Chile: Carabinieri captain convicted of failed assassination during 2019 protests

On Wednesday, Chilean justice sentenced a Carabinieri police captain for attempted murder and the illegal detention of a demonstrator during the 2019 social protests.

The events took place in oval500 km north of the city SantiagoOctober 19, 2019, the second day of demonstrations in the so-called “social explosion”, the biggest crisis since the return to democracy in 1990, which lasted more than a year with mass protests for equality.

The Ovalle Oral Criminal Court found that a uniformed officer wearing the abbreviation HRNC resisted, reduced and immobilized the victim, and then shot him in the groin at close range with a handgun.

The protester was arrested and taken to the police station in ovalpolice station, where he was “dragged, beaten, dragged by the hair and put in jail,” according to the judiciary.

The victim received a fracture in the pubic region of a serious nature, as well as wounds and minor injuries in various parts of the body.

The HRNC was also sentenced to forgery of a public document for lying in a police report indicating that the protester was the perpetrator of police brutality, facts which were denied by the judge.

Reports of human rights violations

During a social crisis in which thirty people died and several thousand were injured, international organizations such as Amnesty International (AI) or Human Rights Watch (HRW) directly pointed to the security forces in violation of human rights.

Of 10,796 complaints filed about police violence in the context of this crisis, only nine were convicted in March last year on charges of “beating, torture, murder, sexual assault and mutilation of the eyes,” according to Amnesty International.

(Information from Efe)