Chile: Death of 3 police officers highlights Boric’s challenge – 04/28/2024 – World

A historic attack committed in Central-South Chile this weekend sheds light on the main challenge facing Gabriel Boric’s government: public security. On Saturday (27), three local police officers, the Carabiniers, were murdered and burned in their vehicle.

The episode has double weight: in addition to being considered one of the biggest of its kind since the resumption of Chilean democracy in 1990, it occurred precisely on the day on which the institution’s 97th anniversary would have been celebrated. The festivities gave way to mourning and protests.

The crime occurred in the municipality of Cañete, close to Concepción, the capital of the Biobio region. This is today considered one of the most dangerous regions in the country alongside neighboring Araucanía and Los Ríos, in the so-called “southern macrozone”, a Mapuche indigenous area with historical conflicts and disputes with the local government.

Shortly after assuming the Presidency in 2022, Boric declared a state of exception in this portion of the country and maintains the measure to this day. In practice, the military operates side by side with the carabinieri in the region — but they were not with the dead police officers at the time of the attack this Saturday.

The topic is sensitive. From the left, Boric took over the government promising another type of relationship with the Mapuche and was one of the defenders of the inclusion of indigenous people in the (failed) debate on a possible new Constitution for Chile. To date, he has not achieved this goal.

In these two years of his government, public security became his Achilles heel. This is the main concern of citizens. After all, even though it has one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean, Chile has seen this indicator increase by 70% over the last ten years — from 3 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants in 2014 to 4.8 in the last 2023.

With growing exponents in the Americas of models of penal populism such as in Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador, there are many in Chile who advocate increased repression, a movement driven by the opposition to the president, led by José Antonio Kast.

Once a constant critic of the carabineros, who have a history of violence in the country, the current president, formerly a student leader and vocal deputy, is trying to develop another relationship with the corporation. He thus displeases his more radical base, which calls for more investigations into crimes committed by police officers, as well as his detractors, who say that his actions are insufficient.

Speaking after the crime, Boric said that “attacking carabinieri is attacking the whole country”. “The best tool we have to fight these merciless criminals who committed a horrendous crime is unity. No left or right, no government or opposition.”

He decreed three days of official mourning in the country, in addition to a curfew this weekend in the region of the murders. The crime is under investigation, and no suspects have yet been named. In addition to shooting and burning the three carabinieri, the criminals also stole their weapons and ammunition.

The event also altered the course of a change that would take place in the police institution in the coming days. It was expected that, in the first days of May, the director of the carabinieri, General Ricardo Yáñez, would resign from his position.

He is being investigated for omission during abuses that occurred in the corporation amid the wave of protests in Chile that took thousands to the streets in 2019 and which culminated in the call to try to draft a new Constitution — and, in a way, also in the election of Gabriel Boric .

With the triple murder over the weekend, the Chilean government said it ruled out the general’s resignation. The Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, said that there are already “too many uncertainties at this moment” to promote a change of command simultaneously with the crisis.

Boric only has a 33% approval rating among Chileans, according to the latest data from the Cadem institute, the country’s main institute, released last March. When he took office, in a strongly polarized country, his approval rating was 50%.

Another survey by the same institute showed that, for 82% of the population, the crime scenario has worsened since Boric took over La Moneda Palace. An even larger share, 84%, say that organized crime gained strength during this period in Chile.