Organized crime in Chile has grown beyond drug trafficking. Its tentacles now reach copper, fish, and lumber – not only crushing legitimate businesses but also affecting public health and safety. Researchers say that greater cooperation within the State is needed to prevent organized crime from expanding.
Chilean think tank AthenaLab recently published a report that explains why Chile is “attractive to organized crime.” The report identified six factors that facilitate criminal enterprises in the country: institutional weakness, conflict and social unrest, social vulnerability, technology, infrastructure, and the financial system.
The report underscored institutional weakness as the most important. Criminal enterprises take advantage of the weak State: they enjoy that Chile is strong enough that it has developed services and infrastructure, relative stability, and functioning legal frameworks, but not so strong that it has the robust ability to prevent the streams of income they earn through criminal activities.
According to the AthenaLab report, Chile’s international integration (its comprehensive connections to the wider world, strong foreign trade, etc.) has also contributed to the rise of criminal networks dedicated to copper theft, illegal fishing, cybercrime, and weapons trafficking.
In an interview with investigative journalism organization Insight Crime, the lead researcher for the AthenaLab report, Pilar Lizana, said, “the state either operates as a facilitator of crime or it doesn’t.” She added that effective prevention requires “a national system against organized crime,” with a “comprehensive vision and coordinated work involving various State sectors,” including the financial, educational, judicial, health, and security sectors.
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Copper theft, Lizana said, has been an area of minimal media coverage compared to other crimes. According to her report, in 2020 alone, 257,000 tons of refined copper were stolen, a CLP$12 billion (US$14.6 million) loss for the State. Copper theft “directly affects mining companies, and has consequences for communities, which are left in the dark when power cables are cut or stolen,” she added.
Illegal fishing, according to Lizana, is another important area of burgeoning organized crime, not only due to the loss of money but also the effect these activities have on the health of those who consume poorer quality products as a result. In protecting Chile’s fishing industry, Lizana said, “the Navy, through its maritime police, plays a fundamental role.”
Lumber theft was discussed as another area of blossoming organized crime. Lizana’s report explained that such crimes likely occur due to outdated legislation that fails to facilitate prosecution.
In regards to weapons trafficking, Lizana said that the most common shipments of weapons include blank-firing guns being modified for lethal ammunition. A recent influx of such arms shipments have come from Argentina and other regions of South America.
A 2020 report, entitled, “The Global Illicit Economy: trajectories of transnational organized crime,” from Global Initiative, an organization dedicated to analyzing and responding to organized crime, shows that Chile is not alone. The report noted that “transnational organized crime is both a driver and a profiteer of many of the ills affecting our planet” and that transnational crime has been booming since the 1990s. What originally used to be seen as mafias operating out of larger cities has become a “pervasive threat to peace, injustice and development the world over.”
Ishaan Cheema is an undergraduate student at the University of Calgary, studying Kinesiology, with a focus on Exercise and Health Physiology. He always had a passion for globalism and political journalism, which he explored through Model UN conferences, debate teams, and several other extracurriculars.