Buildings were burned during protests in a town in southern Chile on Friday, while angry protesters responded to the police’s fatal shot at a street juggler.
The shooting took place on Friday afternoon in the city of Panguipulli, after police tried to verify the juggler’s identity, ADN Radio Chile reported. The regional government after said on Twitter that the man had died as a result of the shooting.
On Friday night, a video was circulating on social media that appeared to show buildings and barricades on fire in Panguipulli. A local officer, Carlos Durán, posted a video on Facebook showing several fires across the city, with thick clouds of smoke rising into the night sky.
The news indicated that several government buildings were among those burned. A photographer captured images of firefighters working to fight a fire in the mayor’s office.
There were also clashes between protesters and the police in the capital, Santiago, hundreds of kilometers north of Panguipulli. People in Santiago expressed anger at the shooting hitting pots and pans, a ritual to expose the public discontent known in Latin America as cacerolazo, roughly translated as “casserole”.
Some Twitter users posted footage from the flames in Panguipulli with the hashtag: “He didn’t die, they murdered him.”
Others called for police reform or compared the episode to George Floyd’s death in Minnesota last year, which sparked protests across the country in the United States. Mr. Floyd, a A 46-year-old black man, died after being handcuffed and pinned to the floor under the knee of a white police officer.
“It happened in broad daylight at a time of total peace and without any threat to public security,” said Chilean writer and literary critic Pedro Gandolfo wrote on Twitter. “A shameful act with a tragic result.”
Authorities had not identified the juggler until Saturday morning. Panguipulli’s mayor, Rodrigo Valdivia, told CNN Chile that he was a “peaceful person” who was about 20 years old and lived on the street.
ADN Radio Chile posted on its website what it said was a video of the shooting. The 25-second clip shows a man dressed in black standing at an intersection, holding what appears to be several knives and shouting at two policemen who approached him with guns drawn.
After a policeman fires two shots, the man chases the policeman to the intersection. Three more shots are heard, and the man appears to fall to the ground.
DNA quoted a police officer, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Alegría, saying on Friday that the juggler was carrying machetes and that the officer who shot him had acted in self-defense.
Just before midnight, the network reported that the police officer who shot the man had been arrested and that his arrest would be formalized on Saturday.
César Asenjo Jerez, a regional officer, said in a short video posted on a government Twitter account Friday night that a police officer used a service weapon in Panguipulli and that authorities were investigating. An official who answered the phone on Saturday morning at regional government headquarters said no one was available for comment.
Police misconduct was examined in Chile after mass protests in 2019 over economic issues, which often turned into violence and were confronted with police brutality. The prosecutor’s office has received more than 8,000 reports of human rights violations, including hundreds of complaints of permanent damage to the eyes caused by rubber bullets.
The abuses led to major calls to reform the national police, which was never significantly reformed after the end of the dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet in 1990. Human rights groups and analysts called for more oversight of the force budget and other measures that effectively put it it under civilian control.