Chile Forum

just a little anecdote you may find amusing..or sad.

last night on my way home from work i was stopped at a police control point. they asked for all my paperwork, which i had. everything was fine except for the fact that my california driver's license and my chilean ID card are both expired. the carabinero started giving me a hard time about this minor technicality. i explained that i was in the process of getting my visa, which would allow me to get a chilean driver´s license.... i tried to explain the situation like this...

mr policeman, it´s like this....i need the car to get to work because public transport sucks so bad here. i need the job to get my visa, which i applied for 8 MONTHS AGO. we had a little earthquake that washed the post office into the ocean, so any mail for me from santiago was lost. then we had a change in government. i was informed in april that my application had received preliminary approval, but since then...not a word. i need my visa to get my carné renewed. i need a valid carné to get a driver´s license, and i need a driver´s license to drive the car legally. get it? i did everything i was supposed to...but...the wheels of government are so slow, my documents expired while waiting for other documents.....i'm trapped in a bureaucratic cycle. he consulted with his boss and he let me go with a warning.....

cali_chile48 wrote:

last night on my way home from work i was stopped at a police control point. they asked for all my paperwork, which i had. everything was fine except for the fact that my california driver's license and my chilean ID card are both expired. the carabinero started giving me a hard time about this minor technicality.

Minor?! hehe, in my opinion you got really lucky and you ran into the kindest 'paco' ever
I always thought that an expired ID would get you into trouble just anywhere...
In MA, a friend of mine almost got arrested and got like 3 tickets, she was driving with a Missouri driver but she had spent like 8 months in Boston

i need the job to get my visa, which i applied for 8 MONTHS AGO.

that sounds weird, I don't think you are supposed to have a job until you get a work permit (which I thought is the same as visa?). Did you seek professional advice for that?

i'm trapped in a bureaucratic cycle

.

Hope you can fix it ASAP.
R.

Well, think of it this way.

In the U.S., they would have put you down on your face, cuffed you, hit you with the tazer and pepper spray, then asked you for your ID and what you were doing there. After which they would have thrown you in the county jail for a month on suspicion of everything. Over 1 million dollars in legal fees later, they would have let you out with a felony conviction for looking at the steroid pumping police officer wrong and resisting arrest. By that time your car would have been auctioned off at the policeman's ball, so the local sheriff could buy some new toys, and thus you really would not need a driver's license because they would have deported you.

Yea, not sure but the carbinernos seem a bit more cranky recently. Perhaps they have orders from the new government to get serious. Either way, still find them far more pleasant to deal with than your average meter maid in the States.

cali_chile48 wrote:just a little anecdote you may find amusing..or sad.

last night on my way home from work i was stopped at a police control point. they asked for all my paperwork, which i had. everything was fine except for the fact that my california driver's license and my chilean ID card are both expired. the carabinero started giving me a hard time about this minor technicality. i explained that i was in the process of getting my visa, which would allow me to get a chilean driver´s license.... i tried to explain the situation like this...

mr policeman, it´s like this....i need the car to get to work because public transport sucks so bad here. i need the job to get my visa, which i applied for 8 MONTHS AGO. we had a little earthquake that washed the post office into the ocean, so any mail for me from santiago was lost. then we had a change in government. i was informed in april that my application had received preliminary approval, but since then...not a word. i need my visa to get my carné renewed. i need a valid carné to get a driver´s license, and i need a driver´s license to drive the car legally. get it? i did everything i was supposed to...but...the wheels of government are so slow, my documents expired while waiting for other documents.....i'm trapped in a bureaucratic cycle. he consulted with his boss and he let me go with a warning.....

This will not help you now but will serve as a warning to others, and a sub-warning that it might not always work. I think something similar appeared on another forum. Or perhaps that was in another country, and now the wench is dead (with apologies to Christopher Marlowe).

It has been suggested subsequent to the original posting that the following should be viewed for amusement only and not for advice:

Don't show your real licence if you can avoid it. Prepare ahead before you arrive by getting two or more "international driving permits" before you leave the US/Canada/other home country. Those permits are expendable and you can usually get several of them. If the paco needs to confiscate a licence, better a cheap permit than the last vestige of a real licence. The explanation is that the permit serves until you get the Chilean permiso de conducir.

I'll agree that the pacos are generally the most decent of the police to be found in all of Latin America. Would also agree that things seem tighter now. I got pinged recently for not having the revision técnica paper with me when I was stopped at a checkpoint in the VII region.

IDP is only valid with your unexpired license form the country that issued the IDP.

Real IDP's can only be issued by authorized and recognized vendors in the country of the license (for the USA, there are only 2).

IDP is good only for a year and cannot be renewed outside the country of your valid license.

There are many self-proclaimed experts using slang like "PT," "offshore," "privacy," "freedom," "sovereign individual," $$$elling false IDPs on the net. Trying to use one of these for official purposes constitutes fraud.

