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 of a man from gunshot wounds in La Granja, both municipalities of the country's Santiago metropolitan region, during a chase the police after a car theft. But after 12 months, this Tuesday, Chileans began their new year 2024 by reporting six murders in just over 24 hours, a situation that reflects the security crisis that the South American country is going through, coupled with the increase in the use of Firearms, the emergence of new crime and the rise of organized crime.
On December 29, on the eve of New Year's celebrations, three people, including a 13-year-old girl, were killed when a car fired shots while recording a music video on a street in the municipality of Pedro. Aguirre Cerda, in the southern part of Santiago. On January 1, two people died from gunshot wounds and four were injured at a New Year's party at the Mi Gente VIP nightclub in Recoleta. And the next day, this Tuesday, at around 6:00 a.m., more than 50 bullets were fired from a vehicle at two apartments on the first and second floors in the La Florida community in Santiago. The automatic weapon casings used to murder a 70-year-old man with a criminal record for drug trafficking lay scattered on the sidewalk.
In addition to the violent New Year celebrations, there were nine murders at Christmas, in which a three-year-old child was seriously injured in a shooting.
The crime wave has put the government of left-wing President Gabriel Boric under pressure. During the long weekend, several opposition parliamentarians asked the executive to convene the National Security Council (Cosena) in light of the security crisis and violent killings of recent days. One of them was the President of the Senate, Juan Antonio Coloma, of the UDI and the historic right, who pointed out that, given the situation, “the government must show signs of strength”. “I'm not saying it's the only thing that's possible, but what we need as a country is the restoration of security in 2024. And there is no other agreement, no other signal, no other more important element,” he said on local radio.
Cosena is an organization that advises the President of the Republic on national security issues and was promoted in the 1980 constitution, drafted by the military dictatorship (1973-1990) but reformed in 2005 by the former socialist president Ricardo Lagos. It also consists of the Presidents of the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies and the Supreme Court; the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the Director General of the Carabineros and the Comptroller of the Republic.
In early December, three opposition mayors called on the government to declare a constitutional state of emergency in light of the insecurity crisis.
However, Boric government spokeswoman Camila Vallejo ruled out convening the National Security Council this Tuesday. And he said that Cosena “doesn’t deliver 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, we will always evaluate the suggestions.”
The security crisis that Chile is experiencing is explained by the emergence of a new crime that has led to an increase in the murder rate from 4.5 in 2018 to 6.7 in 2023. According to the government, crime has been at a low this year, but the level of violence used to commit murders is low, causing fear among the population.
According to the public prosecutor's office, 1,860 people were killed by firearms between 2016 and 2016, and 713 in 2022, i.e. in one year alone.
It is a crisis that challenges the left-wing government and that has become the main task of Interior Minister Carolina Tohá. After the referendum on the constitution on December 17, in which a right-wing proposal was rejected, La Moneda assured that it would focus on governing with a particular focus on social priorities: pension reform, a fiscal compact to finance it and the fight against crime. The year 2024 is an election year, with the local elections in October being experienced as a foretaste of the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2025. In the election campaign, as happened in the last elections, the issue of public safety will be of crucial importance. Because, according to surveys, it is a priority for society.
“With much more cruelty”
Peñalolén Mayor Carolina Leitao, president of the Chilean Association of Municipalities (AChM), says the murders committed in Chile today have two components that have made them “even more complex.” “First of all, these reckonings between gangs, carried out with open eyes and patience in the neighborhoods, generally did not involve innocent people, but today they don't care. And that creates a feeling of great fear and terror in the communities, as has already happened to several innocent people these days.”
The mayor describes the second element: “It is a type of homicide that we had not seen before, for example when people connected to drug trafficking or gangs were dismembered and buried.” Even though homicides have always existed they are now much more cruel and spectacular than before, with more weapons and more violence, in situations that we have only seen in films. This of course leads to a greater sense of fear.”
For Leitao, who belongs to the center-left Christian Democratic Party but is not part of the ruling party, “the government has responded to a security agenda that seems to me very extensive and complete from a legislative perspective and the resources invested.” I even make it difficult that there is another government that, due to the exceptional reasons that we are experiencing, places more emphasis on security, but which does not produce immediate results but will have them in the medium term. And what people are waiting and looking for now is: How can we stop this?”
As an example, the mayor cites the “Streets Without Violence” plan promoted by the executive branch, precisely because of the homicides. He emphasizes this but insists that the results will not be visible “from one day to the next”. And what do we do in the meantime so that people understand that this is a crisis that is being addressed and that it doesn't look like the situation has spiraled out of control?” For these reasons, Leitao points out that the municipalities have tools that can be very useful, but that “the knowledge that the mayors of our areas have about the commission of crime and organized crime is rarely used”.
Amid the security crisis, the Ministry of State, as part of a program launched by the Undersecretary of the Interior since November, has set up a new unit, the Organized Crime and Homicide Team (ECOH), which focuses only on cases like those that have arisen. the last two weekends in December. It was a public order created precisely because of the emergence of a new armed crime and also because the scene of the crime had changed. As Prefect Jorge Abatte, head of the Homicide Unit (BH) of the Santiago Investigative Police (PDI), explained to EL PAIS a few months ago, there are situations in which “for example, there are 80 to 100 pieces of ballistic evidence in the same place” or more people. “
At the end of November last year, the Boric government's Undersecretary for Crime Prevention announced that the results of the National Urban Survey of Citizen Security (ENUSC) showed that the perception of insecurity in Chile reached 90.6%, the highest level in 10 years. A study by the Citizen Peace Foundation in October showed that in the citizen perception index of the state of public security in the South American country, Chileans' fear of committing a crime has reached its historic maximum of 30.5%, the highest number since 2000.