Killings and prison torture raise alarms over gang crime in Chile

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During Marcelo’s first week in Santiago I prison, he was glad when his fellow inmates handed him a phone so he could call his girlfriend and family.

Before the night was over, the same people would film his screams as he was tortured, demanding that those on his freshly registered contact list send over money to make it stop.

Marcelo says the incident was a consequence of a growing population of foreign detainees, who have brought along with them a more violent and exploitative prison culture to Chile.

While most of the people who stabbed and beat him were Chilean, foreign inmates “are the ones in charge,” said Marcelo, 29, who asked to use an alias for fear of retaliation. “You didn’t used to see that. To call and extort a prisoner’s family was completely out of the codes for Chileans.”

Marcelo’s very sentiment – that foreigners’ influence is at the root of this violence — is one shared by many Chileans, 92 percent of whom think immigration has worsened safety and security in the country, according to the LatAm Pulse poll by AtlasIntel and Bloomberg News. Over 95 percent of those surveyed in October think Chile should have more restrictive immigration laws. The concerns mirror those across the region and even as far as the United States, where similar conversations are playing out during its presidential election season.

While Chileans like Marcelo are being hit by rising crime alongside the arrival of migrants in Chile, there is also another reality: the newcomers themselves are victim to the brunt of the violence.

Organised crime groups like Tren de Aragua — which has become the face of the phenomenon from Santiago to New York — often target migrants, who are vulnerable and find themselves in precarious economic circumstances. In Chile, the gang, founded in a Venezuelan prison a decade ago, was involved in the highly publicised murder of Venezuelan dissident Ronald Ojeda.

Rising crime has consumed the government of leftist President Gabriel Boric, who is now trying to build a legacy of fighting violence and drugs over the platform of social security he campaigned on. Since 2022, the government has more than tripled its budget to tackle organised crime to US$89 million. It’s created a new state attorney’s office and police unit, and is building high-security prisons. Prosecutors are now ordering pre-trial detention of any undocumented immigrant apprehended for an offence.

That’s all significant for a country that has almost no history of criminal gangs and where the police once only carried revolvers and drove unarmored vehicles. Chile’s policing tactics are now starting to mirror those of its regional neighbours who have to dismantle cocaine labs in jungles and patrol dangerous favelas.

“The presence of organised crime in our country has shocked us, but it will not paralyse us,” Boric said earlier this year. “We are going to win this fight, step by step.”

Unforeseen arrival

The Venezuelan diaspora has been a goldmine for Tren de Aragua, which specialises in human-trafficking. People pay gang members to smuggle them across the border into Chile, and some have to work for the group to pay back their debts. That leaves migrants vulnerable to becoming the gang’s first victims.

There is no denying that murders, violent crime and drug seizures have increased in recent years. Last year the local investigative police seized 30 tons of drugs, including cocaine and processed cannabis. That’s up from the 21 tons registered in 2019.

Homicides in Chile reached 579, or 2.9 for every 100,000 inhabitants, in the first half of the year, according to the office of the Undersecretary for Crime Prevention. That’s a 30-percent increase compared to 2019, but a nine-percent drop from the first semester of 2023. Over 20 percent of homicide victims this year were foreigners, up from four percent in 2020.

While the number of Chilean victims remains more or less stable, it’s the killing of Venezuelans — more than 700,000 now live in Chile — that is skyrocketing. Authorities carried out 73 autopsies on Venezuelans who had suffered a violent death last year, up from just three in 2019, according to the national forensic medical service centre. The number of Colombian autopsies doubled to 60 in 2023.

There is a subsegment of ultra-violent crimes within the homicides data, “which usually has a higher presence of people of foreign nationality, because these crimes are linked to the modus operandi of gangs that have emigrated from other places,” Interior Minister Carolina Tohá said in an interview with the La Tercera newspaper earlier this year.

In July, an alleged fight between two rival gangs resulted in the murder of five Venezuelans at a party near Santiago.

As the number of incidents has increased so has their complexity.

“We now encounter crime scenes we didn’t see in the past, with a dead person with many bullet marks on his body, hands and feet tied, and possibly in a different place from where he was killed,” said Juan Pablo Pardo, head of the Organised Crime Brigade at the Investigative Police.

That’s forced Chile to make its investigative methods more sophisticated. The local prosecutor, criminal analysts and a psychologist now accompany investigative police to crime scenes if there is any suggestion of gang involvement.

“Many times it’s the psychologists who get the most relevant pieces of information from the family of the victim,” said Tania Gajardo, the deputy director of the specialised organised crime unit of the prosecutor’s office. “The victim in the organised crime context is not a traditional victim. They don’t trust the police, they don’t collaborate with the investigation.”

