SANTIAGO (Reuters)

A Haitian woman who moved to South America nearly a decade ago was finally reunited with her daughter through a local visa program that highlighted both the escalating conflict in the Caribbean and sharpening tensions over migration as Chile’s presidential election season ramps up.

Christa Belus, 38, a local government worker in Chile, reluctantly left her 3-year-old daughter Lowanda behind with family in Haiti as deadly armed gangs, facing little international response, made life for many increasingly untenable in her home country.

“I didn’t want to come (to Chile) because I didn’t want to leave my baby because she was too little,” Belus told Reuters of leaving her family in Port-au-Prince in 2016. “But my dad told me you have to go because you have to have a better life.”

Lowanda arrived in Chile earlier this year via the country’s family reunification visa program that launched in late 2022. Now aged 13, she is learning Spanish on YouTube and, aside from reuniting with her mother, has met her mother’s new partner and their five-year-old son.

Some 15,000 Haitians have entered Chile via family reunification visas since the program began, including 3,000 so far this year. They are contingent on the person requesting reunification having definitive residency, a stable job, no criminal record and contributing to local taxes.

“In Haiti there is no security,” Belus said. “Over there they are killing people, they kidnap people, they kill children, they rape little girls.”

Though Haitians represent a small fraction of Chile’s 1.6 million-strong migrant population, they have become a political flashpoint ahead of November general elections, with some politicians seeking to limit entries with higher financial thresholds for migrants seeking to reunite with loved ones.

Images of Haitians arriving last month on charter flights – commercial flights from the capital have been cut off due to the gang shootings – spread on social media and morning news shows, sparking fears of mass migration that led Congress to question the government program.

Recent polls show that immigration and crime are the top concerns among voters.

Evelyn Matthei, an experienced right-wing politician who has been leading early polls, has proposed building prisons in the desert to fight crime and illegal immigration.

Michel-Ange Joseph, a Haitian migrant community leader in Santiago, has called out an “anti-Haitian campaign” circulating not only in Chile but also in the Dominican Republic, which neighbours Haiti, and in the United States.

Both nations have been deporting Haitians in spite of repeated U.N. pleas not to due to the humanitarian conditions in Haiti. The issue of Haitian migrants became a flashpoint in both countries’ election campaigns last year.

The Dominican Republic launched a mass deportation program late last year, aiming at some 10,000 per week, while the current U.S. administration has cut short some 520,000 Biden-era temporary permits for Haitians living in the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump had during his campaign pledged mass deportations and repeated false claims that Haitian migrants were eating household pets.

Restrictive migration reforms in Chile in 2021 made it harder for Haitians to obtain residency permits, causing many with Chile-born children to migrate again toward North America.

Belus’ seven siblings have all left Haiti, most of them for the United States.