday and another today, to try to fly out of the country.
“I am really worried about our fate here. I think that both I and my compatriots who are abroad will basically be condemned to a kind of prison without documents,” he lamented.
Chilean Pierre Álvarez (36 years old) also came to the diplomatic headquarters to support the Venezuelans, and in particular, his wife, of this nationality, who left for paperwork to her country of origin and “cannot travel (back) to Chile.”
“There are many Chileans who may be against it [de los venezolanos] for different reasons, crime more than anything, which is obvious that no country wants this, but also to tell them that there are more Chileans or Venezuelans who come here to contribute to the country and who work their asses off,” Álvarez told EFE.
Along the same lines, Linda Fernández, 41, who has lived in Chile for seven years, described Maduro’s government as a “narco-government, narco-regime, dictator and murderer,” and urged Venezuelans to unite against him.
“We have to organize ourselves and see how we send resources to protect the people. They are killing the Venezuelan people,” he stressed without providing evidence.
The close results of the general elections held last Sunday in Venezuela have sparked controversy following accusations by the opposition of alleged fraud.
Several states in the region, including Chile, have demanded transparency in the vote count and questioned the results given on Sunday night by the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE), which declared Nicolás Maduro the winner, with 51.2% of the votes and 80% of the minutes counted.
His main opponent, former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, reportedly obtained 44.2% of the votes, according to the first and only public report from the CNE, which did not specify which candidates received the 2,394,268 votes that were not reported.
The opposition denounced irregularities in the counting and demanded the publication of all the records, as did the vast majority of the region’s leaders, including the presidents of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and European states such as Spain.
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2024-08-01 05:08:33
