By Sebastián Betancourt
The division of the national territory into macro zones is strengthening the work carried out by the Public Prosecutor’s Office to confront organized crime that uses Chilean ports to carry out its illicit activity.
The spatial segmentation made it possible to focus the State’s efforts, through greater capacities with a local approach that addresses the problem of trafficking in port facilities from a local perspective, considering the specific elements and characteristics of criminal dynamics.
In this regard, Ignacio Castillo Val, director of the Specialized Unit for Organized Crime and Drugs of the National Prosecutor’s Office, explained that “the important thing is what the State is doing differently to combat trafficking in our ports. From the point of view of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, since the National Prosecutor, Ángel Valencia, took office, he made working in ports to prevent drug trafficking one of his priorities and commissioned the creation of a port project.”
Along these lines, Castillo added that “the port project did was divide our country into macro zones so that a regional prosecutor would be in charge of each one to give it more professionalism and specialization, improving inter-agency coordination with the rest of the institutions and being able to identify phenomena that are different. We have seen this exactly, the phenomenon of organized crime associated with port drug trafficking in the north, in Arica and Iquique, is very different from what it is, for example, in Valparaíso and San Antonio, and even the southern zone, that is, Bio Bio, Los Ríos and Los Lagos, but it is also different from what it is in the far south.”
“So, the first thing was to design that. The second is to keep working to achieve results and I believe that the results we have seen, whether in the Valparaíso Region and, more recently, in the Arica Region – where more than 100 tons of cocaine were seized – show that this work is being done. What we seek is to protect our ports to also protect our country, a port and coastal country, therefore, that is also its commercial asset. We must strengthen it to take care of it,” added the lawyer.
Regarding the resources and technologies available to combat crime in national ports, the unit director stated that “organized crime will always seek mechanisms to anticipate, gain ground on the State and have more technology than the State. I can speak from our area of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and I recognize that we have seen a significant strengthening of our institutionality.”
“Today we have the Ecoh project (Organized Crime and Homicide Teams), for example, which although it is not related to the port issue, is related to organized crime and, particularly, its harshest face with homicides, kidnappings; but also in port matters we have had some resources to improve our profiling centers and, especially in the institutions, the availability and exchange of information also show that we have adequate resources,” he added.
From a broader perspective, Ignacio Castillo Val addressed the evolution of organized crime in South America regarding the use of ports as a space for drug trafficking.
From that perspective, he pointed to the possibility that the implementation of the Bioceanic Corridor between Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil could be used as an axis of new opportunities for illegal activity.
“Criminal organizations were very focused on the northern part of our continent, basically in Brazil and Colombia. We also had important cases of trafficking through our coasts, but basically because it was said that Chile was a transit country, where they somehow cleaned the routes with our ports,” he stated.
“Now, the trafficking situation in South America has been changing, in the sense that criminal organizations have also changed ports, because this is like a balloon: you squeeze it on one side and the air comes out the other; that has to do with what happened in Ecuador, for example, where violence associated with port trafficking increased sharply, and the risks that could also occur in Chile, regarding the Bioceanic Corridor,” affirmed the head of the Specialized Unit.
Regarding the logistical road project, Castillo explained that “on the one hand, it has a huge advantage from the economic and commercial point of view of our ports, but that is where some, the good ones, see legitimate business opportunities, while those on the other side of the law see these types of corridors and crossings as opportunities to further strengthen their organized crime.”
“This is an issue that the country is seeing, but we as the Public Prosecutor’s Office are seeing it in the Antofagasta Region. The regional prosecutor has a very serious commitment to this issue, but also – it is worth saying – the Supraterritorial Prosecutor’s Office, which is a recent institution of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, also has a perspective on this phenomenon and will have an impact on what happens there,” assured the director.
