CL-I-05: Carabineros de Chile and the Police-Reform Question (1990–2026)

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1. Key Takeaways

  • Carabineros de Chile is a militarised national gendarmerie, founded on 27 April 1927 by Colonel (later President) Carlos Ibáñez del Campo through the merger of the army's Cuerpo de Carabineros with the fiscal and communal police forces. The institution's defining features — national scope, military rank structure and discipline, barracks culture, a single General Director commanding the entire force, and a strict separation from the civilian investigative police (the PDI) — were set at the founding and have survived every subsequent political regime: the Ibáñez dictatorship, the 1932–1973 democratic period, the Pinochet dictatorship (in which Carabineros General Director César Mendoza sat as a member of the original junta), and the post-1990 democracy. The 2019–2026 reform debate is best understood as the first sustained attempt since 1927 to revisit those founding features — and, as of 2026, the attempt has substantially failed.

  • The democratic transition of 1990 left Carabineros with an autonomy unusual among democratic police forces. The Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Carabineros (Law No. 18,961, promulgated in the final weeks of the dictatorship in 1990) was one of the leyes de amarre — the "binding laws" through which the outgoing regime entrenched institutional protections. It placed Carabineros under the Ministry of Defence rather than the Interior Ministry, protected the General Director from presidential removal, and insulated internal promotion, doctrine, education, and intelligence from civilian oversight. The 2005 constitutional reforms restored the President's power to remove the General Director; Law No. 20,502 of 2011 moved the force to the new Ministry of the Interior and Public Security. But the internal architecture — the closed officer-formation system, the autonomous intelligence and procurement apparatus, the military justice jurisdiction over much police conduct — remained substantially intact into the estallido period.

  • For most of the post-1990 period, Carabineros was among the most trusted institutions in Chile and the most trusted police force in Latin America [TBD-VERIFY: Latinobarómetro and CEP series consistently placed Carabineros confidence in the 50–60 per cent range through the early 2010s, far above congress, parties, and most regional police forces — exact series values to be confirmed]. This trust capital was the institution's principal political asset: it deterred reform, justified autonomy, and made Carabineros a third-rail issue for both Concertación and centre-right governments. The 2016–2019 scandal sequence destroyed this asset with extraordinary speed.

  • The pre-estallido legitimacy collapse ran through three episodes. First, the Pacogate procurement-and-payroll fraud revealed in 2017: a years-long embezzlement scheme inside the Carabineros finance apparatus, initially estimated at CLP 28 billion and ultimately assessed at over CLP 35 billion [TBD-VERIFY: final fraud total — figures cited across the investigation range from CLP 28 billion to over CLP 35 billion (roughly USD 40–60 million); the case is described as the largest fraud in the history of a Chilean public institution], with well over a hundred officers and former officers charged. Second, Operación Huracán (2017–2018): the Carabineros intelligence unit fabricated digital evidence — planted WhatsApp messages generated by a purported software tool — to justify the arrest of Mapuche leaders including Héctor Llaitul; prosecutors discovered the fabrication in January 2018, the case collapsed, and senior intelligence officers were themselves prosecuted. Third, the killing of Camilo Catrillanca on 14 November 2018: a 24-year-old Mapuche community member, grandson of a lonko of Temucuicui, shot in the back of the head by members of the Comando Jungla tactical deployment; officers initially claimed a confrontation and destroyed camera evidence, and the unraveling of the cover-up forced the resignation of General Director Hermes Soto in December 2018. By October 2019, the institution entered the estallido with its legitimacy already broken among precisely the populations it would be ordered to police.

  • The estallido of October–December 2019 (see CL-C-02 for the event record) converted the legitimacy crisis into a human-rights crisis of international scale: 36 INDH-recorded deaths in the protest context, more than 400 ocular-trauma cases [TBD-VERIFY: INDH documented 460 eye-injury cases through end-November 2019, approximately 280 involving partial or complete vision loss — the most concentrated epidemic of protest eye injuries documented anywhere in the world to that date], over 28,000 detentions, and findings by the INDH, the UN OHCHR mission, the IACHR, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch that the use of force violated international standards in a pattern that Amnesty's Eyes on Chile report (October 2020) attributed to command responsibility, not individual deviation. This document treats the estallido from the institutional side: what the command did, what accountability followed, and what did not.

  • The accountability record is thin relative to the documented harm. General Director Mario Rozas — recorded telling subordinates words to the effect that he would discharge no one for police procedure, "aunque me obliguen a pasar a retiro" [TBD-VERIFY: the leaked Rozas recording, widely reported in December 2019, is paraphrased across sources as "no voy a dar de baja a nadie por un procedimiento policial, aunque me obliguen a pasar a retiro" — verbatim text to be confirmed against the original audio transcript] — survived a constitutional accusation attempt and resigned only in November 2020, after carabineros shot two adolescents inside a SENAME children's residence in Talcahuano. Of the thousands of criminal complaints arising from the estallido, only a small fraction produced charges and a far smaller number produced convictions; the emblematic convictions (Patricio Maturana for blinding Fabiola Campillai, sentenced in 2022; Claudio Crespo for blinding Gustavo Gatica, convicted in 2024) [TBD-VERIFY: sentence lengths and appeal status in both cases] stand against a background of mass dismissal of cases. General Director Ricardo Yáñez was himself summoned for formalización on charges of omission; he resigned in 2024 ahead of the hearing [TBD-VERIFY: precise resignation date and the current procedural status of the Yáñez case].

