Tuesday First Carabinieri Corporal Alex Salazar has died, married and father of two daughters aged 7 and 12. The 37-year-old former uniformed man was seriously injured after being run over last weekend during a police intervention in the heart of the civic center of Concepción (500 kilometers south of the capital Santiago) by a Venezuelan citizen .
So the opposition reacted immediately to the news, calling the corporal the last martyr of the institution and, although he stressed that he felt pain for his loss, he also took the opportunity to focus his gaze on the government and ruling party parliamentarians.
One of the first lawmakers to comment on the fact of Congress was Congressman Victor Pino (People’s Party), which asked the president to comply with his statements regarding the fight against crime.
“In the middle of last year, we heard the president say, ‘I’m going to be a crime dog.’. And we do not know if this dog is a Rottweiler but it seems that he has become a Chihuahua, only for the company, that he is only accompanying criminals and not defending citizens”, declared the parliamentarian.
Meanwhile, the deputy Roberto Arroyoparliamentarian from the People’s Party (PDG), complained that, according to him, the security agenda is not the most important thing for this administration. “There is no positive signal from the government”he affirmed, regarding the urgency of projects that give guarantees to the carabinieri and law enforcement agencies.
On the other hand, the deputy of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), Flo Weissemaintained: “Let the president be the one in charge and not the Minister of the Interior (Carolina Tohá) who governs and calls to reprimand the Director General of the Carabinieri (Ricardo Yáñez). Look what happened, he died. Once again, we have a martyr.”
Along the same lines, the member Marlene Perez (Independiente-UDI) regretted having lost a police officer “at the hands of an immigrant criminal” and asked the government to “put aside its complexes” and urgently set up projects that support the police . “It is unpresentable that today the Minister of the Interior is summoning the director general because he has launched an appeal representing thousands of police officers who daily suffer violence from criminals”, he condemned. .
By your side, Sergio Bobadilla (National Renewal) also expressed itself in the same way and invited the government to “give urgency to the more than twenty initiatives which are in the hemicycle and which this government has done absolutely nothing for them to become law” . “No more dead policemen, no more abuse of this noble institution. Mr President, you have the floor,” he said.
“Also indignant that it is suggested that the rejection of the tax reform would have resulted in an impossibility of obtaining resources which would allow to increase the places of entry to the carabinieria question that seems like an insult when, ultimately, the historic decline in the entry of the Carabinieri has the only explanation for the defamation campaign and the insults that the institution has been subjected to by those who occupy today government,” MPs wrote in a National Renewal statement.
“The insults and questions that the police received from their neighbors or on the public highway, and which help to explain the drop in numbers, are only a consequence of the systematic defamation campaign of those who today, in line with this attitude, reject any initiative aimed at strengthening police action”, underlined the legislators.
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