Better plan is to renew your license before you go so you have the max years before expiration and only show that to the paco, feign ignorance of castellano and hope they don't inquire to see your passport and non-existant tourist card if you have residency or are in tramite for residency.

you got really lucky and you ran into the kindest 'paco' ever

but that´s the weirdness of it...i have been stopped dozens of times in the past six months, and none of the carabineros ever said anything. we were under military curfew for several weeks. the army never said anything. then..out of the blue...this guy threatens to impound the car and such...

i agree with charles...i´d never get away with what i´m doing here in chile if i were in the US. that´s the flip side of the inefficiency...yes..it is slow and frustrating, but generally the police dont hassle me about small stuff like an expired license....which has nothing to do with my vehicle insurance, by the way. in the US, with an expired work visa AND no driver´s license...geez...i´d have been really screwed.

i expect to visit my family sometime in 2011...and i´ll be sure to renew my licenst there. i certainly hope to have these chilean issues resolved by then...but there´s only so much i can do...i filled out all the forms and paid the fees and now there´s nothing i can do but wait.

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:IDP is only valid with your unexpired license form the country that issued the IDP.

Real IDP's can only be issued by authorized and recognized vendors in the country of the license (for the USA, there are only 2).

IDP is good only for a year and cannot be renewed outside the country of your valid license.

This is why Chile is so challenging, and amusing, and why this situation is illustrative of the contradictory heart of Chile. Chile has tried to convince itself that it is the "el país más legalista y reglista de la región." But by international (e.g., Western) standards this is hard to believe, if not laughable. There are the real rules and then a country full of people (including officials) who don't know the rules, or who know the rules and elect to behave contrary to the rules, or who don't know the rules but act as though they did. It's often a sort of theatrical anarchy. One cannot understand and effectively operate within Chilean culture without an appreciation for the chamullo.

As you well know, being "right" in Chile doesn't necessarily mean that an attending clerk will agree with your interpretation of what is specified by unambiguous regulation. This forum has frequently acknowledged the concept of "Tuesday's rules" wherein no two officials seem to agree on the correct treatment for routine transactions. Go to one bank branch with a stack of papers and you are denied everything, while at another branch of the same bank and the same paper you get an account and a credit card. Welcome to Chile.

As a result, when faced with an incompetent bureaucracy, one can hardly be blamed for exploiting available opportunities. For good or bad, it is the Chilean way (or one of the Chilean ways), and it understandably grates on Western sensibilities, just as it embarrasses those Chileans who wish that the country might grow into a more mature model.

We happen to agree on part of this. We all know that IDPs require a real licence. But we must also acknowledge real experience that exists apart from the regulations. In 20+ years of driving in Chile not one paco has asked me for the real licence after being presented an IDP. Not one paco has noticed or cared that the IDPs are expired. I am still using IDPs I got in Europe in the 1990s, all expired for more than a decade. There is no fraud in presenting an expired IDP. And there is no doubt that someone somewhere has encountered different treatment.

The notion that an IDP "cannot be renewed outside the country of your valid license" is what the treaty requires, but it has been my real-world experience in at least two countries that the actual practice occasionally (and conveniently) differs from the formal requirement. If the real rules were respected, I would not have a drawer full of sacrificial IDPs and a perfectly clean driving record. The mileage and experiences of others may of course differ.

What a nice reasoned post.

All should understand you follow his advice at your own risk. I'm sure admin as policy cannot approve of some if not most of this "advice."

DYODD. BCWYT.

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:What a nice reasoned post.

All should understand you follow his advice at your own risk. I'm sure admin as policy cannot approve of some if not most of this "advice."

Let me suggest then that the benefit of experience should be viewed as simply that, and not as advice. I suspect that admin isn't representing agreement and blessing for every cockamamie notion and coping strategy that is described on these pages. But then again, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Hell, I don't even endorse half of my b.s. on this site. In fact, in the TOS I clearly state that it all may be very very wrong. If you are not a contracted paying client, and you ask me for advice, consider it nothing more than a layman's take on the World. I endorse the advice people pay me to give. That said, I try to point everyone in the right direction as much as possible regardless if they are paying me or not.

As for playing games with the driver's license, international type license for the most part are kind of given a once over. Even Chilean license do not seem to be all that much of an interest to the police (they know any idiot can get one). More important really is that your car is in good legal standing, insurance, revisions, and so on are all documented. Once you have residency however, time to brush up on your driver's test (coppy can be found in the wiki by the way) as you MUST have a Chilean license by law. Now, will they throw you in jail for it, not likly? The police in Chile for the most part are heavily focused on prevention, then real crimes, and finally petty bureaucratic violations. How refreshing.

I have been busted speeding on the highway, dead to rights, and the carbinario just wags his finger at me to slow down. He did not start a high-speed chase in a super charged police interceptor to catch me and write a ticket, while hundreds of other speeders zip by because the cops are obviously busy. You see them out cruzing the highways in bad weather at 80 km an hour to force the entire stream of traffic to slow down to a reasonable speed in bad road conditions. People are completely within their legal rights to pass them, but don't out of respect. That is law enforcement. That is really protecting and serving.

Confusing,
So an international driver's license won't do?
I got one through AAA, pretty cheap, you can get it for one or two years.
BTW I think 'automovil club de Chile' is the local version of aaa.

And talking about pacos, why do they drive with their emergency lights on?!? How do I know when they are chasing me?
ANyway I don't want to drive in Santiago, I was just confused about the police and their lightbars.

The only time I've been asked to show license and registration, my IDD was enough to satisfy them.