Former Chilean colonel arrested after 53-year hunt for folk singer Víctor Jara’s murder

More than 50 years after the murder of Chilean folk artist Víctor Jara, the last fugitive suspect linked to his death has been found and brought to justice.

Nelson Haase Mazzei, a former colonel, had been evading authorities since 2023 after he and six other ex-soldiers were convicted in absentia for the murders of Jara and another man. Chilean police announced that Haase Mazzei was arrested in Puyehue, a rural area in the south of the country, where he was served an immediate arrest warrant.

The Víctor Jara Foundation, founded by his widow—English dancer and activist Joan Jara—said: “We know that former Colonel Nelson Haase Mazzei, who had been evading justice since 2023, has been found and imprisoned. We welcome this news. However, it must be stressed that half a century after the murders of Víctor Jara and Littré Quiroga, it is hard to see this as full justice.”

Jara, a singer and left-wing activist, was arrested in Santiago on 11 September 1973, a day after the bloody US-backed coup by General Augusto Pinochet that toppled socialist president Salvador Allende. He was detained with thousands of others at a small covered stadium in central Santiago. Four days later, he was killed in the changing rooms alongside Littré Quiroga, Allende’s national prisons director.

The arrest of Haase Mazzei is seen as the final step in a long quest for justice for Jara, one of the most prominent victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, which killed or disappeared more than 3,000 people and detained and tortured tens of thousands during its 17-year rule.

At the stadium, Jara was tortured and humiliated by officers who played Russian roulette with him, then broke his hands, crushed his skull, and shot him dead with a machine gun. His body was found near the main cemetery in Santiago with 44 bullet wounds and 56 fractured bones. He was 40 years old. Quiroga’s body, shot 23 times, was also found at the same time.

After nearly half a century of eluding justice, seven former soldiers were convicted of murder and sentenced in absentia to various prison terms in August 2023. Haase Mazzei received a 25-year sentence. He had claimed he was not at the stadium (now renamed Estadio Víctor Jara), but sworn testimony confirmed he was present at the scene.

Haase Mazzei joined the infamous Tejas Verde brigade of the Chilean army in 1972, later becoming a member of Pinochet’s secret police, the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (Dina), where he worked closely with its leader Manuel Contreras, a loyal henchman of the regime who was sentenced to over 500 years in prison for crimes against humanity before his death in 2015.

Convicted alongside Haase Mazzei was Hernán Chacón, 86. When police came to arrest him at his home in an affluent Santiago neighbourhood in 2023, he asked permission to take medication, then slipped into another room and shot himself. Another Tejas Verde officer convicted was Pedro Barrientos, who left Chile for the United States in 1989 and was deported back in December 2023, more than a decade after the first extradition request was made. A former soldier testified that Barrientos used to point a pistol and boast: “I killed Víctor Jara with this!”

Barrientos was finally arrested in the US during a routine traffic stop and lost his American citizenship not for his crimes but for failing to disclose his military background on his naturalisation application. Jara’s widow died aged 96 just weeks before Barrientos was returned to Chile to face justice.

Haase Mazzei’s lawyer has requested that he be transferred from a prison in the southern city of Osorno to Punta Peuco, a well-equipped prison north of Santiago built to hold human rights offenders from the Pinochet era.