Word: santiagos
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...hospital, it was reported that the plane had been carrying Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño, Mexico's equivalent of a Vice President. Mouriño died instantly in the crash along with seven others, including a top security adviser and former federal prosecutor, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, who had dedicated much of his career to the fight against drug gangs. (See pictures of Mexico's drug wars...
...Santiago Vasconcelos had been, over the past decade, one of Mexico's most outspoken and active figures in the fight against drug cartels. He narrowly escaped assassination in January, when federal police arrested in a Mexico City house five hitmen who had allegedly been contracted to kill him. He had held a series of top positions in the federal Attorney General's office but stepped down in August, citing personal reasons...
...kind of thing that happens every day in every big city in the world. Still, as I've recounted my experience to Chilean friends, I've been struck by their response: Rather than a commonplace experience, they regard it as a depressing sign of changing times - an indication that Santiago, long regarded as the safest capital city in Latin America, has a growing crime problem...
...Fundacion Paz Ciudadana (The Citizen Peace Foundation), an independent Santiago-based organisation committed to reducing crime levels, compared surveys on attitudes towards crime around the world. It found that Chileans are more fearful of crime than Argentines, Paraguayans - even more fearful than Colombians, whose country is widely regarded as one of the most dangerous in the world...
...blame lies with the Chilean media. Local media tends to highlight sensationalist accounts of robberies, rapes, murders and assaults. Watching the TV news here, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in the favelas of Brazil or the mean streets of Colombia, not in relatively safe Santiago...