On January 2, 2023, a year ago, Chilean newspapers reported two serious events: the shooting of a six-year-old girl in the municipality of Cerro Navia, and the death by gunshot of a man in La Granja, both communes of the Santiago Metropolitan Region, during a police chase after the theft of a car. But after 12 months, this Tuesday, Chileans began their new year 2024 with the report of six homicides in just over 24 hours, a situation that reflects the security crisis that the South American country is going through, crossed by the increase in the use of weapons. of fire, the emergence of new crime and the advance of organized crime.
On December 29, on the eve of the celebrations to say goodbye to the year, three people, including a 13-year-old girl, were killed when a car fired bullets while a music video was being recorded on a street in the commune of Pedro. Aguirre Cerda, in the southern sector of Santiago. On January 1, at a New Year's party at the Mi gente VIP nightclub in Recoleta, two people died from gunshot wounds and four were injured. And, the next day, this Tuesday, at approximately 6:00 in the morning, more than 50 bullets were fired from a vehicle against two apartments, on the first and second floor, in the commune of La Florida, in Santiago. . The automatic weapons casings with which a 70-year-old man with a police record for drug trafficking was murdered were scattered on the sidewalk.
Added to the violent New Year are the nine murders perpetrated on Christmas, when, in addition, a three-year-old child was seriously injured in a shooting.
The wave of crimes has put pressure on the government of leftist President Gabriel Boric. During the long weekend, several opposition parliamentarians have asked the Executive to convene the National Security Council (Cosena) in the face of the security crisis and the violent homicides that have occurred in recent days. One of them was the president of the Senate Juan Antonio Coloma, of the UDI, of the historical right, who pointed out that, given the situation, “the Government has to show signs of strength.” “I'm not saying that it is the only thing that could be, but we do need as a country for the year 2024 to be the recovery of security. And there is no other agreement, no other signal, no other element more important than that,” he said on local radio.
Cosena is an organization in charge of advising the President of the Republic on matters of national security and was promoted in the 1980 Constitution that was drafted by the military dictatorship (1973-1990), but which was reformed in 2005 by the former socialist president Ricardo Lagos. It is also made up of the presidents of the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies and the Supreme Court; the commanders in chief of the Armed Forces, the general director of the Carabineros and the comptroller general of the Republic.
At the beginning of December, three opposition mayors asked the Government to declare a constitutional state of emergency in the face of the insecurity crisis.
The spokesperson for the Boric Government, Camila Vallejo, however, ruled out calling the National Security Council that Tuesday. And she has said that Cosena “does not give any more results than developing an opinion, a diagnosis.” “We need agreements or actions that imply results. I insist: not pills or incentives, but results. “In general terms, we are always going to evaluate the proposals.”
The security crisis that Chile is experiencing is explained by the emergence of a new crime that has implied an increase in the homicide rate from 4.5 in 2018 to 6.7 in 2023. According to the Government, this year crime has had a low, but the violence with which the murders are committed causes fear in the population.
According to figures from the National Prosecutor's Office, if between 2016 and 2016 there were 1,860 people killed by firearms, in 2022, that is, in one year alone, there were 713.
It is a crisis that challenges the left-wing Government and that has become the main mission of the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá. After the constitutional plebiscite on December 17, where a right-wing proposal was defeated, La Moneda assured that it would focus on governing with special emphasis on social priorities: pension reform, a fiscal pact to finance it, and crime control. . This 2024 is an electoral year, where the municipal elections in October will be experienced as a preview of the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2025. In the campaigns, as has already happened in the last elections, the problem of public security will be crucial, because it is about a priority for society, according to surveys.
“With much more cruelty”
The mayor of Peñalolén, Carolina Leitao, president of the Chilean Association of Municipalities (AChM), says that the homicides committed today in Chile have two components that have made them “even more complex.” “First, these settling of scores between gangs that are done with open eyes and patience in the neighborhoods, generally did not involve innocent people, but today they don't care. And that gives a feeling of great fear and terror in the communities, as has already happened to several innocent people these days.”
As a second element, the mayor describes, “it is a type of homicide that we had not seen before, such as when people linked to drug trafficking situations or gangs have been dismembered and buried. Although homicides have always existed, today they are much more cruel and spectacular than before, with more weapons and more violence, in situations that we only saw in the movies. Of course this generates a greater perception of fear.”
For Leitao, from the center-left Christian Democratic Party but who is not part of the ruling party, “the Government has responded to a security agenda that seems to me to be very rich and complete from the legislative point of view and the resources invested. I even make it difficult for there to be another Government that has placed more concern on security due to the exceptional reasons we are experiencing, but which do not have immediate results, but will have in the medium term. And what people are waiting and looking for now is: how do we stop this.”
The mayor gives as an example the Streets Without Violence Plan driven by the Executive, precisely, because of the homicides. He highlights this, but insists that the results will not be seen “from one day to the next.” And what do we do in the meantime so that people can understand that this is a crisis that is being addressed and it doesn't seem like the situation got out of hand?” For these reasons, Leitao points out that municipalities have tools that can be very useful, but that “little use has been made of the knowledge that the mayors of our territories have in relation to the commission of crimes and organized crime.”
In the midst of the security crisis, the Public Ministry, through a program by the Undersecretary of the Interior, has implemented a new unit since November, the Organized Crime and Homicide Team (ECOH), which focuses only on cases like those that occurred. the last two weekends of December. It has been a public policy created, precisely, due to the emergence of a new armed crime and because, also, the crime scene has changed. As Prefect Jorge Abatte, head of the Homicide Brigade (BH) of the Santiago Investigative Police (PDI), explained to EL PAIS a few months ago, there are situations in which “80 to 100 ballistic evidence in the same place, for one or more people.”
At the end of November of last year, the Undersecretary of Crime Prevention of the Boric Government announced the results of the National Urban S
urvey of Citizen Security (ENUSC) showed that the perception of insecurity in Chile reached 90.6%, the highest in 10 years. This, while in October, a study by the Citizen Peace Foundation revealed that in the citizen perception index on the public security situation in the South American country, Chileans' fear of suffering a crime reached its historical maximum, reaching 30 .5%, the maximum number since 2000.
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