A view of the essential lines of Chilean criminal law and criminal procedure is hereby presented. The focus is primarily on the Chilean Penal Code, the oldest in the Spanish-speaking world. Along that way, particular emphasis is placed on the history, the spirit and the subjects that shape Chilean criminal law, with special focus on the crisis of legality principle, the role of legal theory and some contemporary discussions of global significance. The overall picture allows us to observe the accelerated and variegated expansion of criminal legislation in Chile, well into the 21st century, with challenges such as the emergence of the victim, penal populism and a certain politicization of legal discourses, in the context of a shift in the language of law (human rights). The paper closes with a glance at the new penal procedure, after almost a quarter of a century since its establishment.
Linking substantive criminal law and procedural notions offers an interesting, and yet mostly unexplored, point of view. It can be argued that the idea according to which criminal procedure is a mere tool to enforce substantive criminal law must be revisited. There are good reasons to claim that the evolution of the general theory of crime has been driven, relevantly or exclusively, by the need to facilitate the reach of a certain evidentiary standard in practice. The subsequent changes of criminal law notions like dolus, offender, limits in the omission, causation crisis and development of objective imputation, as well as other concepts, produced the (unlikely casual) consequence a facilitation in the trial fact finding. If the above is correct, then an interesting debate on the ethical foundation of such evolution can be started.