Key Messages from Two National Security Experts
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During a recent seminar on organized crime and public security held in Santiago, two generals with exceptional backgrounds in national security management presented their views to an audience of officials, academics, and experts. General Miguel Ángel Ballesteros Martín, who led Spain’s National Security Department from 2018 to 2023, and General Óscar Naranjo Trujillo, former Vice President of Colombia from 2017 to 2018 and former Director of the National Police of Colombia, a recognized expert in regional security, offered complementary perspectives that, despite coming from different contexts, converge on a common diagnosis. Their messages are particularly relevant for Chile, a country currently facing a public security crisis that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.
The End of Silos
The first point of convergence between both generals is also the most structural. Both General Ballesteros and General Naranjo assert that the traditional architecture of security, which clearly separated national security from internal, public, and citizen security, is no longer functional in the face of present threats.
General Ballesteros illustrates this transformation with a concrete lesson from the pandemic. Spain categorized COVID-19 as a risk, not as a threat, and that operational distinction had real consequences for resource allocation and response capabilities. The lesson drawn is unequivocal: when risks can cause the same damage as intentional threats, maintaining them in separate categories is a strategic error. The Spanish National Security Strategy of 2021 eliminated that separation, integrating under a single framework 16 areas ranging from terrorism and cybersecurity to disinformation campaigns and economic security.
General Naranjo arrives at the same conclusion from a Latin American perspective. Transnational organized crime, he noted, no longer respects the institutional borders that states constructed in a different historical context. A phenomenon that simultaneously affects security, the economy, governance, and social cohesion cannot be managed from a single ministry or through a single institutional logic. The response must be equally transversal.
Institutional Architecture as a Structural Condition
If the diagnosis is shared, the prescription is as well. Both generals agree that addressing these threats requires integrated national security systems, with real coordination capacity among multiple state actors.
General Ballesteros accurately describes how that system functions in Spain. At the top is the Prime Minister, advised by a National Security Council primarily composed of ministers. Below, an executive Situation Committee and an inter-ministerial coordination cell, CELCOR, operate in real time during crises, meeting daily through secure channels when the situation demands. The example he provides is revealing: when Russia deployed 130,000 troops to the Ukrainian border in December 2021, Spain did not wait for the worst to happen. It activated its coordination cell, constructed five possible scenarios, and prepared responses for each. When the invasion occurred on February 24, 2022, the Spanish state already had active working groups in cybersecurity, displaced persons reception, sanctions monitoring, and energy security. Anticipation, in his view, is not prediction but structured preparation in the face of uncertainty.
General Naranjo adds a dimension that Ballesteros does not develop with the same centrality. Without institutional integrity, no architecture functions. Naming corruption, making it visible, and confronting it without fear is not an act of weakness but a prerequisite for any security strategy. Corrupt institutions not only fail but become vectors for the very crime they must combat. “Having the house in order” is, in his formulation, the prerequisite for everything else.
Intelligence as an Ecosystem
A third axis of convergence is the role of intelligence. Both generals implicitly reject the model of intelligence as a closed state monopoly and instead propose an ecosystem logic.
General Ballesteros demonstrates how that ecosystem operates in practice. The anticipation of the Ukrainian crisis was not the work of a solitary intelligence service but of an analytical system that cross-referenced confirmed information from multiple sources and translated it into actionable scenarios for different ministries. In that model, intelligence is an input for collective decision-making, not a product reserved for a select few.
General Naranjo goes further in the conceptual formulation. He argues that secrecy as a foundational value of intelligence is now a mistake. Information must flow between nations, institutions, academia, think tanks, and the private sector. Organized crime operates in networks and without borders, and confronting it with compartmentalized and secretive intelligence systems creates an asymmetry that favors the adversary. International cooperation in intelligence, he adds, is not a concession of sovereignty but a strategic imperative in a world where threats are transnational by definition.
Implications for Chile
The messages from both generals take on a particular dimension when read in the Chilean context. Chile, which for decades was seen as an exception in terms of security in Latin America, now faces a crisis that its own indicators reflect starkly. According to the AthenaLab-Ipsos survey of 2025, 81% of the public and 94% of experts identify drug trafficking and organized crime as the most serious threats to national security, figures that have steadily increased since 2020.
In light of that diagnosis, the lessons from Ballesteros and Naranjo point in a clear direction. It is not enough to make sectoral political decisions or to reinforce police capabilities in isolation. What is required is a transformation of the institutional architecture of security that integrates actors, coordinates ministries, shares intelligence, and operates with anticipation rather than reaction.
AthenaLab has precisely worked in that direction. We have developed concrete proposals in the three axes that both generals identify as central. In terms of institutional architecture, we have proposed the establishment of a National Security Architecture, with a permanent technical secretariat and a national security advisor of exclusive trust to the President of the Republic. In the field of intelligence, we have outlined the essential components of a modern national system that balances the need for confidentiality with the need to share information among institutions, incorporates artificial intelligence capabilities, and strengthens international cooperation. And in public security, we have grounded the need for a National Strategy against Organized Crime that abandons reactive logic and adopts a systemic state approach. That two generals with direct experience in managing these crises arrive at conclusions so close to those that AthenaLab has been developing is not a coincidence, but a sign that the path is charted. What remains is the will to pursue it.
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