  • The structural-reform window of 2019–2021 closed without structural reform. The Piñera government channelled the pressure into commissions and a coordination unit; the Convención Constitucional debated redefining the police as civilian and non-militarised, but the draft containing that redefinition was rejected in the September 2022 plebiscite (CL-K-05); the Boric government entered office committed to "refounding" debates in its political hinterland but, confronted with a rising homicide rate, an organised-crime panic centred on the Tren de Aragua, and the political salience of irregular migration, pivoted within eighteen months to a modernisation-plus-strengthening agenda agreed with the right: the Naín–Retamal law of April 2023 expanding privileged self-defence for police, a rules-on-use-of-force statute, budget and personnel increases, and the creation of the Ministry of Public Security (operational from 2025) [TBD-VERIFY: Law No. 21,730 creating the Ministerio de Seguridad Pública and the April 2025 appointment of its first minister].

  • The central paradox of the period: Carabineros was re-legitimised without being reformed. Public confidence in the force, which collapsed to historic lows in 2019–2020, recovered substantially from 2022 onward as crime displaced inequality as the dominant public concern [TBD-VERIFY: CEP and Cadem confidence series showing Carabineros trust recovering to majority levels by 2023–2024]. The killings of carabineros on duty in 2022–2023 — and the political response to them — converted the institution from the symbol of state violence into the symbol of a state under attack. The reform debate did not conclude; it was overtaken.

  • The Kast government inaugurated in March 2026 (CL-E-01, CL-E-02, CL-D-07) has adopted the most explicitly pro-Carabineros posture of any government since 1990: expanded recruitment, hardened rules of engagement on the northern border and in the Macrozona Sur, and a rhetorical restoration of the institution's honour. Two readings coexist and the corpus records both: the restoration-of-order reading, in which a functioning state requires a confident police and the 2019–2021 delegitimisation campaign was itself a governance failure; and the deferred-accountability reading, in which the underlying institutional defects — autonomy, opacity, the intelligence apparatus, the militarised doctrine — remain exactly as they were in 2019, and the conditions for the next crisis are preserved rather than resolved.

  • In comparative Latin American terms, Chile's trajectory is distinctive on three axes: the police entered the crisis from a high-trust baseline (unlike Mexico or Colombia); the reform debate was constitutionalised and therefore died with the constitutional drafts; and the counter-reform was driven not by authoritarian reversal but by democratic public opinion responding to a real deterioration in security. Chile neither militarised policing further (the Mexican Guardia Nacional path) nor cosmetically rebranded riot police (the Colombian post-2021 path); it returned, with higher budgets and a new ministry above it, to the institution of 1927.

2. Institutional Architecture and the Democratic Transition

2.1 The 1927 Founding and the Gendarmerie Model

Carabineros de Chile was created by Decree-Law No. 2,484 of 27 April 1927, under the government of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, by fusing the army's Cuerpo de Carabineros (a mounted military police corps dating to 1903) with the heterogeneous fiscal police and communal police forces that had until then operated under municipal and provincial control. The founding choice was deliberate and consequential: Chile adopted the continental gendarmerie model — a single national force, militarily organised, hierarchically commanded by a General Director of general-officer rank, formed in its own closed academies (the Escuela de Carabineros for officers, the Escuela de Formación Policial for the rank-and-file personal de nombramiento institucional), housed partly in barracks, and subject to military-style discipline — rather than the municipal or civilian-commission models found in the Anglo-American world.

The model had a domestic political logic. Ibáñez, himself a carabinero officer by formation, sought a police force loyal to the central state and insulated from the local political bosses who had controlled the communal police. The institutional motto — Orden y Patria — and the institutional self-understanding as a fourth armed force (alongside the army, navy, and air force) date from this founding settlement. Throughout the 1932–1973 democratic period, Carabineros operated under the Interior Ministry for operational purposes while retaining its military character; it policed the routine life of a democracy — including, controversially, episodes of lethal repression of strikes and land occupations — without the institution itself becoming a deliberative political actor.

2.2 The Pinochet-Era Militarisation

The 11 September 1973 coup incorporated Carabineros into the governing junta: General Director César Mendoza Durán signed the coup proclamation as one of the four junta members (see CL-K-03), having displaced superiors who declined to join. Two structural changes followed. First, in 1974–1975 Carabineros was transferred from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of National Defence, formalising its identity as a military body and placing it institutionally alongside the armed forces rather than the civilian administration. Second, the force was integrated into the repressive apparatus: carabineros participated in detentions, torture, and killings documented by the Rettig (1991) and Valech (2004) commissions, and the force maintained its own intelligence organs alongside the DINA and CNI.

Mendoza's own exit prefigured the scandal dynamics of the 2010s: he resigned in August 1985 after the Caso Degollados, in which members of the Carabineros intelligence unit DICOMCAR kidnapped and cut the throats of three Communist Party members. The case demonstrated a pattern that would recur — an autonomous intelligence apparatus operating criminally, an institutional reflex toward denial, and accountability arriving only at the level of an individual resignation while the architecture survived.

2.3 Law 18,961 and the Leyes de Amarre

In the final phase of the dictatorship, the regime promulgated the Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Carabineros, Law No. 18,961 (1990) — part of the package of leyes de amarre through which the outgoing regime entrenched institutional protections against the incoming democracy. The law and the 1980 Constitution's accompanying provisions established: (i) Carabineros's dependence on the Ministry of Defence, not Interior; (ii) the irremovability of the General Director, appointed for a fixed term from among the most senior generals and not subject to discretionary presidential removal — the same protection enjoyed by the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces; (iii) institutional control over its own promotion lists, doctrine, education, and internal discipline; and (iv) the broad jurisdiction of military justice over offences committed by carabineros, including violence against civilians.

The practical consequence through the 1990s was that the Concertación governments exercised civilian control over Carabineros by negotiation rather than by command. The Aylwin and Frei governments, managing simultaneous tensions with the army (Pinochet remained army commander-in-chief until 1998), had limited political capital to spend on police reform; the force's high public standing (Section 3) made the expenditure seem unnecessary. The governments directed police deployment through the Interior Ministry's public-order powers while the institution governed itself.

