ST. PAUL. As soon as the news of her death after eleven days of agony broke, hundreds of young Chileans gathered in the emblematic Plaza Italia in downtown Santiago to demand justice for the first journalist murdered in Chile since the end of the dictatorship. Francisca Sandoval was 29 years old and very well known for her work as a reporter on “Señal 3” of La Victoria, a community channel that covered the problems of the working-class neighborhoods of the Chilean capital. She was a reporter with scuffed shoe soles, she was injured on May 1st, she was following the Labor Day demonstration in the Meiggs working class neighborhood. In the square there were also many neighbors of a barrio marked by the violence of the drug gangs and also by the arrogance of the itinerant trade run by the local mafia that Francisca knew well. Chilean bosses and the labor of Venezuelan, Colombian or Haitian immigrants arrived with the growing wave that upset Chile and was at the center of the latest electoral campaign, the one that brought the 36-year-old socialist Gabriel Boric to the Palazzo della Moneda. First there were shoves, then the bars appeared and finally the firearms, under the heedless eyes of the carabinieri. According to various witnesses, Francisca was shot by the convicted Marcelo Naranjo, one of the bosses in the area, who will respond to the accusation of manslaughter. Francisca struggled for eleven days in the hospital but eventually her body gave out. Her death shocked public opinion. “Thus began the worst tragedies in Latin America – said Boric himself – by attacking the free and independent press”.
The interior minister Izkia Siches, who also commands the body of the gods, also lasts carabinieri, responsible for serious violations of human rights in the street protests of 2019 and 2020. “Nobody deserves to go to work and end up like this.” Siches promised an investigation into the work of the police and an examination of the videos that portray Naranjo and his henchmen (a Colombian and a Venezuelan were also arrested with him) in collusion with the agents before attacking Sandoval. In recent years, Chile has received a wave of 700,000 Venezuelan immigrants and 200,000 Haitians and, according to the right, they are responsible for the increase in crime rates and drug dealing. The NGOs that deal with the issue and Boric himself invite us to avoid generalizations and to focus on reception policies, but people perceive another reality. In the central districts of Santiago traditional traders do not work because in front of their shops the street vendors protected by the bosses are installed, those who protest take great risks.
The crime issue contributed to Boric’s steep drop in popularity fifty days into his tenure. Then there is the problem of the reform of the body of gods carabinieri, imbued with the logic of dictatorship, made up of repression and impunity. Difficult challenges for a young president who surrounded himself with novice ministers. To all this is added the referendum on the new Constitution scheduled for September. The Charter, which retires the one inherited from Pinochet, will have a strongly progressive imprint that could scare the middle-class electorate. If Chile were rejected, it would go back two years and the backlash on the political stability of the Boric government will inevitably be felt.