A first-of-its kind report has highlighted how transnational criminal groups are driving violence in Chile and eroding public security in the north of the country.
Organized crime-related violence increased between 2022 and 2023, according to the recent study that for the first time mapped out a comparison of all organized crime-related offenses across the country. The report compared a range of crimes, factoring in their severity, and measured corruption and violence on a national and local level.
Crimes like drug trafficking, kidnapping, migrant smuggling, money laundering, and weapons offenses increased 8.4% overall during that period, while organized crime-related violence jumped around 37%, from 3,834 cases to 5,265.
Although property crimes still account for the majority of Chile’s offenses, there have been fewer of these cases in recent years. But crime-related violence has seen a rise novel not only for its scope but for its gruesomeness, according to the report’s author Pía Greene Meersohn, director of the Center for Studies on Security and Organized Crime (Centro de Estudios en Seguridad y Crimen Organizado – CESCRO) at the University of San Sebastián, which published the report.
“Nowadays, homicides have changed dramatically and are carried out by unknown individuals, by hired assassins with a firearm,” she said. “They may arrive on a motorbike and what has happened a lot lately is they’ve hit adults and children with stray bullets.
“We’ve also had cases like that seen the other day when a dismembered woman was found. These are types of things we didn’t see before in the country.”
Transnational crime has played a central role in this violence, Greene Meersohn said. While she warned that migration in general is often incorrectly associated with organized crime, she added that Chile’s porous northern borders have been a large factor for organized crime’s prevalence in the north.
“There’s a lot of illicit human trafficking, contraband trafficking, and drug trafficking. Everything that enters illegally across the border generally comes in through the northern border,” she said.
InSight Crime Analysis
Transnational crime has brought a level of violence to Chile that the country is unaccustomed to.
The discovery of the bodies of two men buried alive under the concrete floor of torture houses run by the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua’s breakaway faction, the Gallegos, in May 2023 was just one example of the type of brutality that was once all but unheard of in Chile.
Such violence in what has traditionally been one of Latin America’s safer countries may help explain why Chilean citizens’ perception of security there ranks among the lowest in the world, below other countries in the region with higher crime levels, such as Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.
Chilean authorities have implemented some positive measures to try to tackle rising crime levels, Greene Meersohn acknowledged, highlighting the Public Security Ministry’s creation of a homicides observatory which should help investigators gain a better understanding of the factors behind murders.
“In Chile, like most of Latin America, we have quite scattered and diverse figures from the police and the attorney general’s office,” she said. “With the homicide observatory, we now have a single, definitive number of homicides, and we’ve also been able to characterize homicides and understand how they occur in order to be able to address them.”
But although 2024 saw fewer homicides than the year prior, this does not necessarily mean the government is weakening organized crime. Pacts between rival gangs or certain gangs eliminating their rivals may be behind the drop in murders.
“I don’t think it’s a product of the public policies we’re implementing,” Greene Meersohn said.
A lack of effective inter-institutional coordination and Congress’s failure to quickly pass laws that would boost the state’s intelligence capacities and allow officials to more efficiently combat money laundering mean Chile is still lagging in its fight against organized crime, she added.
The archiving of criminal cases, and the state’s seeming inability to prevent criminals from continuing to operate from within prisons, has also created a sense of impunity that not only further increases the public’s feeling of insecurity but also further boosts organized crime by emboldening gangs to diversify their criminal portfolios, CESCRO investigator Camila Astrain told InSight Crime.
“Gangs feel more secure in being able to expand commercially,” she said.
Featured image: PDI officers arrest a suspected Tren de Aragua member in Santiago, Chile. Credit: Reuters