2.4 The 2005 and 2011 Adjustments

Two later adjustments partially normalised the constitutional position. The 2005 constitutional reforms under Ricardo Lagos (see CL-A-01) removed the irremovability of the commanders-in-chief and the General Director of Carabineros: Article 104 of the reformed constitution empowered the President to remove them by founded decree, informing Congress. The 2011 reform under Sebastián Piñera — Law No. 20,502, creating the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security — finally transferred Carabineros (and the PDI) from Defence to Interior, sixty-eight years after the transfer in the other direction. Formal civilian authority was thereby restored on paper.

The limits of the adjustment deserve emphasis, because they explain 2019. The 2005 and 2011 reforms changed who the institution answered to, not what the institution was. The closed formation system, the two-track class structure (officers versus suboficiales, with separate schools and largely separate careers), the institutional intelligence apparatus, the procurement and finance autonomy, the military-justice jurisdiction (narrowed for civilian victims only by Law No. 20,477 of 2010, after the Inter-American Court's Palamara judgment), and the doctrine of public-order policing built around the Control de Orden Público units and their riot equipment all remained internal matters. No external inspectorate, no independent complaints commission, and no parliamentary oversight mechanism specific to policing existed in 2019 — and none exists in 2026.

2.5 Carabineros and the PDI: The Division of Labour

Chile's second police force, the Policía de Investigaciones (PDI), founded as a separate civilian institution in 1933, provides the structural contrast. The PDI is plainclothes, civilian in status, investigative in function, and works under the direction of the public prosecutors (the Ministerio Público, created by the 1997–2005 criminal-procedure reform). Carabineros holds preventive policing, public order, traffic, and rural coverage; both forces investigate crime under prosecutorial direction, generating a continuous low-grade institutional rivalry over jurisdiction, budget, and prestige.

The division matters for the reform debate in two ways. First, the PDI demonstrates that a civilian police is not foreign to Chilean institutional tradition — a point reform advocates pressed repeatedly after 2019. Second, the PDI's own scandals (including the 2024 resignation of Director General Sergio Muñoz over leaking information to a criminal-case target [TBD-VERIFY: status of the Muñoz prosecution]) complicated the simple narrative that civilianisation alone produces probity.

3. The Trust Era and Its Erosion (1990–2019)

3.1 Latin America's Most Trusted Police

From the transition until roughly the mid-2010s, Carabineros enjoyed a public standing that was the envy of every interior ministry in the region. Regional survey series consistently ranked it at or near the top of Latin American police forces in public confidence [TBD-VERIFY: Latinobarómetro cross-national police-confidence series; CEP national series placing Carabineros confidence in the 50–60 per cent range through the early 2010s, typically second only to the armed forces and far above congress and the parties]. The sources of the trust were real: by regional standards the force was professional, low in petty corruption (carabineros do not, as a norm, solicit bribes at traffic stops — a fact every Chilean motorist could verify against experience elsewhere in the region), nationally present including in remote rural areas, and effective in routine order maintenance.

The trust had a sociological structure that mattered later. It was strongest among older, wealthier, and more conservative Chileans and weakest among the young, the poor, and the Mapuche — the populations with the most adversarial contact with the force, through the policing of student protests (2006, 2011 — see CL-A-01, CL-A-02), of poor poblaciones, and of the Araucanía conflict (CL-C-03). The aggregate numbers concealed a distributional reality: Carabineros was trusted most by those it protected and least by those it policed. The estallido inverted the salience of the two experiences.

3.2 Pacogate (2016–2017): The Money

The first pillar to fall was financial probity. In late 2016 and 2017, an investigation originating in irregular payments detected by the Comptroller-General and pursued by prosecutors in Magallanes uncovered a payroll-and-procurement embezzlement network operating for years inside the Carabineros finance directorate. The scheme — quickly labelled Pacogate, from paco, the Chilean slang for police — involved fraudulent transfers to officers' accounts disguised within the institution's payroll system. The initially reported figure of approximately CLP 28 billion grew as the investigation widened; later assessments exceeded CLP 35 billion [TBD-VERIFY: final consolidated fraud figure; the case is consistently described as the largest fraud against a public institution in Chilean history], and more than 130 officers, former officers, and civilians were eventually charged [TBD-VERIFY: total number charged and convicted across the case clusters].

The institutional damage exceeded the monetary loss. The fraud had run through the very autonomy the institution had defended as professional necessity: internal finance, internal audit, internal discipline. General Director Bruno Villalobos — whose own conduct in the period drew scrutiny — presided over an institution that had detected nothing for years. The Piñera government replaced Villalobos with Hermes Soto in March 2018 with an explicit mandate of institutional cleanup; Soto would last nine months.

3.3 Operación Huracán (2017–2018): The Intelligence Apparatus

The second pillar was operational integrity. In September 2017, Carabineros's specialised intelligence unit in the Araucanía announced Operación Huracán: the arrest of eight Mapuche leaders, including Héctor Llaitul of the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM — see CL-C-03), on charges of orchestrating arson attacks, based on intercepted WhatsApp and Telegram messages allegedly extracted by a software tool called Antorcha, developed by a civilian contractor working with the unit.

In January 2018 the case collapsed in the most damaging way possible: prosecutors of the Ministerio Público concluded that the incriminating messages had been fabricated and planted — implanted on the defendants' seized telephones — and that Antorcha did not function as claimed. The Temuco prosecutor's office opened criminal proceedings against the Carabineros intelligence officers themselves, including the head of intelligence General Gonzalo Blu, for obstruction and falsification [TBD-VERIFY: outcomes of the Blu and associated prosecutions, which proceeded through 2019–2023 with mixed results]. The episode placed on the public record a fact previously confined to Mapuche testimony: that the institution's intelligence apparatus was capable of manufacturing evidence against citizens, and that the internal hierarchy had either directed it or failed to detect it. The echo of DICOMCAR was drawn explicitly in public commentary.

