One Hundred Bullets at the Crime Scene: How Chile's Homicides Changed

It is not that a decade ago it was easy to investigate a homicide in Chile, but that the complex thing is to do it today.

Prefect Jorge Abatte (Curicó, 48 years old) knows this well. With two and a half decades as a police officer in the Homicide Brigade (BH) of the Santiago Investigative Police, he has witnessed firsthand how the crime scene has changed and how they went from looking for a suspect, who usually had a relationship with the victim, to chasing hundreds who do not know who they are. In Chile they are called unknown defendants and, according to the national prosecutor, Ángel Valencia, in a period of six to seven years the cases of this type went from 16% to 40%. "That is very serious," he said. To this is added the rise in the country's murder rate per 100,2016 inhabitants: if in 3 it was 6.2022 points, in <> it reached seven.

It's a cold, gray autumn afternoon in Santiago. Abatte wears an impeccable dark blue suit that never seems to wrinkle despite having had an extremely busy day in which he has run from meeting to meeting and between one barracks and another through the city. Theirs is that of the BH of the southern metropolitan area of Santiago, one of the areas of the capital of Chile where historically more crimes have been committed, but it is no longer the only one. It is the same sector that the government of leftist President Gabriel Boric chose to begin a new policy of demolishing mausoleums that friends and relatives of drug traffickers and assailants have begun to erect in the streets and squares to honor criminals killed in rival gang disputes.

Abatte has just spent a few days in Madrid in an advanced crime scene course taught by the Spanish National Police. They are experiences that, he says, serve a lot and that although they can be applied, they are not copied, because each country has a different reality, he clarifies. And Chile is going through a complex moment. For example, if last weekend there were 10 murders in Santiago, two weeks ago, in the Alameda, the main avenue of the capital of Chile, the head of a man was found wrapped in a bag. A few blocks away the other remains were spread out on two different streets. Until a decade ago, the appearance of a head would have been the front page of newspapers for several days.

A knife and a few bullets

The policeman recalls that when he joined the Homicide Squad in 1996, the crime scene used to be relatively apparent. Unlike what happens today, when most of them are committed on public roads and with firearms, the murders were perpetrated in wastelands, near rivers and canals or inside houses or bars. "There were finds of bodies by sharp weapons and sometimes they had bullet impacts, but that was sporadic. Blunt objects could also be found almost spontaneously in the place, such as stones, sticks or irons, which was what was attacked," the police officer told EL PAÍS. "The motive was associated, mainly, with a quarrel or fight that occurred at the time. And that generated a discussion that became a deceased person. But always in a circumstantial way, associated with a party, a fight between neighbors or within a population ^neighborhood)".

Jorge Abatte, outside the PDI barracks in Santiago, Chile. Sofia Yanjari

When they began to investigate, he recalls that many of the motives for the crimes were linked to a known accused. "We arrived at the site of the event and worked with the body. Within this scientific-technical work, the detectives also began to register neighbors, acquaintances and relatives. Immediately, it came out that the homicide had been at a party or in a fight with neighbors. Therefore, there was a prior knowledge between victim and perpetrator. And that meant that the investigation, despite being complex, at least had a specific line of investigation that made it advance much faster."

There is no exact date, with day and month, to indicate when the way of committing homicides in Chile changed, but a seasoned criminal helps to tell the story of the before and after in Chile: Juan Luis Mujica Hernández, alias El Indio Juan, murdered in 2006 with a sharp weapon inside the prison of the municipality of San Miguel. precisely in the jurisdiction in which Abatte works.

When Indio Juan was alive, the policeman recalls, the first signs of homicide dynamics linked to drugs and firearms began. "It is a triad that set the national tone, because they gave it a lot of boom. On the other hand, now it would hardly be news," says Abatte. "That caused us as police to begin to change our investigative strategy and link it not only to a homicide area, but in a multidisciplinary way."

For the policeman, Mujica's, for his time, was a type of criminality of family clans dedicated to drug microtrafficking and whose characteristic was to defend the corner where they sold drugs. "They were associated with territorial issues, but on a smaller scale. Not like now, who defend a geographical sector, which can become a complete population (with thousands of inhabitants)," he says. Today, he explains, this is associated with a structure in which different people or groups fulfill different functions: some provide security; other transport; a stockpile of drugs; others keep their weapons.

"That didn't happen before, today everything is outsourced. For example, if someone is arrested, they have the drugs, but not the weapons. And if they raid me, they're not going to find anything. That's what organized crime has today, because to disrupt a criminal structure, it's more complex," he says. "Today we use a more powerful research parameter: to identify bands for not only in that house or that block, but in the entire population. It has been a change of investigative paradigm."

The beginning of bursts

For the head of the BH, it is between 2005 and 2010 that the Investigative Police visualized the increasingly frequent use of firearms in homicides. "That evolves rapidly, because in the 90s knives were used." It is from 2010, he adds, "but especially in the last five years, in which weapons are seen that have altered their mechanisms to make them shoot automatically, in bursts. And, pressing the trigger once, a multiplicity of projectiles comes out in a few seconds. Or also blank guns, which adapt them. You didn't see that before."

Abatte continues: "Now we have also seen long weapons, submachine gun type, or weapons of war proper. And that is typical of criminal organizations that are beginning to gain strength, but that we have been disrupting." "There is a shift in violence, a crime scene that has types of evidence associated at the ballistic level and of vehicles involved in these violent deaths."

Detectives from the Investigative Police work at the site where two people were found dead, in Santiago.NurPhoto (Getty Images)

In this new crime scene, he explains, in recent years they find "vanillas or projectiles for the death of one or more people in a place. It is a multiplicity of evidence that speaks of the violence used that has to do with the fact that it no longer shoots only one subject, but several to one and with modified weapons. "

And he adds: "Today they use vehicles, something that did not happen. There are four subjects: three shoot, except the driver. And they do it to another one who is standing on a corner or to another car." "We also have a lot of homicides in which there are motorcycles involved and more than one subject participating and with firearms."

The change in the crime scene has been such that, he says, they have found in a single corpse, more than 10 bullets. "And sites of the event with 80 to 100 ballistic evidence in the same place, for one or more people."

That is why, Abatte insists, today it is not enough just one police expert in homicides. "There are multidisciplinary teams, scientific-technical work, criminal analysis and investigation, intelligence and new investigative strategies."

It is the new reality of homicide in Chile, which today, unlike a few years ago, occurs in the heart of the capital. And in some areas of the country, such as the north, in chilling ways. Just a few days ago, the Prosecutor's Office confirmed the death of two foreigners in Arica: they buried them alive wrapped in plastic bags and put cement on them.