It’s not that investigating a murder in Chile wasn’t easy a decade ago, but it’s difficult to do so today.
Prefect Jorge Abatte (Curicó, 48 years old) knows it well. With two and a half decades as a police officer in the Santiago Investigative Police Homicide Unit (BH) he has been a direct witness of how the crime scene has changed and how they have gone from looking for one suspect who was generally related to the victim to pursuing hundreds who don’t know who they are. In Chile they are referred to as “unknown defendants” and according to prosecutor Ángel Valencia, cases of this type have increased from 16% to 40% in six to seven years. “This is very serious,” he said. Added to this is the increase in the murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants: from 3.6 points in 2016 to seven in 2022.
It’s a cold and gray autumn afternoon in Santiago. Abatte wears an immaculate dark blue suit that never seems to wrinkle, even though he’s had an extremely busy day running from meeting to meeting and from one shack to the next across the city. It is the BH of the southern metropolitan area of Santiago, one of the areas of the Chilean capital where more crimes were committed in the past, but it is no longer the only one. It is the same sector that left-wing President Gabriel Boric’s government chose to launch a new policy of demolishing mausoleums that friends and relatives of drug dealers and attackers have begun erecting in the streets and squares to honor the criminals who lost their lives there gang disputes. rivals.
Abatte has just spent a few days in Madrid taking part in an advanced crime scene course run by the Spanish National Police. These are experiences that he believes are very useful and that, although they can be applied, cannot be duplicated since every country has a different reality, he clarifies. And Chile is going through a complex moment. For example, if there were ten murders in Santiago last weekend, two weeks ago the head of a man wrapped in a bag was found on Alameda, the main street of the Chilean capital. A few blocks away, the rest of the remains were scattered across two different streets. Up until a decade ago, the appearance of a head would have graced the front page of newspapers for days.
A knife and the occasional bullet
The cop recalls that the crime scene was relatively obvious when he joined Homicide in 1996. Unlike today, when most murders are committed on public roads and with firearms, the murders were committed on vacant lots, near rivers and canals, or in homes or bars. “Bodies were discovered by bludgeoning weapons and sometimes they had gunshot wounds, but that was sporadic.” Blunt objects such as stones, sticks or iron used to carry out the attack could also be found at the site almost spontaneously,” the police officer said EL PAÍS. “Most of the motive was related to a fight or brawl that was going on at the time. And that sparked a discussion that led to a deceased person. But always in an awkward way, involving a party, a quarrel between neighbors or within a population neighborhood)”.
Jorge Abatte, in front of the PDI headquarters in Santiago, Chile. Sofia Yanjari
As they began investigating, he recalled that many of the motives for the crimes were linked to a known suspect. “We would arrive at the scene and work with the body. As part of this scientific and technical work, the detectives also began registering neighbors, acquaintances and relatives. It immediately turned out that the murder had taken place at a party or a fight with the neighbors. Therefore, there was prior knowledge between the victim and the perpetrator. And that meant that the investigations, while complex, at least already had a specific investigative line that made them move much faster.”
There’s no precise date, day, and month that would suggest when the nature of homicides in Chile changed, but one veteran criminal helps tell the story of Chile’s before and after: Juan Luis Mujica Hernández, aka El Indio Juan, was murdered in 2006 with an edged weapon in the San Miguel Municipality Jail, the very jurisdiction where Abatte works.
When Indio Juan was alive, the police officer recalls, there were early signs of a drug and gun-related killing dynamic. “It’s a triad that’s set the national standard because it’s given it a lot of growth. Instead, it would hardly be news now,” says Abatte. “That prompted us as police officers to change our investigative strategy and link it not just to one homicide area but also in a multidisciplinary way.”
For the policeman, Mujica in his time was a kind of family clan crime dedicated to micro-trafficking of drugs, whose characteristic was to defend the corner where drugs were sold. “They were linked to territorial issues, but on a smaller scale. Not like they are now, when they are defending a geographic sector that can grow into a full population (with thousands of residents),” he says. Today, he explains, this is associated with a structure in which different people or groups perform different functions: some provide security, others security. other means of transport; some drug collection; others keep their guns.
“That didn’t exist in the past, today everything is outsourced. For example, if someone is arrested, they have the drugs but not the guns. And if they ambush me, they won’t find anything. That’s what the organized crime we have today is because it’s more complex to destroy a criminal structure,” he says. “Today we use a more powerful research parameter: identifying gangs not just for this house or block, but for the entire population. It was a shift in investigative paradigm.”
The beginning of the gusts
For the BH boss, it is between 2005 and 2010 that investigative police observed the increasing use of firearms in homicides. “It’s evolving rapidly because bladed weapons started to be used in the ’90s.” It dates back to 2010, he adds, “but especially over the last five years when we’re seeing guns whose mechanisms have been altered to allow them to… fire automatically and in bursts.” And a single pull of the trigger fires a multitude of projectiles in a matter of seconds. Or blank pistols that they adapt. You haven’t seen that before.”
Abatte continues: “Now we have also seen long guns such as submachine guns or weapons of war as such. And that’s typical of criminal organizations that are getting stronger, but which we have dismantled. “There is a shift in violence, a crime scene associated with ballistic level evidence and vehicles involved in these violent deaths.”
Police investigators work at the site in Santiago where two people were found dead.Photo only (Getty Images)
At this new crime scene, he explains, “Vanilla or projectiles responsible for the death of one or more people at a location have been found in recent years.” There is ample evidence to support the use of force involved that no longer just one subject shoots, but several at one and with modified weapons.”
And he adds: “Today they use vehicles, which didn’t happen. There are four subjects: three shoot, except the driver. And they’ll do it to someone who’s stopped around a corner, or to another car.” “We also have a lot of homicides that involve motorcycles and involve more than one person and they’re carrying firearms.”
The change at the crime scene was so great that, he says, more than 10 bullets were found in a single body. “And venues with 80 to 100 pieces of ballistic evidence in the same place, for one or more people.”
For this reason, Abatte emphasizes, a police officer who is an expert in homicides is not enough today. “There are multidisciplinary teams, scientific and technical work, criminal analysis and investigation, reconnaissance and new investigative strategies.”
It is the new reality of murder in Chile, which, unlike a few years ago, is taking place in the heart of the capital. And in some parts of the country, like the north, in a frightening way. Just a few days ago, prosecutors confirmed the deaths of two foreigners in Arica: They were buried alive, wrapped in plastic bags and coated with cement.