President Sebastián Piñera received Tuesday the conclusions of the National Agreement on Public Security, one of the five main topics the head of State championed at the beginning of his second term in office.
This includes five core ideas: to modernise both the Uniformed Armed Police and the Police of Investigations (PDI), to strengthen the State’s intelligence system, to oversee and improve gun control, to highlight the role city councils have in public security and to coordinate all the agents in charge of crime prosecution.
Those measures “will mean, in some cases, radical changes to the way we were used to do things in our country before this proposal”, Piñera said in front of ministers, police authorities and the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, among others guests.
Besides, the project entails the specialisation of security forces and the creation of a National Intelligence Council (Consejo Nacional de Inteligencia in Spanish) under direct command of the President.
It was precisely that organism which raised some eyebrows across the country given that, despite its functions and aims, its acronym in Spanish (CNI) is the same as one of general Augusto Pinochet’s institutions: Central Nacional de Inteligencia, created in 1977 to replace the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the late dictator’s first secret police.
Pinochet’s CNI was responsible for the death of detractors as well as the entity in charge of violating Human Rights. It was also linked to the ponzi scheme known as “La Cutufa”.
