Two corpses of foreigners found in northern Chile correspond to people buried alive, the Chilean justice system determined after releasing details of the case on Tuesday amid the security crisis affecting the South American nation.
The Chilean Prosecutor’s Office stated that the two bodies were found twelve days ago in Cerro Chuño, in the desert region of Arica and Parinacota, in the extreme north of the country and bordering Peru.
The human remains corresponded to two people wrapped in a nylon bag and died due to asphyxia by obstruction after being buried alive at a depth of one and a half meters and then covered with a concrete base, said the justice institution.
The Criminal Analysis Unit of the Arica Prosecutor’s Office charged members of the Los Gallegos clan, the operational arm in this city of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua, with the double crime.
The head of the Arica Homicide Squad of the Chilean Investigative Police, Subprefect Álvaro Astroza, stated that the two bodies correspond to Venezuelan citizens.
“Their identities are being verified, but options are being handled according to the information given to me by people who know them, according to the physical characteristics and tattoos on the bodies. Scientific identification through DNA is being carried out with some relatives”, he said.
During the first semester, security has been the main topic on the political and social agenda in the South American country.
The murder of Carabinero Daniel Palma on April 6, the third police officer to be killed in a month, forced the government to present a series of projects and measures to alleviate insecurity in the South American nation.
In 2022, 934 homicides were registered, which gives a rate of 4.7 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data from the Center for Crime Studies and Analysis (CEAD), of the Chilean Government’s Undersecretariat for Crime Prevention.
Although well below the regional level, this figure represented an increase of 34.33 percent over the previous year and 67.8 percent over a decade.
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