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At least 350 carabinieri in civilian clothes operated daily in the Metropolitan Region during the first weeks of the social outbreak, reaching a peak of 505 undercover officials on October 23, the day the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) called for a national strike.
These are part of the background revealed in a report by The Public, an NGO that seeks to promote, maximize and strengthen access to information in Chile, which developed a map of the deployment of these agents between October 18 and November 12, 2019, through a Transparency request.
The conduct of these troops was the subject of a strong controversy in the days of the outbreak, through viralized kidnapping records on social networks, such as the arrest of people in the downtown area by civilian officials who were mobilizing in vehicles individuals.
One of the emblematic cases happened on November 5, when a couple was arrested on the corner of Santo Domingo with Teatinos. According to the data of The PublicThat day there were 46 undercover police officers in the Santiago commune and 492 in the entire region.
Carabineros response
Last November, the general director of the Carabineros, Mario Rozas, justified the actions of the so-called “Civil Commission”, pointing out that these are procedures that are completely in accordance with protocol and “duly authorized.”
But the institution denied access to the detail requested by The Public, arguing that its disclosure would affect “the proper fulfillment of the functions of the Carabineros, since said personnel carry out operational tasks in safeguarding order and public safety, and whose number, distribution, orders and action protocols respond to surveillance studies and protection of the population ”.
For this reason, the organization filed an appeal before the Council for Transparency (CPLT), which ordered the Carabineros to deliver the data, since “it was not possible to prove that the publicity of said information, of a general and quantitative nature, has sufficient potential to affect (…) the due performance of the organ’s functions or national security ”.
Based on the CPLT’s decision, Carabineros had to deliver the figures with the number of officials appointed to the Civil Commission between the requested dates, specifying the number of officers (OFL) and institutional appointed personnel (PNI) – policemen and non-commissioned officers who are appointed directly by the director general—, the communes, prefectures and police stations.
Likewise, the institution only limited in its response to The Public that “civilian personnel, which by the way is a minority with respect to uniformed personnel, belongs to specialized units that are assigned to specific tasks such as criminal investigation of crimes and criminal organizations, human trafficking, search of persons and vehicles, and investigation of drug and narcotics trafficking and intelligence work, all of the foregoing either autonomously or under the direction of the Public Ministry ”.
It should be remembered that, as a result of the arrests that occurred during the social outbreak, five senators entered a bill, which aims to increase transparency in the operation of the carabineros in plain clothes. “There were very violent arrests with this way of proceeding and where there are also reports of people who said that they were ‘caught’ and taken to other places. The complaint that Human Rights and civil society organizations have made is that there may be groups of police who are acting autonomously or without hierarchical control, violating all kinds of institutional protocol and that is very serious in a democracy, ”warned the senator Juan Ignacio Latorre (RD).
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