Iquique, June 2024.
The lawyer and academic from the University of Tarapacá (UTA), Marcela Tapia, highlighted the variations that have existed in the region, regarding the crime of human trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation, stating that “Tarapacá has the highest rate nationwide. , but, in addition, from 2018 to 2023 it has reported a 100% participation of foreign victims.”
The assertion was made in the context of the seminar “Smuggling, illegal trade and organized crime: the economic and legal perspective in Tarapacá”, organized jointly by the Faculty of Administration and Economics of the UTA and the FIC project, Tarapacá Microdata Center (CEMIT), financed by the Regional Government of Tarapacá.
Tapia added that “this means that opportunity, in terms of marginality and vulnerability, has influenced the establishment of certain markets and with respect to these groups of special protection, such as migrations that have occurred in a forced context. , makes it especially vulnerable and susceptible to victims of this type of crime.”
In his presentation “Dynamics of Organized Crime in the Northern Macrozone”, he also explained the understanding of organized crime from a business perspective of the phenomenon, “this facilitates the correct identification of service chains, competitive advantages, and certainly the role that the people who make up this structure and this criminal plan are having, which allows us to correctly clarify the different hypotheses at the legal level of participation and criminal typology.”
From that perspective, in his explanation, he commented on the dynamics of the main criminal businesses in the northern macrozone, “highlighting the greatest concentration of businesses linked to drug trafficking, human trafficking, migrant trafficking and vehicle theft, where the latter has strengthened financing for illicit activities.”
REGION LEADS TRAFFIC
In relation to the crime of drug trafficking, the trend has been in the last five years, in the Tarapacá Region, to be positioned in first place. “This means that Tarapacá almost quadruples the national rate regarding complaints linked to this crime per 100 thousand inhabitants. This is replicated with neighboring regions, and means that effectively the territorial component has a correlation in relation to the data, since Tarapacá and its borders are situated as a gateway, collection, but also the transfer of these substances to other parts of the region,” indicated the lawyer and teacher.
For her part, UTA academic Dr. Romina Ramos, in her presentation “The gray areas of migrant smuggling in Chile,” believes that “the lack of effectiveness of the law regarding persecution is relevant.” of the crime of smuggling of migrants. We must work, also at an institutional level, to improve this effectiveness in terms of criminal prosecution.”
It is for this reason that he believes that the normative terms of the criminal offense should be discussed. “Thirteen years have passed since the promulgation of the Law (No. 20,507) on Human Trafficking and Trafficking, and criminal complexity, especially within the framework of new digital processes. Anyway, without a doubt in thirteen years the situation has changed. I believe that the law should be reviewed, not from a perspective of penal or punitive populism, but rather from a perspective of putting emphasis on the factors that we have identified with the evidence that we have gathered, I am not referring only to the UTA, but that probably in other universities that allow long-term decisions to be made, that are not short-term decisions, because ultimately they do not contribute to us working to reduce the indicators of criminal complexity or organized crime,” stated Dr. Ramos.
The UTA academic and director of CEMIT, Dr. Iván Valdés, expressed “I value the presentations of our colleagues at the university, which strengthen the diagnosis that indicates that the borders of the Tarapacá Region allow all kinds of flow of goods and people. , which puts strong pressure on regional and local authorities to allocate resources to advanced research into these phenomena, which ranges from the field of generating fine information to means to combat them.”
In fact, Valdés indicated that “the regional development of its markets -mainly associated with Zofri users-, but above all, the success of the Capricorn Corridor that is projected to begin operating in the coming years, including this region, depends strongly of the regional capacities to control smuggling, illegal trade, and the migratory flows observed in recent years.”
In this sense, he highlighted that “it is necessary to make a qualitative and quantitative leap in the control of merchandise traffic especially to and from Bolivia and Paraguay (especially cigarettes, clothing and liquor), which will give confidence to Brazilian importers and exporters to use our roads as a means to get their products abroad.”
