Chile: Third police murder in five days and the fraudulent campaign to reform the Carabineros
Mauricio Saavedra
41 minutes ago
In the first nine days of February 2021, Chile’s paramilitary Carabineros police force was responsible for the deaths of three young working-class men. While the institution is notorious for its brutality, the three deaths mark an intensification of class war against the youth and the working class initiated by the ultra-right government of President Sebastian Piñera and supported by the parliamentary “left.”
On February 9, Chile was convulsed by the news that two Carabineros agents Andres Navarro Pulgar and Ilton Zambrano Marin were caught assaulting and then discarding the body of a 23-year-old Bolivian, Jaime Veizaga Sánchez. Veizaga was barely alive when the cops from a checkpoint vehicle dumped him outside the Medical Legal Service in the mining town of Calama. He died before paramedics arrived at the scene.
The two cops were arrested after being charged with manslaughter and unlawful coercion. The autopsy pre-report failed to determine the exact cause of death of Jaime Veizaga, which restricted prosecutor Raúl Marabolí to indicating that “the officers did not provide adequate assistance to the victim and left him abandoned in the place where he died.” The preliminary autopsy showed “signs of non-specific systemic shock that could have an infectious origin and should be ruled out through histology” and that there were “no traumatic dynamics in the findings of the head.”
Based on these initial findings, on February 13 the Court of Guarantee (which in the Chilean judicial system examines the legality of the deprivation of liberty) ordered the two cops released and placed under nighttime house arrest and national arrest during the 200 days established for the investigation of the case.
. . .
Jaime Veizaga Sánchez is the third person to fall victim to police violence in five days. Earlier, on February 5, Francisco Martínez, a 27-year-old street performer, was shot dead by Sgt. Juan González Iturriaga over an altercation resulting from a preventive identification check. The event happened in broad daylight, in a busy thoroughfare and in view of dozens of witnesses in Panguipulli, a lakeside town in Araucanía, the poorest region in Chile.
Martínez—the uncle of Anthony Araya, the youth who was pushed off a bridge by Carabineros during anti-police violence demonstrations in Santiago the previous October—was shot five times before falling to the ground in the middle of a busy intersection. As crowds descended to the scene chanting “Murderers! Murderers!” the cops drove off leaving the dying man abandoned on the street to only reappear en masse to violently suppress the protest.
More:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/17/chil-f17.html
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This is Anthony Araya, murdered last October. Very, very young, as you can see.
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This article was posted a little over a week ago, regarding the uncle of the child shown above:
Protests erupt in Chile after police fatally shoot street juggler
https://upload.democraticunderground.com/110875193
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From last October:
BREAKING: Amnesty International Demands Investigation of Police Command
by Boris van der Spek 14 October, 2020
SANTIAGO – Amnesty International has called for an investigation into human rights violations by Chile’s national police force during the social uprising. The high command, especially, should be investigated, the organization argues. In its report, presented today, Amnesty lists hundreds of alleged human rights violations committed in just one-and-half months of observation.
With protests in Santiago and other cities across the country growing by the week, the violent responses by Chile’s national police force, Carabineros de Chile, are as if the widely condemned human rights violations from last year never happened.
Meanwhile, calls for the resignation of Carabineros top general Mario Rozas and even more drastic measures, such as starting an entirely new police institution from the ground up, are louder than ever. Amnesty International echoes those calls in a report released today.
According to the human rights organization, the violations last year were systematic and those leading the Carabineros were aware of what was happening, yet refused to stop the abuses. Today, they present their report based on one-and-a-half months of investigations into acts of violence committed by police during the social protests last year. At the presentation, Fabiola Campillai, blinded by a teargas cannister shot, will be present.
More:
https://chiletoday.cl/breaking-amnesty-international-demands-investigation-of-police-command/