The problem is not the head of Defense in La Araucanía

La Tercera, May 17, 2023

The marines who promptly assisted police officers under attack with long weapons in an ambush in Cañete in November 2021 are now formally charged with the alleged homicide of one of their attackers.

The trial has no clear direction, despite the efforts of the prosecutor from the Public Ministry, who is responsible for human rights cases in that region, and who also requested preventive detention for the accused, considering them a danger to society due to their possession of military-grade weapons with significant range.

Fortunately, the courts dismissed the requested precautionary measure and released them while the tortuous investigation is ongoing.

These marines are human beings, young individuals with families, parents, children… but they lack the fundamental human right to due process in Chile. They were sent by the Chilean government to risk their lives in defense of police officers and civilians under threat, fulfilling their military duty with the training, rules, and weapons provided by the State. However, when they were charged with a crime, they were not tried as military personnel, nor by military courts, but are being investigated by the prosecutor from the Public Ministry, who is unfamiliar with military personnel, their training, rules, and weapons, disregards the Military Justice Code, and ultimately violates the universal principle of specialized justice and the natural judge.

That is the problem. The issue is not any military personnel commanding the area under a state of emergency. The problem is that the military who must perform their duties do not have their minimum procedural rights recognized in the fulfillment of their military function, and for that precise reason, they lack certainty in the application of legal causes that exempt them from all responsibility in this case.

Any effort to control and extinguish armed terrorist crime in La Araucanía must involve equipping the members of the Armed Forces and Carabineros de Chile, who perform these military functions under states of constitutional exception, with the powers derived from legitimate defense and guarantees of due process through specialized justice and a natural judge, without distorting those rights—as the government has attempted to do—with the bill on Rules of Use of Force.

Sending a military force to impose the rule of law, without the minimum jurisdictional guarantees—recognized even internationally for military personnel performing military functions—not only counteracts the objective being pursued, but is clearly immoral.

John Griffiths
Head of Studies, AthenaLab

Julio Leiva
Chairman of the Advisory Council, AthenaLab

Source: La Tercera