3.4 The Catrillanca Killing (November 2018): The Cover-Up

The third pillar was truthfulness about lethal force. On 14 November 2018, in the community of Temucuicui (Ercilla, Araucanía), members of the Comando Jungla — the tactical GOPE deployment to the Macrozona Sur, publicised by the government months earlier with imagery of jungle-warfare training — pursued suspects after a vehicle theft and shot Camilo Catrillanca, a 24-year-old Mapuche comunero and grandson of a lonko of Temucuicui, in the back of the head as he drove a tractor accompanied by a fifteen-year-old. Catrillanca was unarmed and uninvolved in the theft.

The institutional response followed the established reflex: officers initially claimed an armed confrontation; it then emerged that a participating officer's helmet-camera memory card had been destroyed and that officers had been instructed in the false account. The cover-up unravelled within weeks under prosecutorial and journalistic pressure. General Director Hermes Soto resigned in December 2018 after contradicting the government over responsibility for the false account; Interior Minister Andrés Chadwick survived politically but carried the case into the estallido period. In January 2021, the Angol tribunal convicted Sergeant Carlos Alarcón as the shooter and convicted additional officers and a civilian official for the cover-up [TBD-VERIFY: Alarcón's sentence — reported as in excess of eleven years for homicidio simple and attempted homicide of the minor — and the full schedule of co-defendant sentences].

The Catrillanca case completed the pre-estallido arc. Within twenty-four months, the public had been shown that the institution stole (Pacogate), fabricated (Huracán), and killed and lied (Catrillanca). Confidence series registered the collapse: Carabineros confidence fell from majority levels to the low thirties and below by 2019 [TBD-VERIFY: CEP series values 2016–2019]. When the estallido arrived in October 2019, the force confronted the largest public-order crisis since 1990 with its credibility already spent — a sequencing that belongs in any explanation of both the violence of its response and the public's refusal to extend it the benefit of the doubt.

4. The Estallido and the Human-Rights Crisis (October 2019 – 2020)

The event record of the estallido — the fare-evasion campaign, the 18 October rupture, the state of emergency, the protest cycle, and the 15 November 2019 constitutional accord — is carried by CL-C-02 and is not repeated here. This section treats the crisis from inside the institution: the operational conduct, the command posture, and the accountability mechanics that followed.

4.1 The Protest-Policing Record

The core of the institutional record is the pattern of force documented by four independent bodies whose findings converged. The INDH (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos), deploying observers to streets, commissaries, and hospitals from the first days, recorded by year-end 36 deaths in the protest context, over 28,000 detentions, thousands of injuries, and the defining figure of the crisis: more than 400 ocular-trauma cases — 460 by end-November 2019 on the INDH count, approximately 280 involving partial or complete loss of vision [TBD-VERIFY: final consolidated INDH eye-injury tally; the figure is cited variously as 460 (end-November 2019) and over 400 sustained across the protest period] — caused overwhelmingly by 12-gauge shotgun pellets (perdigones) and tear-gas canisters fired at head height. A University of Chile study published during the crisis found that the perdigones contained only a minor fraction of rubber, the balance being silica and lead compounds [TBD-VERIFY: composition percentages from the November 2019 Universidad de Chile study], contradicting the institution's characterisation of the munition as non-lethal rubber shot; Carabineros suspended general use of the munition on 19 November 2019.

The UN OHCHR mission (30 October – 22 November 2019) found that the management of assemblies was "carried out in a fundamentally repressive manner" and documented unlawful killings, torture and ill-treatment, sexual violence in detention, and arbitrary detention. The IACHR reached parallel conclusions. Amnesty International's October 2020 report Eyes on Chile advanced the most institutionally pointed finding: that the pattern of eye injuries was known to the command within days, that the command had the information and authority to stop it, and that its failure to do so engaged command responsibility up to and including General Director Mario Rozas. Human Rights Watch (November 2019) framed its findings explicitly as a case for police reform. The convergence matters analytically: the four bodies differed in mandate and method, and the institution's defence — that violations were individual excesses within a generally lawful operation under unprecedented attack (and the force did absorb genuine violence: commissaries assaulted, hundreds of carabineros injured) — never produced a counter-record of comparable evidentiary weight.

4.2 The Command Posture: Rozas and "No Daré de Baja a Nadie"

Mario Rozas Córdova had become General Director in December 2018, after Soto's fall over Catrillanca, as the cleanup candidate. His estallido-period posture became the emblem of institutional closure. In a recording leaked in December 2019, Rozas told officers of a Santiago unit words reported as: "no voy a dar de baja a nadie por un procedimiento policial, aunque me obliguen a pasar a retiro" — I will not discharge anyone over a police procedure, even if they force me to retire [TBD-VERIFY: verbatim transcript of the leaked audio; the phrase is consistently reported in this form across La Tercera, CIPER, and El Mostrador coverage but should be confirmed against the original recording]. As a statement of command intent issued while the INDH was documenting hundreds of eye injuries, it was read by the human-rights bodies as confirmation of the command-responsibility thesis: impunity was not a failure of the disciplinary system but its instruction.

Rozas survived the estallido year. President Piñera publicly backed him through 2020 — the government's calculation, against an ongoing public-order crisis and with its own political survival in question, was that decapitating the force mid-crisis was riskier than enduring the criticism. A constitutional accusation against Rozas was prepared in Congress [TBD-VERIFY: procedural fate of the accusation]. The end came on 19 November 2020, when carabineros fired shotguns during an intervention at a SENAME children's residence in Talcahuano, wounding two adolescents in state care. Rozas resigned the same week and was replaced by Ricardo Yáñez. It is a precise measure of the period that the General Director consumed by the estallido fell not for the 460 eye injuries but for an unrelated shooting of children a year later.

