Visa Schengen through Belgium, itinerary and processing application questions

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Your itinerary sounds reasonable to me. Your interview is already in the past so there isn't a whole lot you can do for this application but in general, when dealing with consular officials or border guards, just be genuine, never lie but don't apologise and try not to be too nervous.

Some details might indeed suggest that there are some special concerns about your application but on the other hand, if it was clearly inappropriate, they could also refuse it in a couple of weeks. That means that it is still entirely possible you will get a visa in the end.

I don't have detailed statistics by country or by consulate at hand but if that's any help, note that the refusal rate for South America is slightly north of 5%, much better than for applications from Africa for example (and that's taking into account the fact that South America mostly means Colombia/Ecuador/Bolivia/Peru as the nationals from many other countries don't even need a visa). So, without knowing anything else about the particulars, it would seem your odds are quite good.

One month is long but it's in line with the information found on the official website. In particular, for Schengen visas, they write that it can take up to 60 days in the worse case:

Toutefois, vous devrez attendre plus longtemps lorsque le consulat transmet votre demande de visa à l’Office des étrangers pour un examen plus approfondi (60 jours maximum).

The level of friendliness and professionalism varies from consulate to consulate. It's indeed annoying to have your passport taken away for so long and some consulates only require you to bring it back at the end of the process but that does not mean that all of them have to offer a reasonable solution and sometimes they don't really care. Some countries even issue a second passport to frequent travellers to help them deal with this and other related issues.

As to what they might be investigating I don't really know but I am guessing they could check their databases for red flags about you, your travel agency, or your employer, check if your hotel booking is genuine, look up population registers for relatives in Belgium, etc. Or they simply want a senior case-worker to have a look at the application.

In this context, the line of questioning about “knowing anyone in Belgium” should be pretty standard. The concern would be that you are claiming to go for tourism but really intend to settle illegally. If they turn up any clue that that might be the case or that you lied about this, they would then definitely refuse the application.

Beyond that, and I hope I won't offend anyone by saying this, but I have many friends who live there or have to deal with all this professionally and Belgium does not have a reputation for good governance and efficient administration (compared to its neighbours at least). So it's entirely possible that your application is slowly making its way through the bureaucracy, maybe waiting for some senior Spanish-speaking case-worker to come back from holiday and get around to looking at a pile of applications for the summer or something like that.

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