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On the evening of 8 November 2019, Chile’s capital was gripped by protests amid a wave of nationwide unrest. While thousands demonstrated peacefully in Santiago’s Plaza Italia, violence broke out down a side street on the fringes of the square, where riot police with rifles battled protesters.
Among them was Gustavo Gatica, a 21-year-old psychology student at the University of Chile, who threw a stone towards the police and stooped to pick up another. The last thing he saw was a line of advancing officers in the shadow of a tower block.
As he straightened up, he was hit in the face by two rubber-coated bullets fired by Lt Col Claudio Crespo. After nearly two weeks of surgeries, doctors could not save Gatica’s eyesight.
After a 14-month trial, a Santiago court delivered its unanimous verdict last month that Crespo shot and blinded Gatica – but absolved him of any wrongdoing, invoking the principle of legitimate defence.
“I am not happy with the outcome,” Gatica told the media outside the courthouse. “I think that it is relevant for the good of democracy that these cases do not result in impunity.”
Gatica said he planned to appeal the decision to international courts if necessary, saying that he would raise the issue in congress, to which he has recently been elected.
Crespo, by contrast, appeared grinning behind dark sunglasses outside the courtroom, fists raised in triumph. He quickly used his social media accounts to mock Gatica, provoking ire and revulsion.
But the verdict has already raised fears that a precedent has been set for heavy-handed policing, as Chile preparing to inaugurate its most conservative president since Gen Augusto Pinochet – the far-right leader José Antonio Kast, who takes power in March.
“This doesn’t just affect Gatica, his family and those close to him; it sends the signal that when these acts are perpetrated, nothing will happen – and that this will be legitimised by the justice system,” said Rodrigo Bustos, the director of Amnesty International in Chile.
“When there is impunity, it allows more human rights violations to occur in the future.”
That evening alone, Crespo fired more than 2,000 rubber-coated bullets into the crowds of protesters. He was stood down from the force on 25 June 2020 for breaking protocols, and arrested two months later.
The audio from various body cameras worn by the former carabinero’s colleagues reveals him taunting protesters.
“We’ll take your eyes out … you hear me?” he can be heard snarling at a young man being led away. “Let him burn,” is his retort when a colleague informs him that a protester is on fire.
“Only in about 10% of the cases did we even have an identified aggressor,” said Judith Schönsteiner, a researcher at the Universidad Diego Portales’s human rights centre.
“Yet we still don’t have anyone found guilty [in this case] … It seems curious that legitimate defence has been applied here in favour of the officer.”
In the intervening years, the protests of 2019, during which millions took to the streets decrying a host of inequalities and injustices, have been dramatically revised in the public imagination.
In July 2020, polling suggested that two-thirds of Chileans thought that the protests were positive for the country. Six years on, in October last year, 63% of respondents to the same question said that they had been negative.
And on 11 March, Chile will inaugurate a far-right president, compounding an about-turn in the country’s political trajectory.
Kast has maintained a vitriolic line on 2019’s protests, and his narrative – which largely ignores the demands raised peacefully, which 72% of Chileans still believe are yet to be addressed – has caught on.
Six weeks after the protests took hold, Kast dismissed them as “an outburst of violence against the poorest in Chile” and a “great economic disaster”.
Meanwhile, Crespo has been embraced by Chile’s far right as a martyr for public order.
Just three months ago, when the far-right former YouTuber Johannes Kaiser closed his presidential campaign in Santiago, he held a minute’s silence for police officers killed in the line of duty before bringing Crespo on stage to rapturous applause.
The victims of police brutality, meanwhile, face a very different outlook. Of the more than 11,500 cases brought for human rights violations during the protests, there have been just 219 prosecutions.
According to Chile’s public prosecutor, 464 Chileans were victims of eye injuries during the protests, while there were cases of homicides, beatings, torture and sexual violence committed by the security forces.
Nine victims have taken their own lives as reparations and psychological support have been slow in coming – if they have come at all.
And experts feel that should more protests come, legislation governing them has been eroded significantly.
When the leftwing Gabriel Boric took office as president in March 2022, his manifesto committed to addressing a series of laws that hinder rights to assembly and demonstration and define terrorism.
Not only was he unable to do this, but a bill was passed in 2023 that weights the law in favour of security officers in cases of legitimate use of force. This was applied retrospectively to absolve Crespo.
“If people decide to protest peacefully in Chile for any legitimate reason, there could be violations of their human rights as the legal framework is in a worse state than in 2019,” said Bustos.
“The outlook is not good.”
