Boric’s government under pressure: 16 homicides in 48 hours expose Chile’s security crisis

Chile registered 16 homicides between early Sunday and Tuesday, and more than half of them were committed in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. And two cases have been particularly shocking because they were multiple murders, which amounted to nine deaths, which occurred in the municipalities of Quilicura and Lampa, in the northern part of the capital of the country. The wave of crimes has monopolized the agenda of the Government of President Gabriel Boric, who is under pressure, and has called for a meeting this Thursday at 7:00 in the morning of a Pro-Security Cabinet Council with authorities from the Ministries of the Interior, Finance, Justice and Defense. “With unity and together with all the institutions of the State, we will continue working hard to confront organized crime,” the Chilean president wrote on his X account shortly before eleven at night.

The wave of murders began over the weekend, when four teenagers, aged between 13 and 17, were gunned down in a square in Quilicura, in the north-central area of ​​Santiago: they were shot more than 40 times from a car, which the police later found abandoned and burned. And, at midday on Tuesday, in the commune of Lampa, five foreigners – four men and a woman – died from gunshot wounds at a party.

The cases have shocked the country. Although, since approximately 2022, Chile has been experiencing, due to the emergence of a new crime, a type of homicides that are more violent and committed with firearms, multiple murders are unusual, but not unprecedented in recent times: in April 2023, five people of foreign nationality were shot, also in Lampa, after a celebration and, according to the Tarapacá Prosecutor’s Office, the Aragua Train was behind the crimes. Last April, a turning point was the murder of three police officers in the Biobío region, in the south of the country, in an area where the constitutional state of emergency is in force, with the presence of the armed forces, due to rural violence and organized crime.

The murders have exposed the security crisis in Chile and have forced the entire political class to speak out. The ruling party has called on Boric to implement exceptional and tough measures in the Chilean capital. Socialist senator and former foreign minister José Miguel Insulza said that the government should declare a ‘state of siege’ in the Metropolitan Region, a presidential power that is declared in extreme situations and that implies military presence. His argument, after the wave of violence, is that “this can become naturalized and, if that happens, we enter a zone of no return.”

The Communist Party (PC), the cornerstone of Boric’s government, has also spoken out and called for a great national agreement “to confront and eradicate organized crime and drug trafficking,” according to a public statement in which it noted that “the country is at a critical crossroads.” In recent weeks, the party had questioned the very Administration of which it is a part following an operation in Villa Francia, where weapons and explosives were found, which generated strong friction both with the left-wing Administration and with the Socialist Party (PS).

The opposition, meanwhile, has focused its criticism on the lack of new security measures that Boric’s government announced on Wednesday after an emergency meeting at La Moneda, led by the Minister of the Interior and Public Security, Carolina Tohá, together with the national prosecutor Ángel Valencia and the police chiefs.

The mayor of Providencia, Evelyn Matthei, the main presidential candidate of the traditional right, even questioned the absence of the president at the meeting at the presidential palace, who had been in Paraguay since Tuesday afternoon on an official visit, although he spoke of the murders before boarding the plane. “On Sunday it was already known that there were 10 dead and one wonders where the president was, what he did: nothing. On Tuesday it was already known that there were 15 dead, where was the president? (…) He washed his hands and asked the Minister of the Interior to call this meeting,” she said. And she added: “There is a political responsibility here that falls first and foremost on the President of the Republic.”

On Tuesday, a group of parliamentarians from the UDI, a traditional right-wing party, after the massacres in Lampa and Quilicura, called for the resignation of Minister Tohá and the undersecretaries of the Interior, Manuel Monsalve, and Prevention, Eduardo Vergara. This Wednesday, after the Government announced a package of five measures to strengthen the Metropolitan Region, they insisted on the questions. “The time has come for people who really know how to do their job to arrive at the Ministry of the Interior and the various undersecretaries.” [trabajo]”, declared Juan Antonio Coloma, deputy and general secretary of the UDI. The president of the group, Javier Macaya, senator, blamed the Executive for the country’s security: “President Gabriel Boric, organized crime is winning by a landslide, I invite you to stop blaming the opposition and personally lead its change,” he said on his X account.

The magnitude of the crisis in the face of the latest homicides, and the level of violence, has pushed President Boric to speak out twice in less than 24 hours about the multiple murders in Lampa and Quilicura. On Tuesday, shortly before boarding the plane to Paraguay, the president said that “organized crime’s wings had to be clipped,” and he also criticized the opposition for asking his team in charge of public security to resign. “I want to say something very clearly to the opposition: there are some of us here who are working permanently on this. In the face of the constant demands for resignations that some parliamentarians are making on social media or through press releases, I tell them ‘no, gentlemen. The Government is working here’ and contributing to the solution, while others try to undermine and create differences in Chilean society.” He added: “I am not going to ask anyone to resign because the UDI asks me to.”

The Metropolitan Region in the spotlight

Compared to other Latin American countries, Chile has one of the lowest murder rates in the region. But there is concern because the homicide rate, which includes victims of all ages, rose from 4.5 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 to 6.3% in 2023. Undersecretary Monsalve said on Wednesday that, as of July 14, 2024, in the capital of Chile, there have been 256 completed homicides, which means three more than in the same period last year. Despite this, he admitted that although these crimes have decreased in the rest of the country, “we have not managed to break the homicide trend in the Metropolitan Region.”

According to Monsalve, the Metropolitan Region of Santiago accounts for 40% of homicides in Chile. “We are dealing with criminal structures that operate in this region, and the intervention is more complex than in other regions due to the number of inhabitants and organizations that operate. It is essential, along with strengthening their persecution, to be able to share information between all institutions in order to act with the greatest possible opportunity against this criminal dynamic.”

On Wednesday morning, Boric also referred to the complex situation in the Metropolitan Region following the crimes in Lampa and Quilicura. The president indicated that although the homicide rate was lowered in the vast majority of Chile’s regions in 2023, and that at the national level it decreased “in the order of 6%”, this has not been the case in the Metropolitan Region: “There is a serious problem that we are not unaware of, it worries us and concerns us.”

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