A 10-year-old girl shot while riding in a car with her father, several men stabbed in different neighborhoods, and a Colombian citizen gunned down in an attempted robbery at a sushi place, They are part of the victims left in Santiago by the wave of homicides that began 2024.
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According to figures from the Chilean authorities, at least 47 homicides have been recorded in the metropolitan region so far this year, 14 of them in a single week, and the vast majority with firearms. A violent panorama that has not taken long to generate alert among the authorities of this country.
“There is an upward trend in homicides in the last 10 years, the important thing is to be able to have a lot of sensitivity and urgency for specific cases, but also to have a cool head and responsibility to be able to draw up a strategy that allows us to mark a change in that trend. ” stated Constanza Martínez, the presidential delegate of the Metropolitan Region in Chile.
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Although the security crisis has worsened in the last decade, recent events have made the issue become one of the priorities for the government of Gabriel Boric, who has more than two years left in his term, and whose minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, has been strongly questioned by the opposition due to the increase in crime.
Gabriel Boric, president of Chile.
AFP/Presidency of Chile
“It is a capital with the problems of all large capitals. But, obviously, with homicide figures that we had not seen in our history. We are at this moment with the figures that Ecuador had 11 years ago. But, we are going down the wrong path and the government continues to treat the problem as when the great Santiago was a peaceful city, a city where a police officer imposed respect in society, a city where the cameras worked, where the prosecutor's office acted,” he tells EL. TIME the deputy of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), Jorge Alessandri, member of the Security Commission of the Chamber.
For Alessandri, the treatment of crime must be updated and a much more frontal strategy must be adopted that links the deployment of the military in the most critical points. However, unlike other countries in the region such as Ecuador or El Salvador, the Chilean government has been much more reluctant to implement measures such as the state of emergency to control the overflow of crime in Santiago.
![AL homicides](https://www.eltiempo.com/files/article_content_new/uploads/2024/02/18/65d297ff24305.jpeg)
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“This is a complex phenomenon, not only in Chile, but internationally. But indeed, in recent months, due to the number of homicides that have been committed in the Metropolitan Region, since the team against organized crime and homicides of the Public Ministry has been in operation, it shows a sustained, alarming and worrying increase,” According to EL TIEMPO, deputy of the Socialist Party, Raúl Leiva, who is also a member of the Security Commission.
Leiva points to other factors such as organized crime and the dispute over territorial control in some areas of Santiago, which is why he assures that intelligence efforts must be strengthened. A challenge that, according to the local authorities of the Chilean capital, has already been launched. “We are already investing 85,000 million pesos, we are going to carry out a special project for the Prosecutor's Office to be able to provide them with technology, a special project with the gendarmerie to provide them with armored vehicles and scanners. We have to take this issue seriously,” said the governor of the Metropolitan Region, Claudio Orrego.
There is an upward trend in homicides in the last 10 years, the important thing is to be able to have a lot of sensitivity and urgency for specific cases.
The “oasis” that vanished
Almost 5 years have passed since the former Chilean president Sebastián Piñera assured that Chile was “a true oasis, in the middle of this convulsed Latin America”, 10 days after that declaration his country would be plunged into the so-called social outbreak that, for several months , tested institutions, such as police, and their protocols for controlling public order.
An overflow of demonstrations and criminal acts that could only be contained after the arrival of the pandemic and strict confinements in 2020.A context to which was added the migration crisis that has been a challenge for the last two governments, which have had to tighten their rules to prevent the massive arrival of Venezuelan citizens, the vast majority, through unauthorized steps, and thus managing to stop criminals who manage to infiltrate migrants who seek to escape violence and the lack of opportunities in their countries. And, although this phenomenon had particularly affected the northern areas of Chile, it is clear that Santiago has now also become a fertile territory for crime.
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![Aragua Train Tattoos](https://www.eltiempo.com/files/article_content_new/uploads/2024/02/15/65ce3703f2754.jpeg)
National Guard checks migrants for these tattoos linked to the Venezuelan gang.
“Within the arrests of foreigners, they express the need to take the territories, and the territories are taken, according to their own statements, at the point of a bullet,” the former prefect of the Investigative Police (PDI) explains to EL TIEMPO. from Chile, Eduardo Labarca, who assures that the increase in phenomena such as hitmen was something that was not seen in his country and that it has a close relationship with Venezuelan gangs such as the Tren de Aragua.
“Santiago and, in reality, Chile was one of the safest countries in Latin America, having homicide numbers, homicide rates, compared to first world countries like Switzerland. The homicides that existed in Chile were homicides in fights, then at the level of violence of 10 years ago, the first homicides were between Venezuelans or Colombians and that began to be carried out by the national gangs, which began to equate their level of violence and Many of them, with some purchasing power, began to subcontract it,” he highlights.
And the metropolitan region closed last year with a 12% increase in homicides, according to the balance of the four regional prosecutor's offices that pointed to organized crime as the main driver of this increase in violence. Half of the murders in recent days have been concentrated in the western sector of the city, which includes the majority of popular and low-income communities.
However, security experts affirm that the wave of violence experienced in Santiago is not an unrelated phenomenon from that shaking other Latin American capitals that have seen the number of homicides, assaults and kidnappings increase during the last decade.
“Chile could boast, show that it was one of the safest countries in Latin America along with Uruguay and Costa Rica, and we have seen that both Costa Rica and Uruguay are also shocked by the wave of homicides. Clearly what happened was that this organized crime that was concentrated in some Latin American countries expanded to other calmer territories,” Jorge Araya, a security expert at the University of Santiago, says in dialogue with EL TIEMPO.
Araya highlights that Chile became an attractive place for criminal gangs because its population has a purchasing power greater than most Latin American countries and therefore selling drugs to the Chilean consumer was convenient, but, in addition, it has ports in which The shipment of drugs to Europe and the United States raised less suspicion.
Currently, Santiago accounts for almost half of the homicides nationwide, which is why since the middle of last year the Organized Crime and Homicide Team (ECOH) was launched, a multidisciplinary group made up of police and prosecutors, which is dedicated, exclusively, to investigate crimes of homicide and kidnappings that keep what was once one of the safest and most peaceful capitals in the region on alert.
ANDREA AGUILAR CÓRDOBA
FOR THE TIME
CHILI
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