Chile arrests last fugitive ex-officer convicted for 1973 murder of singer Víctor Jara

The arrest

Nelson Haase Mazzei, 80, a retired Army colonel, was arrested on Saturday 25 July 2026 in a rural property in Puyehue, in the Los Lagos region, about 850 kilometres south of Santiago. He was the last of the ex-military officers convicted for the 1973 murder of folk singer Víctor Jara still at large. The minister for human rights of the Santiago Appeals Court, Paola Plaza, ordered his immediate imprisonment. Judicial authorities stated:

“An incarceration order has been issued against retired military officer Nelson Haase Mazzei.”

Haase Mazzei had been a fugitive since 2023, when the Supreme Court confirmed his sentence and he failed to surrender.

The crime

Víctor Jara, a leading figure of the Nueva Canción Chilena movement and a Communist Party militant, was detained on 12 September 1973, one day after the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende. He was taken to the Estadio Chile, where more than 5,000 prisoners were held, and separated from the others. Along with Littré Quiroga Carvajal, the director general of prisons, Jara was tortured in the locker rooms. His body was found on 16 September near the Metropolitan Cemetery, bearing 56 fractures and 44 bullet wounds. Neighbours identified him and handed the body to his widow, Joan Jara, who arranged a clandestine burial.

The sentences and the fugitives

In 2023, the Supreme Court handed down definitive sentences against Haase Mazzei and six other former soldiers. Haase Mazzei received 25 years and two days for the qualified homicide and kidnapping of Jara and for the kidnapping, torture and homicide of Quiroga. The court found that, despite his denials, he had acted as an author of the crimes, forming part of the internal command structure and carrying a weapon capable of inflicting the fatal injuries. Five of the other convicts are already in prison. Hernán Chacón Soto committed suicide when police arrived to notify him of the sentence. Pedro Barrientos, who fired the shot that killed Jara, was deported from the United States in 2023 after years in hiding.

Víctor Jara's legacy

Jara, author of classics such as "Duerme negrito" and "El derecho de vivir en paz", was a professor at the Technical University of the State. His murder became one of the most emblematic crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship. In December 2009, a Chilean court ordered the exhumation of his remains. Thirty-six years after his death, they were reburied in an official ceremony attended by then-president Michelle Bachelet.

A regime's toll

The Pinochet regime, which lasted 17 years, left more than 40,000 victims, including those executed, disappeared, imprisoned and tortured. Official figures count over 3,200 opponents killed by state agents. The arrest of Haase Mazzei closes a chapter in the long pursuit of justice for the dictatorship's crimes.