2024-03-03 04:30:02
The kidnapping and crime of former Venezuelan military officer Ronald Ojeda, 32, who was taken early in the morning from his apartment in Santiago de Chile on February 21 and whose body was found last Friday, March 1, is still full of questions that do not have firm answers. The main doubt points to the motive for the crime, which was carried out in a sophisticated way, as specialists in Chile have agreed. Three individuals dressed as Chilean police officers – with supposed bulletproof vests, dark helmets and their faces covered – took him out of an apartment on the 14th floor of a building in the municipality of Independencia and took him away. Ojeda – a refugee in Chile since 2018 – was barefoot, tied and only wearing his underwear, which would have been key to the identification of his body. The operation reveals that the kidnapping was meticulously planned and carried out with professionalism.
In Chile, the only certainty seems to be the feeling of vulnerability, because Ojeda’s crime confirms that organized groups currently operate in the country that are capable of impersonating police officers, taking a person from their home at dawn, kidnapping them, and that the The State, despite the intense work of the Prosecutor’s Office and the police, might not prevent his death. The date of death is between seven and 10 days, so it is not known with certainty if he was murdered immediately following the kidnapping or if, although they wanted to keep him alive, the criminals killed him when they realized the public commotion that it generated. your demise.
The former lieutenant’s body was found 10 days later inside a suitcase buried 1.4 meters under cement in an informal neighborhood in the municipality of Maipú, in the eastern area of Santiago. Its mayor, Tomás Vodanovic, has defined that area as “a permanent source of crime and incivility.” The way of hiding the body under cement had already been detected by the Arica Prosecutor’s Office, in the extreme north of Chile, in operations attributed to the Los Gallegos clan, a group considered to be the operational arm of the Venezuelan organization the Tren de Aragua, which operates for approximately three years in different regions. The prosecutor in charge of the Ojeda case, Héctor Barros, assured on Friday that it is “a complex operation linked to organized crime.”
The Aragua Train, as EL PAÍS reported in September, spread through several areas of Chile and, although today several investigations are open in reserve, there have been three large operations at the national level, from the Tarapacá Prosecutor’s Office, to dismantle it. The first was in March 2022, and covered three regions. In one of them, Valparaíso, regarding 109 kilometers from Santiago, in the city of Quilpué, Carlos González Vaca, alias Estrella, who arrived from Caracas as head of the organization in Chile, was arrested. Hernán David Landaeta Garlotti, alias Satan, was also arrested, accused by the police as a hitman.
In Chile, the mega-gang has committed crimes such as human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation of migrant women and adolescents, especially of Venezuelan nationality, in addition to extortion, drug trafficking, torture and murder when their victims do not comply with payments to the that are obligatory. “After the pandemic, organized crime is called the Aragua Train,” said the director of the Chilean Investigative Police (PDI), Sergio Muñoz, on September 1 during a seminar on security in the Senate.
Elements that do not fit
But there are elements that do not add up in the Ojeda case, because, unlike the kidnappings that have occurred in the last two years in Chile, of the extortion type, his captors did not ask for money or communicate with the family. If they just wanted to kill him, then why kidnap him? They even risked having the images recorded on the security cameras in the Ojeda building.
The Government of Gabriel Boric has been cautious since the body was found and has avoided going deeper. The first to react this Saturday was the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, who sent condolences to the family and those close to the 32-year-old former military man, pledged support to the Prosecutor’s Office and reinforced the Government’s commitment once morest crime. The president chose to refer to a political matter – a defense of his partners in the Communist Party, a force that has been criticized by the opposition for its ties with the Government of Venezuela – and in the followingnoon it was the Undersecretary of the Interior, Manuel Monsalve , the one who spoke of “a case of extreme criminality.” La Moneda’s caution shows that there are still few certainties regarding the causes of the Ojeda case.
When the kidnapping occurred, the authorities did not rule out any hypothesis, as they publicly declared. A political motive was even on the table, because Ojeda – openly anti-Chavista – had fled Venezuela following escaping in November 2017 from the Ramo Verde military prison, in the city of Los Teques, 29 kilometers from Caracas, where he remained for rebellion. mutiny and treason, among other crimes. After escaping from prison, where he would have been tortured, as he denounced in his X profile, he left for Peru and later to Chile. In the latter country he had resided since 2018, with his wife and son, as a political refugee.
According to information from the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense, on January 24, 2024, Ojeda was one of the 33 soldiers demoted and expelled from the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) for being involved in an alleged conspiracy once morest Maduro. Diosdado Cabello, first vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), has denied that Chavismo has a relationship with the case. “Venezuela has nothing to do with that kidnapping, nothing, solve your problem there in Chile. Continue giving protection to gangsters, for which the mafia itself charges them,” he said one day before Ojeda’s death was announced last Thursday.
Behind the kidnapping and murder, then, might be organized crime in its purest form, carried out by organizations such as the Tren de Aragua, although with audacious characteristics that had not yet been seen in Chile (kidnapping to directly kill someone, without asking for a ransom). ). Or the use of organized crime by other forces. The hypotheses remain open until prosecutor Barros – who coordinates a unit founded last November due to the unprecedented rise in organized crime in Chile – manages to advance his investigation. What happens with the two pending arrest warrants and on Monday in the formalization hearing of the only person arrested, a 17-year-old Venezuelan who would have direct participation in the kidnapping, will be crucial. The proceedings, however, will not be public because it involves a minor.
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