We took a the Santiago city center walking tour with Carlos in December 2024. I had previously taken one with another guide a few years ago, and I remember that I had thoroughly enjoyed it. However, Carlos focused extensively on questions of public safety and migration, which distracted from the actual information and history that the tour should have focused on. While most guides in Latin America will start with a brief disclaimer regarding public safety, it was quite overkill with Carlos, who stressed this point continuously throughout the tour. In addition, he also stressed that a lot of contemporary problems in Chile stemmed from recent migrants, particularly from Venezuela. While this may be true in part, he cited a lot of dubious data and failed to explain both sides of the argument. For example, he claimed that Chile's social services had become overwhelmed due to an increase in its population from 17 million to 21 million in the past decade. However, while he conveyed that this was entirely due to migration, in fact, half was due to natural increase and half was due to migrants. He also blamed many migrants for not integrating into Chilean society, but failed to mention the difficulties that many migrants face in Chile, which often denies migrants residency permits and working papers much more frequently than neighboring countries, such as Argentina and Brasil, which have faced far fewer problems integrating Venezuelan migrants into their societies. In the end, the tour lacked historical explanations, substance, and context related to what we were actually seeing, which were overshadowed by his constant warnings of how dangerous Santiago had become and about the negative impact of migrants on the country.
