Mayor Rodolfo Carter stands in front of what was left after the first demolition of the irregular expansion of a 'narco-house', in La Florida, Santiago, where he is mayor. Cristian Soto Quiroz
On February 9, Chilean media attention was focused on the ferocious wave of forest fires that devastated the central-south zone, the deadliest in a decade.
That morning, far from the flames, Rodolfo Carter, mayor of the municipality of La Florida, in the southern area of Santiago, planned to launch an initiative to recover neighborhoods: demolish a house linked to drug trafficking.
Carter, an opponent of the Government of Gabriel Bóric, tells EL PAÍS that he was told that he would do better to postpone it, that the measure would not have media coverage.
His advisers lost their sense of smell.
The popular morning programs on Chilean television replaced the images of the firefighters with cranes and the great display of La Florida.
Since then, Carter has already demolished three homes and another 16 are planned, according to an account in his office decorated with photographs of Ronald Reagen, John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill.
Critics of this right-wing mayor describe it as a media
show
with populist overtones, but 88% of citizens approve of the measure, according to a survey by Panel Ciudadano UDD, in which crime and drug trafficking appear as the biggest problems facing the country.
The northern municipalities of Antofagasta and Calama have already taken the first steps to carry out demolitions of
drug houses
.
The
Carter formula
expands.
Mayor Carter in his office with photographs of John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. Cristian Soto Quiroz
This mayor, a good reader and knowledgeable about the Spanish political system, does not go it alone in this crusade.
Last Tuesday, the Senate issued a law that strengthens the prosecution of drug trafficking and organized crime.
As the latest report from the Drug Trafficking Observatory in Chile points out, the efforts of different international criminal organizations insist on settling in the country and the pandemic gave an unusual speed to the changes that they had been experiencing since 2015.
La Florida, with some 400,000 inhabitants, is the fourth most populous municipality in Chile, and its sociodemographic composition is often used as a mirror of the national reality: a small upper and lower class sector and a thick emerging and vulnerable middle class.
Carter, 51, has worked for the municipality where he grew up for two decades.
First as a councilor and since 2011 as mayor - he has been re-elected twice - by the right-wing UDI party, which he left in 2019. As an independent, he continues to be part of the traditional right-wing opposition coalition, Chile Vamos.
Carter explains that the initiative arose from a conversation with the prosecutors, who focused on the fact that criminals continue to do their business from prisons because their houses continue to work.
After that meeting, the mayor of La Florida met with the director of works of the municipality, who told him that the general law of urban planning and construction "has a space" to demolish the irregular extensions of the houses.
Once this loophole was discovered, the Eastern Prosecutor's Office gave them a list of 20 houses with current criminal cases, where there has been traffic, violent acts and detainees, operated by at least two mafias: a Chilean one, the Macaco one, and the Cali Cartel
,
from Colombia.
In practical terms, the drug trafficker can buy or rent another house after the collapse.
And already warned of the possible consequences, do not expand it irregularly.
"This is not the solution to drug trafficking, it is not the last nor the only measure, but within the few powers that the mayor has, it is what we can do the most, interpreting the law in the most extreme way to help the Prosecutor's Office and to give a territorial signal that we are fighting,” says Carter, a lawyer from the Catholic University.
The Minister of Justice of the Government of Gabriel Boric, Luis Cordero, maintained that "the strategy has been legally ingenious."
He also described it as a "risk" that the mayor takes because he "exposes himself on the front line."
In fact, the municipal authority has received death threats since the demolitions began and the Public Ministry provided him with personal surveillance and at his home, where he lives with his two children, ages 11 and 10, adopted a couple of years ago. .
Police and municipal escorts monitor the home while Mayor Rodolfo Carter talks with residents of the Monsignor Carlos Casanueva passage, where they demolished the first 'narco-house'. Cristian Soto Quiroz
But this week, in a counterattack, the undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior, Manuel Monsalve, described the measure as "gimmicky, more than effective."
"What happened to them in between?" Carter wonders about the Boric government's position on the initiative.
“They saw the polls.
They said: this guy is scoring well, he has to be thrown away, ”he answers.
Since last December, the name of the mayor has been among the most valued politicians, according to different polls.
Asked what his plans are once he leaves the mayoralty -his current term ends at the end of 2024-, Carter assures that his priority is to be a father and that he is preparing himself if the opportunity to be a presidential candidate comes to him: "There are signs that They say it could be.
Internally, I think it's my time."
Because?
"Because of my biography," she postulates.
“Of all the names that are going around, I am probably the son of modern Chile.
My mother, a housewife, my father, a very minor employee in a company.
I lived in a town in Florida, I studied at the best university in the country, first professional generation.
That is why I connect from the feelings with the citizenship, because I lived it.
I don't need to study it.
Probably, what is happening to me today is that people are beginning to connect with me because they say: speak like me, but not from imposture, but because I understand fear", he reflects in this extensive interview -in which he repeats several times the phrase "and this please write it as it is" -, and which continued with a visit to the first demolished house, with a great deployment of security.
He is critical of the current political generation, which he describes as "quite mediocre in intellectual terms -with exceptions-, very much captured by the next re-election and not by the next generation."
Regarding the second Government of Sebastián Piñera, whom he considers a person with "a lot of talent", he believes that he is the representative of the disconnection with society.
“I believe that a true center-right government has not yet arrived in Chile,” he affirms.
Without even being consulted about his political program in the event of being a candidate, Carter elaborates: "What you can expect from me are two basic things: recover public order and recover economic dynamism."
Faced with the label of a populist that his critics have given him for the demolitions of the
drug houses
, he replies: "I have nothing of a populist," and lists examples of phrases that he has uttered during the interview, such as that he is open to sitting down and talking with the far-right Republican Party, which would have rejected Boric's proposal to legislate the tax reform –which was recently thrown out in Congress– and that bad news must be given to the public.
“What populist does that?
Populists are the ones who promise things they can't deliver: 'I'm going to change everything, I'm going to chase criminals like dogs, I'm going to stop the revolving door [that allows criminals to leave and enter prisons]'.
What I am saying is a little bit: blood, sweat and tears”.
The lawyer adds that it meets two of the four premises on which a populist is based: a charismatic leader who is outside the system.
"There may be something of that here."
He speaks directly with the public, skipping the parties: "It could be."
But with which he does not agree, he argues, are those of presenting himself as a virtuous against a caste and having no scruples to exercise power.
The mayor of La Florida makes people talk and his method against the
drug houses
has been applauded by outside political sectors.
Analyst Pepe Auth, a former center-left deputy, wrote this Saturday: "Mayor Carter's action of demolishing illegal drug traffickers' houses is not the silver bullet to combat drug trafficking, but it helps the harassed to stop being the neighbors and become be the narcos
They should make it national policy instead of
backfiring
[throw it down].”
Carter, for his part, does not avoid the controversy because, he assures, they are doing him a favor: "He gives me more camera."
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