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SANTIAGO, Chile, Aug. 10 (UPI) — Chilean President José Antonio Kast signed a constitutional reform bill Monday that lays the groundwork for his government’s new agenda to combat organized crime.

The initiative seeks to give the state stronger and more explicit tools to confront sophisticated criminal activity. Kast urged Congress to move quickly and approach the legislation with a willingness to reach agreements, with the goal of enacting the measures before the end of the year.

The government’s agenda includes more than 30 bills aimed at strengthening efforts to combat criminal organizations.

Key measures include creating a new state of emergency provision that would allow the deployment of the armed forces, establishing a registry of criminal organizations and creating separate high-security prisons for criminal leaders.

The measures would also streamline the seizure of illicit assets, extend the period in which authorities can make arrests in cases of flagrante delicto — caught in the act — to 24 hours and increase penalties for serious crimes.

Luis Toledo, a former prosecutor and director of the Center for Studies on Security and Organized Crime at San Sebastián University, said expectations about what the agenda can accomplish should be conservative.

“In the short and medium term, it is entirely possible to reduce homicides, regain control of certain territories, improve prison control and dismantle specific organizations, but structurally reversing the penetration of organized crime is another matter,” Toledo told UPI.

He said Chile is confronting not only criminal gangs, but also illicit markets with demand, sources of financing, money laundering mechanisms, recruitment capabilities and international connections.

“And those markets have an extraordinary capacity to adapt: When one structure is dismantled, smaller cells emerge, changing their leadership, communications, routes or financial mechanisms,” he said.

Toledo said Kast’s agenda contains significant proposals, but also has shortcomings, including combining measures targeting organized crime with broader public security and immigration enforcement policies.

“That distinction is important because not everything that increases the state’s coercive capacity necessarily dismantles a criminal organization,” he said.

He said the initiatives with the greatest potential are those aimed at targeting the assets of criminal organizations, seizing their property and preventing them from reinvesting illicit profits.

With organized crime expanding across Latin America, Toledo said tighter controls on illegal entry into the country and other measures proposed by Kast are necessary, but insufficient to address the problem on the scale required.

A transnational criminal organization cannot be fought exclusively through a national response, he said, adding that “international cooperation is one of the essential operational capabilities of a policy against organized crime.”

“We have to see whether Chile will be able to build a state policy that, on a sustained basis, creates a coordinated public security system capable of stripping organized crime of its money, command capabilities, territory, impunity and ability to recruit,” Toledo said. “That is where the possibility of truly reversing the phenomenon lies.”

Alfonso Kaiser, a risk management expert and professor in the Master of Engineering Management program at the University of the Andes, questioned the agenda’s lack of concrete objectives for measuring its results.

“A plan is being presented that does not have clear objectives. We don’t know how we are going to measure them or how much we want to achieve,” Kaiser told UPI.

“We need to take a more measured approach and conduct a somewhat more technical analysis of what goals we want to achieve and when we expect to achieve them.”

Kaiser agreed that border control should be a priority and said the government should strengthen the authority of Carabineros, Chile’s national uniformed police force, and the Maritime Police to deter illegal entry into the country. However, he said the main challenge lies within Chile itself.

“The main failure is internal. It is not that we are facing an extraordinarily intelligent enemy,” Kaiser said. “Our own mistakes are what have led to this situation.”