Chile’s Kast Courts Delcy Rodríguez to Normalize Venezuela Ties

The Kast Venezuela deportation push is driving Latin America’s most ideological right-wing government to open a pragmatic channel to the region’s most contested post-Maduro administration.

The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that Chile’s Kast Venezuela deportation effort has moved from rhetoric to operational diplomacy. El País correspondent Maolis Castro reported on Wednesday from Santiago that President José Antonio Kast is accelerating back-channel contacts with Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodríguez to restore a functioning consular corridor and clear the bottleneck that has left tens of thousands of irregular Venezuelan migrants in legal limbo.

The political contradiction is hard to overstate. Kast spent his 2025 campaign promising “mano dura” on crime and migration, and celebrated on X when the US captured Nicolás Maduro in January. He now needs Delcy Rodríguez’s cooperation to make his flagship deportation promise work.

The numbers behind the Kast Venezuela deportation push

Chile hosts roughly 669,000 Venezuelans, according to the UN-backed R4V platform, making it the fourth-largest Venezuelan diaspora country in Latin America after Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Of that population, around 300,000 are in irregular status, and Chile‘s Servicio Nacional de Migraciones counts approximately 44,000 people with active expulsion orders. Separate local press reports cite a higher figure of 75,000 pending expulsion orders, with half involving Venezuelan nationals.

The first deportation flight of the Kast administration left the Fuerza Aérea de Chile base in Santiago on April 16 carrying 40 migrants. The flight staged through La Paz, Guayaquil and Bogotá with 17 Bolivians, four Ecuadorians and 19 Colombians on board, and crucially, no Venezuelans — a direct function of the frozen consular relationship with Caracas.

Subsecretary of the Interior Máximo Pavez told reporters that routine expulsions continue daily on commercial flights in groups of two or three, with special air operations layered on top. “Expulsions are done, not announced,” he said, declining to share the schedule of upcoming flights on security grounds.

Why Santiago needs Caracas: the consular bottleneck

Chile and Venezuela broke diplomatic and consular relations in July 2024 after the disputed election that preceded Maduro’s detention. Without a working consular channel, Chilean authorities cannot issue or verify the Venezuelan travel documents that make a formal deportation legally possible. The current workaround — encouraging voluntary departures — has produced results but will not scale to Kast’s four-year target of expelling more than 300,000 irregular migrants.

Chilean government data show 2,180 irregular Venezuelans left voluntarily between Kast’s December 14 election victory and mid-April, plus 1,831 voluntary departures logged in the first quarter of 2026. Migration service director Frank Sauerbaum Muñoz confirmed the numbers at the airport press conference on April 16 and said Santiago considers a Delcy Rodríguez channel “priority” for resolving the Venezuelan cohort specifically.

The Kast government has also been digging anti-migrant trenches in the Atacama desert along the Peru and Bolivia borders, a physical-security investment meant to slow new irregular entries while the administrative and diplomatic plumbing is rebuilt. Neither measure moves the 300,000 already inside Chile.

What Delcy Rodríguez gets from the Kast Venezuela deportation opening

For the Rodríguez administration, a diplomatic thaw with a right-wing Chilean government carries a clear political value. More than 5,000 Venezuelans have already returned to the country during her first 100 days in office, many on US-coordinated repatriation flights. The Caracas government presents those returns through the Gran Misión Vuelta a la Patria programme as evidence of national reconciliation and sovereign control of the migration file.

A formal Chile corridor would add volume and regional legitimacy to that narrative. It would also give the Rodríguez government additional leverage in the parallel sanctions-relief negotiations with Brussels, where migration management has become one of the clearest deliverables European officials can point to when defending any relaxation of the Venezuela sanctions architecture.

For Kast, the political cost of engaging with a post-Maduro government he has publicly called illegitimate is real but contained by the volume of the migration pressure in Chilean domestic politics. Polling throughout his campaign showed irregular migration to be the single most important issue for Chilean voters, and Kast’s 14 December victory margin was substantially built on it.

The regional pattern: pragmatic right meets political migration

Kast is running what officials in Santiago openly describe as a Chilean version of the Trump deportation template. Chile’s director of migration confirmed that 300,000 expulsions in four years is the operational target, even though no Chilean administration has come close to that throughput in modern history. Under President Gabriel Boric’s 2022–2026 mandate, roughly 4,500 people with active expulsion orders were deported, and 2025 — the last full year — produced 1,117 formal expulsions.

Argentina’s Javier Milei has moved in a different direction, signing the Isaac Accords with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on April 19 and treating migration as a security rather than a consular issue. Peru and Ecuador, the two transit countries for Venezuelan flows into Chile, have tightened their own border regimes in parallel, reducing the available re-entry paths for anyone Chile expels.

The test for the Kast Venezuela deportation opening will come in the next two to three months. A quiet Chilean–Venezuelan consular channel that enables even a few hundred formal Venezuelan deportations per month would mark the first post-Maduro political deal between an openly right-wing Latin American government and the Rodríguez administration, and would reset expectations for the entire regional diplomacy of the Venezuelan diaspora.

Related coverage: Venezuela sanctions relief: Delcy courts Europe • Isaac Accords: Milei signs MoU with Netanyahu in Jerusalem • Chile–US mining and security agreements under Kast

More: Chile news in English, every day from The Rio Times.

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error