Sergio Muñoz Yáñez
Director General
Policía de investigaciones de Chile
General Mackenna 1314 Santiago,
Chile
E-mail: [email protected] 
Sergio Muñoz Yáñez, the Director General of Policía de Investigaciones de Chile (PDI), is 55 years old and was born in the city of San Fernando, in the O’Higgins Region. He has been married for 30 years and has four children.
He has a 38-year career in the PDI, which has been marked by an essentially operational profile for having worked in police units of different specialties -all over the country- allowing him to be in contact with very diverse social, cultural, and criminal realities, which gives him a complete vision of the criminology phenomenon in Chile, that this investigative police faces at national level.
The highest authority of the Civil Police joined the former Police Investigation Academy in 1985, from which he graduated in 1988, and was assigned to the Sixth Judicial Police Unit (currently the Criminal Investigation Brigade) in Providencia district.
Subsequently, he worked at the Third Robbery Investigation Police Unit (currently the Western Metropolitan Robbery Investigation Brigade) and was later assigned to the Coyhaique Anti-Narcotics Brigade. There, he formed and was the head of the first Robbery Investigation Brigade, while he also had to perform the same role in the Criminal Investigation Brigade of this regional capital.
In 2008, he was selected to be part of the Higher Academy of Police Studies, for high rank officers. After graduating, he was assigned to the San Fernando Criminal Investigation Brigade, where he became head of unit.
He was appointed as a Prefect in 2013, being in charge of the Provincial Police Prefecture of Colchagua. At the end of that year, he had to accomplish the same tasks in charge of one of the biggest and more complex prefectures of the country, the North Centre Metropolitan Zone.
Two years later, in 2015, he was called to join the High Command of the Police and was promoted to take over the Antofagasta Police Region. He fulfilled the same duties in the Valparaíso Police Region in 2017.
He was promoted to Prefect General in 2019, and served as Head of the Sub-Directorate Intelligence, Organized Crime and Migratory Security until June 2021, when he was designated as Director General of Policía de Investigaciones de Chile, after his predecessor, Mr. Hector Espinosa, met his legal term of six years in office.
Specialized in robbery investigations, the Director General holds a Master’s degree in Organizational Safety and Security from Universidad Bernardo O’Higgins, as well as having carried out a series of specialization courses in Chile, in matters such as criminal psychology, crisis management, hostage-taking negotiations and others. He has also performed training courses at the FBI and DEA, as well as at the Saint Petersburg Police (Russia), in both tactical and administrative matters.
When beginning his term as the leader of the PDI and understanding that the police faces a criminality in permanent evolution, and that a digital transformation should be implemented from inside the institution, he defined as his priorities: the
strengthening of internal control and personal well-being, aimed at keeping the social capital and the high citizen legitimacy achieved by the institution; the
prospective analysis of new criminal phenomena, the
enhancement of police operation and the
consolidation of communication policy aimed at spreading to the community the emerging criminal phenomena and the ways to face them, so that in 2033 the PDI would be a Latin American reference in the investigation of crimes of high complexity and transnational organized crime