LIMA, PERU — Less than a week after taking office, Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori has begun making good on one of her signature campaign promises: expelling undocumented Venezuelan migrants, starting with those convicted of crimes.
The Campaign Promise
During the presidential debates ahead of Peru’s April election, Fujimori pledged that if elected, her government would “immediately” expel undocumented immigrants who commit crimes, framing the policy as central to combating Peru’s worst security crisis in decades.
The target population was clear from the outset: Venezuelans make up Peru’s largest foreign community, roughly 1.6 million people, of whom about 14% — some 224,000 — lack authorized residency status.
In an April interview with AFP, Fujimori laid out her position directly: “We will expel undocumented citizens, and we hope that... a humanitarian corridor can be established so that those who... were forced to leave their country can return.”
Fujimori proposed backing the expulsions with joint military-police task forces, sweep operations (“rastrillajes”) in high-crime areas, and using the Armed Forces to help with migratory control given Peru’s shortage of dedicated immigration personnel.
The Policy in Action
Fujimori’s government moved quickly. On Sunday, August 3, Peru expelled its first three Venezuelan nationals since her July 28 inauguration: Edinson Agustín Barrera (“Catire”), Rodismel José Alcántara Brito (“Rody”), and Rafael Zorrilla Velásquez ([Rafa”), all identified by authorities as members of the transnational criminal organization Tren de Aragua.
The three had completed eight-year prison sentences in Peru before being placed under police escort aboard a Peruvian Air Force Spartan C-27 aircraft and flown directly from Callao to Caracas.
Interior Minister César Astudillo confirmed more expulsions are already in the pipeline: “We have more of these undesirables to deport from the country... obviously that depends on migratory processing that will be ready in the coming hours to continue this long-awaited process of expelling criminals.”
The same aircraft that carried the deportees to Caracas returned to Peru carrying ten Peruvian nationals affected by Venezuela’s devastating June 24 earthquakes — a detail Fujimori highlighted personally, greeting the repatriated families at the air base alongside her foreign and defense ministers before continuing her travel schedule.
Aligned With a Broader Regional Pattern: Chile’s Kast
Fujimori’s approach closely mirrors, and in some ways has already outpaced, a nearly identical policy pursued by Chile’s President José Antonio Kast, who took office earlier this year on a similar hardline platform.
Kast has repeatedly invoked the same specific concept Fujimori raised — a “humanitarian corridor” for returning undocumented Venezuelans — using it as shorthand for a broader campaign promise to expel migrants who entered Chile irregularly.
Speaking in Buenos Aires in April after meeting Argentina’s Javier Milei, Kast said the corridor’s prospects had “opened up considerably” following Maduro’s removal, and expressed hope that direct flights to Venezuela would eventually resume to ease the process, telling reporters: “We hope that flights [to Venezuela] can be reestablished at some point, and with that avoid, in part, the need for an overland humanitarian corridor.”
That qualifier — “in part” — reflects a real obstacle Chile has faced that Peru has not: Chile does not maintain consular relations with Venezuela, making direct deportation flights currently impossible and forcing Kast’s government to consider a complex overland alternative routed through Peru, Ecuador, or Colombia instead.
Peru’s own then-Foreign Minister, Hugo de Zela, publicly rejected the idea of routing that land corridor through Peruvian territory in March, telling reporters plainly that “Peru does not have the capacity to receive more migrants” and calling Kast’s proposal “a titanic task, very difficult to accomplish.”
Chile has since begun its own expulsion flights regardless, deporting groups of migrants with criminal records to Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, while continuing to explore land-based alternatives, including a possible route through Lima to Cúcuta, on Colombia’s border with Venezuela, at a reported pace of roughly 120 planned monthly expulsions.
A Shared Regional Alignment
Fujimori’s policy — and its explicit echo of Kast’s own “humanitarian corridor” language — reflects a broader convergence among the region’s newly elected right-leaning governments, several of which took office this year promising both closer alignment with Washington and a harder line on irregular Venezuelan migration specifically.
Fujimori has been explicit about seeking to consolidate this alignment: during her inauguration, she noted meeting with the leaders of Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, Honduras, and Ecuador, alongside Colombia’s vice president, Spain’s king, and Aruba’s prime minister, remarking afterward that “our country has once again been at the center of Latin American news.”
What Remains Unresolved
Unlike Chile, Peru appears to have working diplomatic channels with acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez’s government sufficient to carry out direct deportation flights already — a meaningful operational advantage over Kast’s stalled corridor plan.
Notably, Venezuela’s government had not issued any public statement responding to Peru’s first expulsions as of this writing. Whether Fujimori’s government intends to expand the policy beyond migrants with existing criminal convictions to a broader undocumented population, and whether Kast’s own corridor ever becomes operational given Peru’s earlier objections, remain open questions likely to keep shaping the region’s migration debate in the months ahead.
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