The Funeral of a Narco-Influencer Is Considered a Threat to Public Peace in Chile

The murder of female narco influencer Sabrina Durán Montero, also known as “La Ina,” has the Chilean government on high alert this week, and her funeral tomorrow is being treated as “high risk.”

Durán Montero rose to fame as a TikTok sensation after she started posting videos of herself dancing or talking from behind bars, where she was serving time in Chile for drug trafficking. 

Her online performances, pretty face and long dark hair earned her more than half a million followers and 11 million likes, and now the authorities are worried that her funeral on Friday Oct. 27 will disturb the peace, and attract the attention of fans and aspiring narcos in Peñaflor, on the outskirts of Santiago, according to El Pais. 

The 24-year-old convicted narca Durán Montero was attacked in south west Santiago on Oct. 23 by assailants, who shot her seven times and then took her car, which was later found burned and abandoned. Durán Montero was left bleeding on the road, according to press reports, and died from her injuries later that day.

The government is planning to send special police forces to maintain vigilance and control around her funeral tomorrow. 

The growth of narcofunerales in the South American country is becoming a problem. Earlier this year, Chile’s leftwing President Gabriel Boric sent a new legal initiative to Congress proposing that such ceremonies be limited. Such events can last days, with streets and cemeteries sealed off by locals, schools closed, and mourners firing guns and letting off fireworks and bombs that terrify other residents, according to reporting by El Pais. Around 1,700 such funerals have taken place around Chile in the last five years, say reports. 

Boric’s government is also clamping down on monuments and tombs to drug traffickers and other criminals in public spaces. “Our police make a big effort to control these things, but it’s not enough,” said Boric in June. He said that existing tombs and monuments in memory of traffickers were going to be torn down.

The killing of Durán Montero, who gained a following documenting her life behind bars and then her beauty and associated products on the outside, was planned, according to Santiago’s Western Metropolitan Prosecutor Pablo Sabaj. 

“Initial signs suggest that [her killers] were waiting for her,” he said, and confirmed that police were investigating the possibility that her murder was a revenge act by criminal rivals. She was released from prison in May, and finishing the remaining time of her sentence in her home under police surveillance, according to the authorities.

More than a dozen schools and universities were closed earlier this year in a town 120 kms from Santiago in anticipation of a narco funeral. 

“We cannot permit drug traffickers to decide the school calendar,” said the country’s Interior Minister Carolina Tohá at the time. 

Whether the government manages to trump narco power during Durán Montero’s funeral tomorrow remains to be seen. Her last few videos were dedicated to her girlfriend Antonella Marchant, a member of the powerful Marchant drug-trafficking clan, who she reportedly met behind bars.