4.3 The Prosecutions Record

The judicial accountability that followed is best described as emblematic conviction against background impunity. The Fiscalía received thousands of criminal complaints for estallido-period violence — over 8,500 cases against state agents on the Fiscalía's own consolidated count [TBD-VERIFY: consolidated complaint and case figures; civil-society tallies and Fiscalía reports differ in counting methodology]. The overwhelming majority were closed without charges, a pattern the victims' organisations, the INDH, and international observers attributed to evidentiary obstruction (unidentifiable helmeted officers, missing camera records, institutional non-cooperation) and to prosecutorial triage; by the fifth anniversary in October 2024, convictions numbered in the low dozens against the thousands of complaints [TBD-VERIFY: conviction totals as of 2024–2025].

The emblematic cases produced the exceptions. Fabiola Campillai — a worker blinded in both eyes, with loss of smell and taste, by a tear-gas canister fired by Captain Patricio Maturana as she walked to a night shift in San Bernardo in November 2019, having taken no part in any protest — saw Maturana convicted and sentenced in 2022 to twelve years [TBD-VERIFY: sentence and current custodial status]; Campillai was elected to the Senate in 2021 with the highest independent vote in the country, the human cost of the crisis converted into an institutional presence inside the legislature. Gustavo Gatica — a psychology student blinded in both eyes by perdigones on 8 November 2019 — saw Lieutenant Colonel Claudio Crespo convicted in 2024 [TBD-VERIFY: sentence and appeal status]. Both prosecutions took years, against active institutional friction, and both concerned victims whose total blindness and manifest innocence made them politically unanswerable. The mass of partial blindings, beatings, and detention abuses produced almost no equivalent outcomes — the mechanics of accountability functioned only at the extreme tail of the harm distribution.

The command level escaped judicial consequence longest. In 2024, the Fiscalía moved to formalise charges against General Director Ricardo Yáñez himself — for omission, as the senior commander of public order during the estallido period (Yáñez had been Director of Order and Security under Rozas). After months in which the government resisted demanding his exit while the formalización was repeatedly postponed, Yáñez resigned in 2024, days before the scheduled hearing [TBD-VERIFY: exact resignation date — reported as taking effect in March–April 2024 — and the subsequent procedural trajectory of the case, including the status of charges as of 2026], and was succeeded by Marcelo Araya Zapata. The spectacle of a sitting General Director under criminal formalisation for estallido-period command conduct, retained in office for months by a left government elected on the promise of police reform, is treated in Section 5 as the clearest single illustration of how the political economy of reform had inverted.

5. The Reform Debate (2020–2026): From Refoundation to Modernisation

5.1 The Piñera-Period Machinery (2019–2021)

The Piñera government's response to the institutional crisis followed the classic containment sequence: acknowledge, commission, absorb. In November 2019 the government announced a reform of Carabineros among its crisis measures; a consultative panel of experts (drawing on prior work by Espacio Público, the CEP, and the 2018 Acuerdo Nacional por la Seguridad Pública) produced recommendations on oversight, transparency, use-of-force standards, and career structure; in 2020 the government created a coordination unit for police reform in the Interior Ministry and tabled a bill on modernisation of the police [TBD-VERIFY: legislative fate of the Piñera-period modernisation bill, elements of which were folded into later statutes]. Tear-gas and shotgun protocols were rewritten; the perdigones were restricted; human-rights units and training modules were created inside the force.

What the machinery did not touch was the architecture: command autonomy, the closed formation system, intelligence, military justice, external oversight. By design, the deep questions were deferred to the constitutional process that the November 2019 accord had opened — which meant that the structural reform of Carabineros was staked, without anyone deciding it deliberately, on the fate of the constitutional drafts.

5.2 The Constitutional Route and Its Closure (2021–2023)

The Convención Constitucional (2021–2022) wrote the maximal version of the reform into its draft: the proposed text defined the police as civilian, non-militarised institutions under democratic oversight, with use of force governed by proportionality and international human-rights standards. For the institution this was existential — the abolition of the 1927 settlement — and Carabineros's defenders campaigned against the draft partly on these grounds, folding the police question into the broader security anxieties that the Rechazo campaign mobilised. The 4 September 2022 rejection of the draft (62–38) killed the civilianisation project (see CL-K-05 and CL-D-02); the second process (2023), dominated by the Republican right, moved in the opposite direction, writing strengthened security provisions into its own draft, which was rejected in turn in December 2023. The net constitutional result for Carabineros after four years of constitutional politics: the 1980 framework, Law 18,961, and the 1927 model, all intact.

5.3 The Boric Pivot (2022–2025)

The Boric government entered office in March 2022 from a political hinterland in which "refound the pacos" had been a live slogan. Its exit from that position was rapid and instructive, driven by three forces.

First, the crime shock. Chile's homicide rate, long among the lowest in the Americas, rose from roughly 4.5 per 100,000 in the mid-2010s to 6.7 per 100,000 in 2022 [TBD-VERIFY: official homicide-rate series; the 2022 figure of 6.7 per 100,000 is from the Fiscalía/Interior consolidated homicide report], with the qualitative novelty mattering as much as the level: contract killings, kidnapping-for-ransom, and the visible operations of the Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan-origin criminal organisation whose Chilean presence was confirmed through major prosecutions in Arica and Santiago. Irregular migration across the Colchane border crossing kept the security-migration nexus permanently salient (see CL-A-05). Public-opinion series moved decisively: crime displaced inequality, pensions, and the constitution as the dominant national concern from 2022 onward.

Second, the killings of carabineros. A sequence of on-duty police killings in 2022–2023 — the case of Sergeant Rita Olivares, killed in Quilpué in March 2023, was the political tipping point, followed weeks later by the killing of Corporal Daniel Palma in Santiago [TBD-VERIFY: full sequence and dates of the 2022–2023 carabineros killed on duty] — inverted the moral polarity of the police debate. The funerals became national events; the political cost of being seen as anti-Carabineros became prohibitive across the spectrum.

