Con With 69 votes against, 65 in favor and 6 abstentions, the Chamber of Deputies rejected the budget of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security this afternoon.
Despite the fact that it brought an increase in resources for the fight against crime, from the opposition they affirmed that the game it presented “insufficient” increases for the amounts allocated to the police and the Prosecutor’s Office in the current scenario of security crisis.
In this regard, the Deputy Diego Schalper (RN) He stated that “we have rejected the security budget that the government has presented. We do it with the conviction that raising 0.8% to the PDI, 0.3% to the Prosecutor’s Office and 2% to the Carabineros has no presentation at the moment in which we are”.
In this sense, he recalled that “Chile has an unprecedented increase in homicides, a huge increase in robbery with intimidation and therefore what Chile needs is a budget that meets the needs of Chilean families.”
In this regard, Schalper indicated that the Minister of Finance, Mario Marcel, approached him at the end of the vote to express his disagreement. “I have told him: Minister, as a member of the Security Commission, I ask you to come up with a better proposal and that in the Senate they really do something up to par.”
Known by from RN Andrés Longton He indicated, in this same sense, that the government must be clear “that the institutions must be strengthened, the Carabineros, the PDI. The fight against drug trafficking and organized crime is also carried out by strengthening the Public Ministry. And on the other hand, immigration irregularity is also done by focusing on not regularizing, but on specifying administrative expulsions, which is precisely what this government is not doing and that it specifies with a budget item where it eliminates programs that were precisely oriented towards that ”.
Meanwhile, the Deputy Jorge Guzmanindicated that “since Evopolis We also join the rejection of what was the departure of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security because we consider that what is proposed by the government is still insufficient. We have said it insistently: the key and what the citizens ask of us is to take charge of security and for that we have to allocate resources in this matter. We hope that this is an instance to discuss and improve the budget in this item”.
Deputy Henry Leal, UDI representative for the Araucanía Region, maintained in the same tenor that in the item “there was no increase in resources for Firefighters, the most beloved institution of Chileans, only a minimal part was increased under inflation, so the real budget decreased. In Carabineros he did not see a single peso to improve the remuneration of those thousands of carabineros who enter earning 460 thousand pesos ”.
“Security is the most important thing for Chileans today and this budget did not do justice and was not assigning a real contribution to guarantee security,” he added. “” With this we want to give a clear signal to the government that it has to put more resources for security, it has to modify the laws, “he closed.
During the day, four proposals to the budget presented by the opposition were approved -including one that grants a salary readjustment to the Carabineros and another that provides resources for renting houses for uniformed police personnel and for the acquisition of technology to search for people-, for which the Minister of Finance, Mario Marcel, indicated that the government will reserve constitutionality for some of them.
Other endorsed indications aim to provide free legal advice and defense in trials to victims of violent crimes and, in addition, add Los Lagos among the regions where the Rural Violence program will be applied
On the criticisms of the government and its possible presentation before the Constitutional Court (TC), the Deputy Hugo Rey (RN), pointed out that “as the opposition, it is the mechanism we have to do what Chile is asking for and that is that we support our police forces to combat crime. If the government doesn’t want to do it, it’s the only way out we have. We have to respond to the community, and therefore, regardless of what the minister says, we are with the people and we are going to support the Carabinero and Investigations”.
“We need a sufficient number of Carabineros and this is a mechanism that will promote, encourage, many young people to enter the police career,” he added.