Gang culture

Chile still remains safer than most countries in the region. Only Uruguay, Argentina and Costa Rica appear better-positioned in 2024’s Global Peace Index, which includes security indicators among the measure.

But concerns over violence, crime and immigration are higher in Chile than any other nation in the world, according to a study by Ipsos.

The number of foreigners in Chilean jails has doubled in five years, reaching 14 percent of the total in 2023, of which 26 percent are Venezuelans, up from 1.5 percent in 2018. Colombians and Bolivians represent around 28 percent each, according to data from Chile’s prison service, known as Gendarmería.

The recent surge in xenophobia could risk exacerbating the difficulties migrants already face. Those who are undocumented tend to avoid going to the police when they are victims of any assault or extortion. Some end up working for gangs out of fear, and because it offers a source of income for those who don’t always have other job prospects.

“The more xenophobic a country, the more uncertain the status of Venezuelans in a country, the more fertile the ground for Tren de Aragua’s continued exploitation,” said Jeremy McDermott, co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime. “These are opportunity criminals, and they are extorting the Venezuelan diaspora. Tren de Aragua members are parasites upon the Venezuelan community.”

Fighting back

One of the main challenges Chile faces is that Tren de Aragua’s intellectual leaders are elsewhere, making it hard to map the chain of command. There are also fragmented groups claiming to be or have close ties with Tren de Aragua.

“In Latin America, a franchise system is taking place in which criminals pay to use the name of the most brutal gang,” according to Pablo Zeballos, an organised crime consultant and former police intelligence officer. “The best brand in the region is brutality.”

It’s difficult to determine whether Chile is winning the battle, but it has notched some victories. The police have imprisoned two prominent leaders of the Tren de Aragua, while requesting the extradition of one of the gang’s founders — known as Larry Changa — who was captured in Colombia.

“I’ve been quite impressed with Chilean authorities and I think they are doing the right thing,” said McDermott. “It’s a steep learning curve, but the fact that Larry Changa did a runner from Chile in 2022 shows that he felt there was a very real risk of getting picked up here.”

What’s more, the jump in homicides may be a sign of the gangs’ weakness, not their strength, according to prosecutor Gajardo.

“Given our containment work, cells of Tren de Aragua were left without leadership, and this has caused disorder,” she said. “Murders between rival gangs mean they don’t control the territory. When everything is calm, it means they seized the territories and the state is letting things happen.”

Still, that may be little consolation to the communities wracked by the increase in organised crime.

Next target

The northern city of Antofagasta is becoming a battlefield between foreign gangs warring over territorial control.

Its easy access to the Pacific Ocean, the capital Santiago and proximity to the borders of Bolivia and Peru have long made it a hub for Colombian gangs who traffic drugs.

Now, after expanding in other northern cities such as Iquique and Arica, Tren de Aragua is preparing to fight for Antofagasta, according to consultant Zeballos. “A very violent future is foreseen in Antofagasta.”

Pedro Araya, a native of the city and a senator for the region, says the place is cursed by both its geographical position and mining wealth. Chile is the world’s largest producer of copper, and the region of Antofagasta is at the heart of the industry, with more than US$17 billion in projects in the pipeline through 2032.

“This means a higher inflow of people into the region, from mining workers to criminals looking to seize new economic opportunities,” Araya said. “There is the potential for an absolute loss of control of the northern region.”

First priority

As Chile arrests more gang members, the race is on to stop the prison system from becoming a new command nucleus for organised crime. Preventing corruption is going to be a key part of that effort.

“Criminal organisation and state corruption are two sides of the same coin,” said Fernando Guzmán, a judge who has made regular visits to Santiago I. “It is impossible to build a powerful criminal enterprise, with significant profitability, without an alliance with some state agencies.”

There have been some isolated cases of corruption among the police force and prison guards.

President Boric reiterated that public security will be a main priority for next year when he unveiled the nation’s budget proposal on September 29. He will spend an extra US$30 million in 2025 just to fight organised crime inside prisons.

“Prisons haven’t just become a school of crime,” Guzmán said. “They are also a place to finance and recruit members for organised crime.”

What that means for prisoners like Marcelo remains to be seen.

He was able to get medical assistance after his attack by telling the prison guards that he accidentally cut his arm with a can. Once away from his cell block, he was able to report what happened.

Ultimately, Marcelo was moved to a different cell for his own safety, and then to house arrest — but not before his girlfriend had wired over US$100 to his attackers. He is awaiting trail for December, with the prosecutor requesting a 10-year sentence for drug-trafficking, the harshest term possible.