Chile Elections: Foreign Minister Calls on Expats to Vote

Chilean Minister of Foreign Affairs Heraldo Muñoz has encouraged all expatriate Chileans to participate in the upcoming November presidential elections.

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During a visit to Buenos Aires, the foreign minister noted that recent statistics from the Electoral Service, or Servel, show that approximately 39,137 Chileans are eligible to vote from their residencies in 70 countries around the world.

However, only about 6,500 Chileans from 55 countries participated in the July primaries, with Argentina taking the lead with 1,178 registered voters making the effort. The minister said he challenged Chileans around the world to participate and surpass these preliminary figures.

"An important part of those 39,000 Chileans are in Argentina and what we hope is that they vote because that is going to give an impulse to this right," Muñoz said, according to Cooperativa.

While in Argentina, Muñoz also successfully sealed the deal on one of the largest trade agreements between the two nations since 1996, which has been in development over the last few months.

"This agreement modernizes our bilateral relationship and our economic exchange," Argentinian Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie said in a statement Thursday.

According to Publimetro, bilateral trade between Argentina and Chile rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for both countries.