The real causes of death of homeless people

Chile
29th 2024 Reported by: Consuelo Soto

This report is about the deaths of homeless people, and their causes of death go beyond
hypothermia because 17 deaths were reported in 2020, 29 in 2021, and 44 in 2022. Last year
was the most critical, with 68 deaths recorded, but none of them have a specific cause of
death. Most were reported as hypothermia. Additionally according to the Ministry of Social
Development, there is no record of the causes of death of homeless people with exact
accuracy. Those involved would be the homeless people who die, the ministry in charge of
handling the deaths and investigation, and given this is when Felipe Estay decides to
investigate what is happening with these deaths, are all involved. This happens over the
years, but thanks to Estay, the focus is on 2023, where his thesis was discussed in Chile.

Estay, who is a sociologist and executive director of the Moviliza Foundation, which also
assists people living on the streets, decided to investigate based on the question of how many
people died of cold outdoors. By investigating further, even with the help and transparency of
the Legal Medical Service, where he requested a report on the deaths, the response he
received was that they had no further information about the homeless people as such, but that
they had a general figure for deaths due to hypothermia. From there, and by continuing his
investigation, he realized that the Chilean penal system does not distinguish homeless people
from others. Therefore, in the Legal Medical Service and the Prosecutor's Office, they are not
counted as a separate category. His next step was to count the deaths and review news from
media outlets, also cross-referencing them with information from his organization and others
that also work with homeless people. This revealed that between 2020 and 2023, there was a
significant increase in violent deaths among this population, with an increase from 47.1% in
2020 to 51.5% in 2023. He says, "Not because of two or three cases related to drugs in all the
tents in Santiago is there a micro-trafficker," thus highlighting the need to look at the data
generally to avoid stigmatization and incorrect data. He also discovered that in 2023, more
than half of the deaths were homicides, which were not the same figures managed by the
Undersecretariat of Social Services of the Ministry of Social Development. Last year, that
division reported the deaths of 27 homeless people: two of them from physical aggression.
For 11 of them, there is no registered cause of death, indicating that the problem would be
much more worrying because, according to data and calculations, in 2020, 47.1% of
homeless people’s deaths were due to homicides. In 2023, this rose to 51.5%.

Therefore, he says "Homicide is the most prevalent cause of death among homeless people,"
and that hypothermia and accidents are the next most common causes, each accounting for
14.7%.
Estay raises the question that he himself expresses, where he says "If I have data on street
homicides, why not invest my resources in preventing this type of violence?" Thanks to this
the investigation and its results were disseminated among the foundations that work with
homeless people to inform and somehow know and try to prevent this problem until the
system, such as Ministries and authorities, take measures in the case.

In conclusion, the lack of specific official data on deaths among homeless people is part of
the reason why the real causes of deaths are not known. So Estay says "The Ministry of
Social Development does not keep a record of the causes of death of homeless people,"
which would drive the need for a more precise and coordinated approach to address this crisis
where homeless people die without an identified cause, or the cause they have is not
necessarily the correct one.