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El Ciudadano

Original article: Niños haitianos: Alarma real, gestión cuestionable

By Esteban Tumba Martínez, President of Fenaminsa

Few issues mobilize the collective consciousness as powerfully as the potential danger faced by children. Therefore, when the National Director of the Migration Service (Sermig) filed a criminal complaint with the Metropolitan North Regional Prosecutor’s Office regarding possible child trafficking linked to charter flights from Haiti between January and October 2025, the immediate effect was widespread alarm, a state mobilization, and headlines across all media.

The question no one wanted to voice was: Are we dealing with organized crime or simply a bureaucratic disorder amplified?

The facts, reconstructed calmly, suggest an uncomfortable answer. It all began on April 15, when the General Comptroller’s Office submitted a reserved pre-report to Sermig, alerting them to weaknesses in coordination between the service, the PDI, and the Undersecretary for Childhood, a lack of formal protocols for critical situations involving minors, and issues with database management.

However, the report did not observe any illegality in the issuance of family reunification permits. A crucial nuance.

One of the findings that generated significant noise was that during field visits, several children were not found at the registered addresses. For those unfamiliar with how the Chilean migration system operates, that sounds tragic. For those who do know, it is almost a regularity: immigrants frequently change addresses during their first years in the country and rarely inform authorities, as the regulations requiring them to do so lack real enforcement mechanisms.

This does not mean the children are lost; it means the state does not know where they are. That distinction is significant.

Two Months of Silence and a Complaint That Shook Everything

What is difficult to explain is what occurred —or did not occur— between April 15 and the date of the complaint. During those two months, what did Sermig do to locate the missing minors? Were they in contact with the Haitian community, which has organized networks in Chile? Did they coordinate with the PDI, the Ministry of Social Development, or the Undersecretary for Childhood?

The answers to these questions matter because they determine whether the criminal complaint was the last resort of an exhausted management or the first step of a management that prioritized public impact over silent resolution.

The Haitian Community in Chile and the National Network of Migrant and Pro-Migrant Organizations have stated that no one asked them. They have no records of missing minors within their community. They view the leak of the reserved pre-report from the Comptroller’s Office —which sparked the public crisis— as a political maneuver. This is a serious accusation that deserves to be investigated with the same seriousness as child trafficking.

The Government Caught Between Two Fires

On June 18, the government responded to the pressure by convening high-level meetings and announcing a task force led by the Minister of Social Development, María Jesús Wulf, to determine the whereabouts of 64 children.

The following day, Defense Minister Fernando Barros sought to defuse the narrative of organized crime, ruling out the existence of missing children or victims of trafficking, child prostitution, or organ sale, instead attributing it to administrative disorder. He also described the leak of the reserved pre-report from the Comptroller’s Office as “very lamentable.”

The contradiction between the statements of the Defense Minister and the line followed by the Director of Sermig is so evident that it cannot be ignored. Either the government failed to coordinate its message —which would be a grave political failure— or someone is acting outside the institutional script. Both scenarios are troubling.

What Must Not Be Lost in the Noise

As new updates emerge —some of the children have shown up in recent hours— the situation increasingly resembles a deficient registration system rather than a criminal network. This is no small relief: it signifies the difference between a police problem and a public policy issue. However, it should not serve as an excuse to refrain from investigating every last case. Management must continue until the situation of each Haitian minor is clarified.

It is true that Sermig, in light of the implosion of the Haitian state and the crisis at the Chilean consulate in that country, relaxed requirements for processing family reunification visas. It is also true that this relaxation should have been accompanied by stricter controls within national territory that were not implemented. These are real failures that must be corrected. But loosening procedures in a humanitarian emergency is not human trafficking, and an outdated registry is not a criminal network.

Chile has an outstanding debt regarding its migration policy: clear protocols, reliable databases, real coordination between services, and active state presence in migrant communities. These are the reforms that this episode should push onto the agenda.

What must not be allowed is for media urgency to distort the diagnosis, for vulnerable communities to be criminalized without evidence, or for an administrative crisis to transform into a criminal case for reasons unrelated to justice.

If, at the end of the process, it turns out there was no child trafficking, lingering questions will remain: Who leaked the reserved pre-report? For what purpose? And who will assume responsibility for putting the country on high alert over a crisis that was primarily one of management?

Esteban Tumba Martínez

La entrada Concerns Over Haitian Children: Genuine Alarm, Questionable Management se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.