Chile Arrests 80-Year-Old Nelson Haase to Serve 25-Year Víctor Jara Murder Sentence
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jul 27
Chile Arrests 80-Year-Old Nelson Haase to Serve 25-Year Víctor Jara Murder Sentence
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jul 27
Summary
Puyehue police captured retired colonel Nelson Haase Mazzei, 80, and a judge ordered his immediate imprisonment after he spent nearly three years fugitive from a 25-year sentence.
Haase was the last man sought in the 1973 murders of singer Víctor Jara and prison chief Littré Quiroga, after seven retired soldiers were convicted in absentia in August 2023.
The Víctor Jara Foundation welcomed the arrest but said that, more than 50 years after the killings, it was hard to view the outcome as justice.
Jara, 40, was detained after Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup, tortured in Santiago's stadium, then found with 44 bullet wounds; his case became one of the dictatorship's most emblematic crimes.
Haase, a former Tejas Verdes and DINA officer, has already asked to be moved from Osorno prison to Punta Peuco, a special jail for Pinochet-era human rights offenders.