Third, the parliamentary arithmetic. Within days of the Olivares killing, Congress passed and Boric signed the Naín–Retamal law (Law No. 21,560, April 2023), named for two killed carabineros: it raised penalties for violence against police and created a legítima defensa privilegiada — a privileged self-defence presumption for police use of weapons in the line of duty. Human-rights organisations, the INDH, and parts of the government's own coalition opposed it as a gatillo fácil (easy-trigger) law that pre-absolved precisely the conduct the estallido litigation was still trying to sanction; the government's Frente Amplio and Communist parliamentarians split; Boric signed. The law is the single clearest legislative marker of the period's reversal: forty-two months after Eyes on Chile, the Chilean Congress legislated to expand, not restrict, police use-of-force protection.

The constructive side of the pivot was real but fits the modernisation label rather than the structural-reform one. Interior Minister Carolina Tohá negotiated a standing security agenda with the opposition (the fast-track legislativo of 2023–2024) that produced, among other measures: a statute on the rules of the use of force (RUF) for police and military in public-order roles [TBD-VERIFY: final approval date and content of the RUF law, in legislative process through 2024–2025]; an anti-organised-crime statute (Law No. 21,577); a critical-infrastructure constitutional amendment allowing military border deployment without a state of exception; and — the largest institutional change of the period — the creation of the Ministerio de Seguridad Pública, separating public security from the Interior Ministry, approved by Congress in late 2024 and operational from April 2025 with Luis Cordero as its first minister [TBD-VERIFY: law number (reported as Law No. 21,730), operational date, and the ministry's precise statutory powers over Carabineros]. Carabineros's budget and authorised strength grew throughout [TBD-VERIFY: budget and personnel trajectory 2022–2026; authorised strength on the order of 60,000].

What did not happen is the analytical point. No external oversight or independent complaints body was created. The General Director's relationship to civilian authority, the closed career structure, the intelligence apparatus (whose conduct returned to controversy in the 2024–2025 revelations around political surveillance [TBD-VERIFY: status of the 2024–2025 Carabineros intelligence controversies]), and military-justice jurisdiction were untouched. The Yáñez episode demonstrated the new equilibrium: a left government kept a criminally formalised General Director in office for months because dismissing him was politically costlier than enduring him.

5.4 The Paradox Stated

By 2025, Carabineros's public confidence had recovered to levels approaching its pre-Pacogate standing [TBD-VERIFY: CEP/Cadem series 2023–2025 showing Carabineros among the most-trusted institutions again, ahead of virtually all civilian institutions], without any of the structural defects identified in 2017–2020 having been corrected. The re-legitimisation was supplied not by reform but by context: against the Tren de Aragua, the public wanted more police, not better-supervised police, and the comparison that governed opinion was no longer "Carabineros versus the standards of a rights-respecting democracy" but "Carabineros versus the criminals." The institution that in 2020 was the most discredited in the country ended the Boric government as one of its most popular — an outcome no actor planned, produced by the interaction of crime, migration, and the failure of both constitutional drafts.

6. Carabineros Under Kast (2026)

6.1 The Republican Posture

The government of José Antonio Kast, inaugurated 11 March 2026 (CL-E-01, CL-E-02, CL-D-07), is the first since 1990 whose relationship to Carabineros requires no triangulation: the Republican platform treats the institution as an asset to be expanded and honoured, not a problem to be managed. The first-hundred-days security architecture (CL-E-02) makes Carabineros a principal instrument: the Plan Frontera Norte combines border infrastructure in Tarapacá and Antofagasta with expanded Carabineros and armed-forces deployment under continuing constitutional-emergency authority; the Operativo Limpieza framework enlarges the inherited Operación Solar posture into combined migration-enforcement and anti-Tren de Aragua operations; and the government has signalled expanded recruitment, equipment modernisation, and a hardened deployment in the Macrozona Sur (CL-C-03) [TBD-VERIFY: authorised-strength expansion targets and the 2027 budget-cycle allocations for Carabineros under the Kast programme].

Rhetorically, the government has pursued an explicit restoration of institutional honour: presidential presence at Carabineros ceremonial occasions, the framing of the 2019–2021 period as an unjust "demonisation" of the force, and legislative signals toward further strengthening of use-of-force protections beyond Naín–Retamal [TBD-VERIFY: status of any 2026 legislative initiatives extending privileged self-defence or limiting estallido-era prosecutions]. The Ministry of Public Security created under Boric has been retained and operationalised with reinforced coordination authority — an institutional irony worth recording: the one durable institutional product of the post-estallido reform decade now serves as the command node of the most pro-police government of the democratic era.

6.2 The Unresolved Legitimacy Question

What the Kast posture does not — and by its own logic cannot — address is the question the 2017–2020 sequence posed: whether an institution with the 1927 architecture, the Law 18,961 autonomy, and the demonstrated capacity for Pacogate-scale fraud, Huracán-scale fabrication, and estallido-scale violence can be relied upon not to repeat them. The estallido-era litigation continues to run through the courts at low intensity [TBD-VERIFY: status of the Yáñez case and the remaining estallido prosecutions as of mid-2026]; the victims' organisations and the INDH maintain the accountability file open; the distributional structure of trust noted in Section 3.1 — strongest among those the force protects, weakest among those it polices — has reasserted itself rather than disappeared, with the populations of the northern border regions, the poblaciones under Operativo Limpieza, and the Mapuche communities of the Macrozona Sur supplying the contemporary contact zone.

Two readings of the 2026 position therefore coexist, and the corpus's discipline (CL-J-block style) is to record both at full strength.

The restoration-of-order reading. A democratic state requires a confident, adequately resourced police; the 2019–2021 delegitimisation of Carabineros — whatever the genuine abuses that fed it — was itself a governance failure that coincided with, and partly caused, the worst security deterioration in modern Chilean history; the voters have rendered judgment on the refoundation agenda three times (September 2022, December 2023, and the 2025 presidential election); the proper sequence is order first, with institutional refinement conducted from strength, through the new Security Ministry, rather than under street pressure. On this reading, 2026 is normalisation.

