It is the latest attack on security forces in a region where tensions between locals and the state have long simmered.
Armed attackers ambushed and killed three police officers in southern Chile before setting their car on fire, authorities said. The recent attack on police has reignited security concerns in the South American country.
In a statement on Saturday, President Gabriel Boric called the attack in the municipality of Canete in Arauco province “cowardly” and declared three days of national mourning in honor of the officers, who were Sergeant Carlos Cisterna, Corporal Sergio Arevalo and Corporal Misael Vidal acted.
“Today the whole country is mourning. There is heartbreak, sadness, anger. But these emotions do not paralyze us, they compel us, they mobilize us,” Boric wrote. “We will find out the whereabouts of the perpetrators of this terrible crime.”
Authorities said the officers responded to three false 911 calls and were attacked with heavy weapons in their vehicle. They burned in the armored patrol car on a road near the city of Concepcion, about 400 km (about 250 miles) south of the capital Santiago.
It remains unclear who carried out the attack, but a long-simmering conflict between the indigenous Mapuche community and landowners and forestry companies in the area has intensified in recent years. The conflict forced the government to declare a state of emergency and deploy the military to provide security.
In Chile, about one in 10 citizens identify as Mapuche, the tribe that resisted Spanish conquest centuries ago and was only defeated in the late 19th century after Chile gained independence.
Large forestry companies and farm owners control large tracts of land that originally belonged to the Mapuche, many of whom now live in rural poverty.
Boric, who traveled to the area on Saturday with a large contingent including senior military and congressional officials as well as the president of the Supreme Court, expressed condolences to the victims’ families and vowed to find and bring the killers to justice.
“There will be no impunity,” he said after firefighters extinguishing the burning police car made the grisly discovery.
In Santiago, hundreds of people gathered outside the presidential palace to protest the killings, coinciding with National Police Day and marking the 97th anniversary of the founding of the Carabineros, Chile’s military police. It was the second such deadly attack on the force this month.
Ricardo Yanez, the general director of the Carabineros, told reporters that the officers were dispatched from the highway in response to fake emergency calls, where they were met with a volley of gunfire.
“It wasn’t a coincidence, it wasn’t a coincidence,” he said of the ambush.
The bloodshed has tested Boric, who came to power in 2022 promising to ease tensions in the region, where armed Mapuche activists are stealing timber and attacking forestry companies they say have invaded their ancestral lands.
Boric’s government has touted its success in reducing Chile’s nationwide murder rate by 6 percent, according to 2023 government figures released earlier this week.
“This attack contradicts all the enormous progress that has been made,” said Interior Minister Carolina Toha, a former center-left mayor of Santiago.