Over the last 30 years, Latin America has progressively become one of the most dangerous regions in the world in terms of citizen security. According to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), year 2022, of the first 10 countries in the world with the highest crime rate, 7 are in our hemisphere and of the 20 nations perceived as the most dangerous in the world, 11 are in the American hemisphere.
From the point of view of lethality, in 2019, Latin America registered 42% of all violent homicides in the world and by 2021 of the 20 countries with the highest homicide rates 18 are nations belonging to the hemisphere; striking and alarming data if we consider that just under 14% of the world’s population is concentrated in Latin America and if we evaluate the perception of insecurity expressed by citizens.
This statistic contrasts drastically with the repetitive expression, much used politically, of describing our region as a “territory of peace”.
In this context, citizen security seems to be an indomitable issue for any government administration. Countless security plans, dozens of laws and punitive sanctions, multiple political alliances on the issue, greater resources and an increase in the contingent of armed forces and countless containment measures have not managed to curb this statistic and its disastrous imprint of violence on our societies. An example of this is the data from the IPSOS survey, carried out in 28 countries on all continents, which indicates that the greatest concerns of people in Chile are crime and violence, placing our country in first place in the ranking on this issue for the fifth consecutive time.
Violence is one of the most complex social phenomena and is present throughout human existence. Many of its expressions are both cause and effect. The debate on security in Chile cannot ignore the fact that violence occurs both in common crimes and in phenomena rooted in our way of life and psychology.
It is undeniable that society has become more hostile, and not everything is attributable to crime, as we have normalised violence as a way to solve our problems. It is no longer just the numbers and types of crimes, but today human life has lost value and is potentially at stake more and more often. For this reason, violence and insecurity must be addressed from a more multidimensional and comprehensive perspective, taking into account other indicators such as mental health (we are one of the countries with the worst mental health indicators), poverty and unemployment rates, which are irremediably correlated with crime rates.
Along these lines, the economic crisis and its worsening should translate into an even greater increase in crime by 2023.
But what happens when crime exceeds normal levels? When the containment capacities of the repressive and judicial systems are exceeded? When some authorities indicate that crime has taken over a country and the rule of law is in check? When a society is seized by fear of crime, making violence its main concern? When corruption in state and public entities, together with the ineffectiveness of justice in the prosecution of crimes, contribute to the lack of protection for victims?
It is in such a context that, for many, crime ceases to be a “normal phenomenon” and it is understood that citizens are willing to sacrifice their public liberties and rights for the sake of security, turning the fight against it into a political problem of the first order, quickly appearing, and as the best solution, the punitive power, an extra-legal, merely political phenomenon with a repressive aspect and a power of surveillance exercised over the entire population.
In other words, punitive power refers to the exclusive exercise of the state to exercise legitimate violence for the benefit of the members of the community itself, and it seems to be growing behind our backs, at the same time as crime and the feeling of insecurity, allowing certain ideologies to install the belief that it is better to “pay for broken glass than to adopt necessary and diligent measures to avoid breaking the glass again”.
An example of this insistence on solutions that do not go to the root of the problem is the approval by the Chamber of Deputies of the Rain-Retamal Law, whose legislative process was quickly pushed through after the murder of carabineros sergeant Rita Olivares Rayo. Such approval has been questioned by various personalities and entities in the legal and human rights ambit.
Greater penalties for those who attack the country’s different police forces and greater powers for the Carabineros is the subject of the Naín-Retamal bill, one of the most talked-about measures being privileged self-defence, which invokes the presumption of the justified use of service weapons and other means of defence by uniformed and civilian police officers. (It should be noted, for reflection, that the majority of deaths of members of the national police, between 2017 and 2023, correspond to deaths due to accidents in police procedures and not homicides or acts of violence). source: carabineros.cl dated 28th of this month and year.
Mauricio Duce, lawyer and director of the Procedural Reform and Litigation Programme at the Diego Portales University, said on the programme “Política en vivo”, that the bill seems inadequate because of the increase in penalties for some crimes, the desire to establish privileged self-defence and the fact that Carabineros will not appear as defendants. In the first situation, the lawyer points out that the use of firearms has existed for decades in police work and our legislation allows us to resolve the problems associated with this situation, and wanting to increase this power is almost giving carte blanche to the use of firearms. Moreover, he pointed out that there are well-established rules that are generous enough to justify the actions of the carabineros, thus refuting the idea put forward by certain political sectors that the Carabineros have recently been stripped of their powers.
With regard to the quality of the accused, he referred to the fact that technically, this quality attributes a series of rights and a series of defence mechanisms that are not activated when appearing as a witness, emphasising that the claim that “a Carabineros can never be held responsible for possessing a firearm is an irresponsibility that does not exist in any civilised state of law”.
Claudio Nash, Doctor of Law and Coordinator of the Chair of Human Rights at the University of Chile, also questioned the effectiveness of these projects, considering this fusion to be an expression of penal populism. “One issue that I would say is quite clear from comparative experience and from Chile’s own experience is that increasing penalties does not contribute to crime prevention. Nasch also addresses the dichotomy between maintaining security and respecting human rights, indicating that “if you act in a way that violates human rights while seeking to guarantee security, what ends up happening is that police action is delegitimised”.
For her part, the director of the Human Rights Institute, in her statement today, gives sufficient arguments in relation to the failure of these projects by not taking charge of the real operational problems in security and leaning disproportionately towards the Carabineros by presuming their innocence, favouring their impunity, judging in advance the quality of their possible victims as criminals (remember the well-known set-ups in relation to the Mapuche claim and the emblematic cases of Camilo Catrillanca, Gustavo Gatica and Fabiola Campillay: victims or criminals? ); as well as raising doubts about equality before the law, a guarantee for all those who
law, a guarantee for all those who live in this country. “Let us not forget that Carabineros are practically granted immunity for damages they cause to third parties or their material goods during a police operation. The latter also violates the state’s duty to provide justice to all those affected by its actions”.
Faced with this reality, we need to reflect on whether the methods of containment have made progress or have become obsolete; if the public security forces are prepared to confront this dynamic with respect for human rights and the rule of law.
And very importantly, if our judicial system has given the appropriate procedural response, in time and form, and if they have a proportional professional contingent to remedy the high percentages of cases of crimes of all kinds, protecting the victims as the central object of their task, recognising themselves as an integral part of the country’s social life.
But, above all, it is worth reflecting on whether, as a whole, we promote tools for the non-violent management of conflicts and the promotion of a culture of peace and tolerance as a task of the first order. Various actions around the world highlight the need to advance peace and non-violence (“March for Peace – 1962”, “World March for Peace – 2009”, “2000 without Wars”, “March for Peace with Justice and Dignity – 2011”, etc.).
In this, the political world should contribute by setting an example and not continue to be another expression of violence by insisting on paths and modes of action that have not shown real results so far anywhere on the planet.
Collaborator: M. Angélica Alvear Montecinos; Guillermo Garcés Parada and César Anguita Sanhueza. Political Opinion Commission
