Terrorism and Crime

First, the work seeks to define how our current legislation regulates the application of criminal norms when they come into a situation of conflict — what legal doctrine knows under the headings of real, ideal, and apparent concurrence of offenses — in order to provide the reader with the tools necessary for understanding the subsequent analysis. Second, we seek to establish a broad — not necessarily legal — concept of "terrorism," from which we will proceed to individualize the elements fundamental to it, with a view to proposing a restrictive and legally relevant definition of the same. It is in this context that we define whether the offense of terrorism does or does not constitute a political offense, as well as the consequences of a negative or positive answer to the question. In the third chapter, an analysis of the basic terrorist offense is carried out, focusing attention on the principles governing its specific application in relation to the offenses found in common legislation. It is precisely in this chapter that we determine the legally protected interest under the norm. This task was not without difficulties, given that our legislator made use of a distorting notion of legally protected interest, characterized by vagueness and imprecision. The main objective of the work is to demonstrate that the sole requirement of "creating a state of anxiety, alarm, or terror in the population or in a sector of it." (Excerpt from the introduction).