The deferred-accountability reading. Nothing that produced 2019 has been repaired: no external oversight exists; the intelligence apparatus is unreformed; the command that presided over the eye-injury epidemic was never judicially sanctioned at the command level; Naín–Retamal lowered rather than raised the legal cost of excessive force; and the institution's recovered popularity rests on a crime conjuncture, not on demonstrated change. On this reading, the Kast-era embrace stores up the next crisis: when the force next confronts mass protest — and the estallido demonstrated how fast that can arrive — it will do so with the same doctrine, the same architecture, stronger legal protections, and a government disinclined to restrain it. 2026 is not normalisation but deferral.

The honest analytical position as of mid-2026 is that the second reading is untested and the first is unproven: there has been no mass-protest stress test of the post-2023 settlement, and the institution's conduct under the next one is the open variable of Chilean public-order governance.

7. Comparative Dimension: Why Chile's Path Differed

Chile's 2019–2026 trajectory is frequently grouped with the regional wave of police crises — Colombia's 2019 and 2021 paros nacionales, the Mexican security militarisation, the US 2020 reckoning — but the comparison clarifies more by contrast than by similarity.

Colombia. The Policía Nacional de Colombia, like Carabineros, is a single national force with military characteristics, housed under the Ministry of Defence — the position Chile exited in 2011. The 2021 Paro Nacional, with dozens of protester deaths attributed to the ESMAD riot police and documented by the IACHR, generated a reform debate structurally parallel to Chile's: transfer to a civilian ministry, human-rights doctrine, external oversight. The Duque government answered with a professionalisation package (new uniforms, body cameras, a human-rights directorate, the rebranding of ESMAD as UNDMO under Petro) [TBD-VERIFY: scope of the 2021–2023 Colombian police-reform measures and the Petro-era transfer-to-civilian-ministry proposals, which had not been enacted as of 2025] while the structural questions — Defence Ministry dependence above all — remained open. Colombia thus represents the cosmetic-absorption path: high reform rhetoric, low architectural change, no equivalent of Chile's trust collapse because the baseline trust was already low.

Mexico. Mexico's trajectory ran in the opposite direction from reform: the López Obrador government abolished the civilian Policía Federal in 2019 and created the Guardia Nacional, formally civilian but recruited, trained, and commanded in practice by the military, with constitutional amendments in 2024 completing its transfer to the army (SEDENA) [TBD-VERIFY: final status of the 2024 Guardia Nacional constitutional reform]. Mexico represents the militarisation path — the deliberate substitution of military for civilian policing as a response to state weakness against organised crime. Chile, despite the Tren de Aragua panic, did not take it: military deployment remained confined to border and infrastructure roles under constitutional-emergency and critical-infrastructure provisions, and policing remained with Carabineros. The Chilean institutional inheritance — a strong, national, professional gendarmerie — made the Mexican substitution unnecessary; the same inheritance made deep reform seem dispensable.

The Chilean specificity. Three features mark Chile's path as distinct. First, the high-trust starting point: Carabineros fell from a height no other major Latin American force occupied, which made the fall politically seismic and the recovery politically available — there was an institutional reputation to restore, not to construct. Second, the constitutionalisation of the reform question: alone in the region, Chile routed police reform through a constituent process, which gave the maximal version of reform its one genuine chance and then destroyed it wholesale when the drafts fell; reform died not by veto but by plebiscite, which confers on the unreformed status quo a democratic legitimation no Colombian or Mexican government can claim for theirs. Third, the speed of the salience inversion: the interval between Eyes on Chile (October 2020) and Naín–Retamal (April 2023) was thirty months — the fastest documented swing in the region from a police-accountability politics to a police-protection politics, driven by a real and novel crime shock rather than by manufactured panic alone, though the Tren de Aragua discourse plainly exceeded its evidentiary base at points [TBD-VERIFY: assessments of Tren de Aragua's actual organisational footprint in Chile versus its discursive presence — Fiscalía organised-crime reporting versus media-coverage analyses].

The comparative lesson Chile offers the region is accordingly double-edged. It demonstrates that a high-capacity gendarmerie can lose legitimacy catastrophically through internal corruption and protest violence — capacity does not immunise. And it demonstrates that legitimacy can return without reform when the security environment deteriorates — accountability has no durable constituency once fear of crime exceeds fear of the police. Both halves of the lesson were established in a single seven-year arc, in the region's most institutionally stable country.

8. Conclusion

The history of Carabineros de Chile between 1990 and 2026 is the history of an institution that the democracy inherited rather than designed, trusted rather than supervised, and ultimately re-embraced rather than reformed.

The 1927 settlement — national, militarised, autonomous, self-forming — passed through the democratic transition protected by Law 18,961 and by a public standing that made reform seem gratuitous. The 2005 and 2011 adjustments subordinated the institution to civilian authority on paper while leaving its interior untouched. The 2016–2018 scandal triptych — Pacogate, Operación Huracán, Catrillanca — demonstrated what the untouched interior contained: a finance apparatus that stole, an intelligence apparatus that fabricated, and a tactical apparatus that killed and lied. The estallido then subjected this already-discredited institution to the largest public-order crisis of the democratic era, and its response — the deaths, the 460 eye injuries, the 28,000 detentions, the command posture distilled in Rozas's "no daré de baja a nadie" — produced the most documented police human-rights crisis in the institution's history and one of the most documented anywhere in that period.

