The deadliest forest fires of the last decade in Chile have left 122 dead as of Monday, a figure that has not stopped increasing since the origin of the fire last Friday.
Only 32 of the victims have been identified by the Legal Medical Service (SML) and there are still hundreds of missing.
The catastrophe is such that the Navy asked this Monday the inhabitants of Viña del Mar, Quilpué, Villa Alemana and Limache, the most affected areas, not to leave their homes if it is not necessary.
Four days after the start of the flames, there are still 165 fires in 10 regions of the country, although concentrated in the center-south, according to the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (Senapred).
The fire has devastated more than 26,000 hectares.
Remains of houses in the Valparaíso region.Cristóbal Venegas
Amid criticism for the slowness of identifying the dead, Marisol Prado, director of the SML, said that they are doing biometric identification, through fingerprints, and will begin the process of taking samples from people who have reported someone missing. , with the aim of “later doing DNA identification”.
The curfew starting at 9:00 p.m. has meant that in the middle of the South American summer, the streets of the spas in the Valparaíso Region are practically empty, with only a few rebellious tourists.
Up in the hills, where the flames destroyed the memories of thousands of families in a matter of minutes, the panorama is different.
The neighbors remove the rubble of what was their home under the sun and desperately seek help from the authorities.
When the darkness is total, several affected people stand guard in locations such as Villa Rukan, Villa Dulce or Palto Miraflores to prevent looting or having their land taken over.
In addition, fear of new outbreaks of fire persists.
As the days go by, the suspicion that the forest fires have been intentional - an aspect that the Public Ministry is investigating - has gained greater strength.
While the authorities have been cautious about this hypothesis, the regional governor of Valparaíso, Rodrigo Mundaca, revealed his “absolute conviction” that there is intention behind the flames.
“We have filed a complaint against those responsible.
We are going to persecute them and we are going to imprison them.
Citizens have to be very clear about this because the damage they have caused us is irreversible,” he warned.
“The fires turned into homicides,” added the governor.
Homes destroyed by fires in Viña del Mar.Cristóbal Venegas
The regional prosecutor of Valparaíso, Claudia Perivancich, ruled out this Monday that there are any detainees, although she stated that there are “strong indications” of possible intentionality.
On Sunday night, police received several reports overnight about people allegedly starting a fire or using items to start a fire.
Of the six procedures that were carried out, according to prosecutor Perivancich, nothing abnormal was detected in any of them.
Nicole Martínez, 30 years old, mother of two children, watches over the skeleton of her property at night.
Her house is one of the 12,000 homes destroyed in Viña del Mar. Like her neighbors in El Olivar, the epicenter of the tragedy and a working class sector, she complains that the authorities have failed to provide them with help. .
They have nowhere to relieve themselves and if it weren't for donations, they wouldn't even have bags to throw away the remains of their homes.
Echoing the population's need for help, the mayor of Viña del Mar, Macarena Ripamonti, assured that the municipality asked the SML to accelerate work on the ground and the corresponding authorities to increase security.
On Sunday night, several neighbors uploaded videos of criminals trying to set fires on different hills and police officers chasing them, not always successfully.
“We lost everything and that generates a very great feeling of insecurity and we need the troops committed by the Armed Forces to arrive.
They have told us that there will be more than 1,700 in the affected area, but we strongly need them to be there permanently,” she said.
The president, Gabriel Boric, who declared two days of national mourning, said that the country is going through the greatest tragedy since the great earthquake of February 27, 2010, which left more than half a thousand dead: “I say this so that we are able to "dimension the pain and the magnitude of what we are experiencing."
The fires have hit the central-southern area of the country, particularly the Valparaíso region.
Due to the intensity of the damage, in the spa city of Viña del Mar it has not yet been possible to quantify or identify all the human remains that died in the flames since Friday night: many victims were hit by the fire while fleeing in their homes. cars.
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS Chile newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the country.