Until 2022, the crime of kidnapping was a very distant reality in the Aysén Region, almost proportional to its distance from the country’s large urban centers. However, this calm was broken at the beginning of 2023, when the first two kidnappings in the history of that region occurred.
The first case involved four Colombians who kidnapped a fellow Colombian in Coyhaique due to a drug dispute, an event that occurred on January 19, 2023. In order to murder their rival, whom they stabbed in the leg (after kidnapping him from his home), the kidnappers took him to a rural area, but were arrested in the middle of a routine police check, thanks to which the victim saved his life.
The second kidnapping occurred at the end of January of that year, when a Spanish businessman was kidnapped by three Chileans, brothers, who forced him to give them large sums of money, until the victim managed to escape. While the Colombians have already been brought to trial and sentenced to five years (a sentence that was commuted to expulsion), the case of the three Chilean brothers remains under investigation.
This month, meanwhile, two other kidnappings took place.
On June 3, according to the Aysén Regional Prosecutor’s Office, a 20-year-old man was kidnapped by three individuals in the upper sector of Coyhaique. Intimidated with firearms, the victim was forced to get into the vehicle, and then they left it. Police proceedings allowed the arrest of an individual, who was accused of being an accessory, until today one of the material authors of the incident, both Chilean, was formalized.
The last kidnapping occurred on June 12 (that is, last Thursday), when a gang made up of three young Chileans, aged 16, 17 and 20, kidnapped the driver of a mobile application at 6:15 p.m. that day. Then, 40 minutes later, the defendants assaulted another person, whom they beat and stole money. Sebastián Vildósola, assistant lawyer of the Coyhaique prosecutor’s office, explained that “as a result of first-instance proceedings carried out by Carabineros personnel, the arrest of four people was achieved, three of whom were established as having direct participation in this crime, and by the way “From the procedures later carried out with personnel from the Robbery Brigade of this city, these defendants were able to be formally charged with these crimes.”
Regarding the events, he explained that “it was established that in the afternoon of June 12, four people approached a first victim, who works as a taxi driver, whom they intimidated and forced to transport them to different parts of the city of Coyhaique. During said transfer, they intercept the second victim, whom they approach inside his vehicle, intimidate him and then hit him with firearms, the victim being injured, taking away different species that he was carrying at that time.
After that, he explained that “at one point during the trips in the city of Coyhaique, the defendants forced both victims to get into a single vehicle, which was driven by one of the victims under intimidation, while the second subject was intimidated and hit on the back of the same cell phone. Regarding the background presented today before the guarantee judge of this city, the Coyhaique Guarantee Court decreed the preventive detention and provisional internment of the subjects who correspond to three people, all men, one of legal age. and two minors, the judge estimating, agreeing with the opinion of the Prosecutor’s Office, that the freedom of the accused constitutes a danger to the safety of society and the victims.”
In this regard, Subprefect Víctor Toledo, head of the PDI Robbery Investigative Brigade, said that the three defendants had a history of crimes against property and that “with the investigative work carried out and rapid coordination with the Public Ministry, they began to develop various investigative procedures, including criminal analysis, collection of statements, work with experts from our Regional Criminalistics Laboratory, among other investigation techniques, initially managing to establish the criminal dynamics and in this way position the different sites of events and their ramifications to three of its members, including the two minors.”
The relationship with drugs
In several of the kidnappings the common denominator is drug trafficking, a problem that until a few years ago seemed very minor in the region. However, as the regional prosecutor, Carlos Palma, explained last year, these have increased by almost 400% in recent years. In fact, only in the last two weeks two proceedings have been carried out in which several kilos of drugs have been seized.
The first of them, carried out by the prosecutor’s office and the OS-7 of Carabineros, took place in Coyhaique, where two subjects were detained in a vehicle check, in whose possession almost 1.5 kilos of marijuana, 156 grams of cocaine, 39 grams of ketamine and 79 grams of marijuana in vaporizers.
In the other procedure, instructed by the Public Ministry to the Navy and the PDI, in the port of Raúl Marín Balmaceda, 2.1 kilos of cocaine hydrochloride were seized, which were taken by sea, from Chiloé, to the regional capital. In this case, a Chilean and a Colombian citizen were arrested.