What followed was a natural experiment in whether documentation produces reform. The answer Chile returned was no — not because the documentation was contested, but because every vehicle for reform failed in sequence: the Piñera commissions absorbed pressure without touching architecture; the constitutional route carried the maximal reform into the September 2022 draft and sank with it; and the Boric government, elected from the political generation the estallido created, was converted within eighteen months by homicide statistics, the Tren de Aragua, and the funerals of murdered carabineros into the co-author of Naín–Retamal and the architect of the Security Ministry — a strengthening agenda its own base would have called counter-reform in 2020. The emblematic convictions (Campillai, Gatica) and the fall of two General Directors (Rozas by resignation, Yáñez by formalisation) stand as the accountability residue; the architecture of 1927, 1990, and 2019 stands intact beneath a larger budget.

The Kast government completes the arc by making the unreformed institution a pillar of its programme. Whether 2026 is read as the restoration of a wrongly demonised force or as the deferral of an unpaid accountability debt, the structural fact is common to both readings: Chile will meet its next public-order crisis with substantially the same police institution it had on 18 October 2019, more legally protected and more popular than it was then. The estallido posed the question of what kind of police a democracy that had just seen its own should keep. As of June 2026, Chile's answer — delivered through two rejected constitutions, one crime wave, and three elections — is: this one.

End of document. Status: DRAFT. Institutional-analysis framing; event record carried by CL-C-02. TBD-VERIFY tags pending Tier-2 verification on survey series, fraud totals, prosecution outcomes, and 2024–2026 statutory details.

Sources

  1. Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Carabineros de Chile, Law No. 18,961 (1990), and the 1980 Constitution provisions on the Fuerzas de Orden y Seguridad Pública (as amended 2005).
  2. Law No. 20,502 (2011) creating the Ministerio del Interior y Seguridad Pública; Law No. 21,730 creating the Ministerio de Seguridad Pública (2024–2025) [TBD-VERIFY: law number].
  3. Law No. 21,560 (Ley Naín–Retamal, April 2023); Law No. 21,577 (anti-organised-crime statute, 2023); the rules-on-use-of-force (RUF) legislation (2024–2025).
  4. Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos (INDH), Informe Anual sobre la Situación de los Derechos Humanos en Chile en el Contexto de la Crisis Social (December 2019) and successor annual reports through 2025.
  5. Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Report of the Mission to Chile, 30 October – 22 November 2019 (December 2019).
  6. Amnesty International, Eyes on Chile: Police Violence and Command Responsibility During the Period of Social Unrest (14 October 2020).
  7. Human Rights Watch, Chile: Police Reforms Needed in the Wake of Protests (26 November 2019).
  8. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), observations and country statements on Chile (2019–2020) and on Colombia's 2021 Paro Nacional (for the comparative section).
  9. Ministerio Público (Fiscalía de Chile), consolidated reporting on estallido-period cases against state agents, and the Pacogate, Operación Huracán, Catrillanca, Campillai (Maturana), Gatica (Crespo), and Yáñez case records (2017–2026).
  10. Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (Rettig Report, 1991) and Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (Valech Report, 2004), for the dictatorship-era Carabineros record.
  11. Contraloría General de la República, audit findings on Carabineros finances (2016–2018, the Pacogate detection trail).
  12. CIPER Chile, investigative coverage of Pacogate, Operación Huracán, the Catrillanca cover-up, the Rozas recording, and the Yáñez formalización (2016–2025).
  13. La Tercera and El Mercurio, archive coverage of Carabineros leadership successions, the estallido period, and the 2022–2026 security agenda.
  14. Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), Estudio Nacional de Opinión Pública institutional-confidence series (1990–2025); Cadem Plaza Pública weekly series; Latinobarómetro regional police-confidence series.
  15. Espacio Público, Reforma a Carabineros working papers and reform proposals (2019–2021); the 2018 Acuerdo Nacional por la Seguridad Pública report.
  16. Convención Constitucional (2021–2022), draft constitutional text provisions on policing and security; Consejo Constitucional (2023) draft provisions (see CL-K-05).
  17. Carabineros de Chile, Comunicados Oficiales, annual Cuenta Pública, and use-of-force protocol revisions (2019–2026).
  18. Dammert, Lucía, academic work on Chilean and Latin American police reform and security politics (multiple, 2005–2024).
  19. Bonner, Michelle D., Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies and related work on Chilean protest policing.
  20. Fuentes, Claudio A., Contesting the Iron Fist: Advocacy Networks and Police Violence in Democratic Argentina and Chile (Routledge, 2005).
  21. Universidad de Chile, Department of Physics, composition analysis of Carabineros shotgun perdigones (November 2019) [TBD-VERIFY: study citation].
  22. Ministerio del Interior y Seguridad Pública / Ministerio de Seguridad Pública, Plan Frontera Norte and security-deployment communications (2025–2026), and the Fiscalía/Interior consolidated homicide reports (2018–2025).
  • CL-C-02: The 18 October 2019 Estallido Social — event-record companion; this document carries the institutional side
  • CL-C-03: The Macrozona Sur, the Mapuche Conflict, and the CAM (1997–2025) — the Araucanía policing theatre (Operación Huracán, Catrillanca, Comando Jungla)
  • CL-A-04: Sebastián Piñera's Second Presidency (2018–2022) — the government of the scandal sequence and the estallido
  • CL-A-05: The Boric Government (2022–2026) — the security pivot, Naín–Retamal, and the Ministry of Public Security
  • CL-D-07: Kast Presidency Year One (2026) — the pro-Carabineros restoration posture
  • CL-E-01: The Kast Government 2026 Transition and the Republican Policy Agenda — security-agenda framing
  • CL-E-02: The Kast Government's First Hundred Days (March–June 2026) — Plan Frontera Norte and Operativo Limpieza deployments
  • CL-K-05: The 2022–2023 Constitutional Conventions and the Two Rejections — the constitutional route of police reform and its closure
  • CL-D-01: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
  • CL-D-04: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
  • CL-I-04: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
  • CL-J-01: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
  • CL-O-01: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
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