Chilean authorities arrested former Army Colonel Nelson Haase Mazzei on Saturday; he was the last convicted individual still at large for the kidnapping and murder of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara following the 1973 coup d’état. Haase Mazzei was sentenced to a total of 25 years and two days in prison for the crime against Jara, as well as for the kidnapping, torture, and homicide of the then-Director General of Prisons, Littré Quiroga Carvajal, the Judiciary reported.
Paola Plaza, the special presiding judge for human rights cases at the Santiago Court of Appeals, ordered Haase Mazzei’s immediate imprisonment on Saturday. In 2023, he was one of seven former military officers convicted for the murders of Jara and Quiroga, which took place on September 16, 1973—three days after the coup against Salvador Allende.
Haase, 80, had failed to report to serve the sentence handed down by the Supreme Court (15 years in prison for aggravated homicide and 10 years for aggravated kidnapping). Having remained a fugitive since then, he was finally located by the Investigative Police (PDI) at a property in Puyehue, in the Los Lagos region of southern Chile, according to local press reports.
He was the only one of the seven not yet serving a sentence for one of the most symbolic human rights violation cases of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (one of the others, Hernán Chacón, committed suicide before his arrest). Like the others, Haase Mazzei had attained a high rank in the Army during the regime. At the time of the murders, he was a lieutenant, although he consistently denied “any involvement in the events of the present investigation,” according to the 2021 Court of Appeals ruling, which was upheld by the Supreme Court two years later. The Chilean justice system established that he “participated as a perpetrator of the crimes” and determined there was “direct involvement by the accused in both the confinement of the victims and their subsequent deaths; this activity corresponds precisely to that of a perpetrator.” Witnesses—including army officers—place him inside the Chile Stadium, where the crimes against Jara and Quiroga were committed. His superior officer stated that he was unaware of the activities Haase carried out from September 11, 1973, onwards.
Two other convicted men, Raúl Jofré González and Edwin Dimter Bianchi, placed him at the Chile Stadium during the events in question, as did various conscripts. According to the ruling—upheld by the Supreme Court in 2023—in his capacity as a lieutenant, he was part of the internal chain of command and carried weaponry capable of inflicting the specific trauma and wounds caused by the type of projectile that killed Víctor Jara Martínez and Littré Quiroga Carvajal. Furthermore, testimony from former colleagues within the DINA (Pinochet’s secret police) indicates that Haase allegedly boasted of having participated in the execution of Víctor Jara; all of this supports classifying him as a perpetrator of the aggravated homicides of the singer-songwriter and Quiroga.
Haase Mazzei also became a trusted associate of Colonel Manuel Contreras, the head of the DINA and the man responsible for the most brutal crimes of the dictatorship’s early years.
Among the more than 5,000 detainees taken to the Chile Stadium in Santiago—now known as the Víctor Jara Stadium—following the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, two men spent the final hours of their lives together: Víctor Jara (then 40 years old) and the lawyer Littré Quiroga Carvajal (33), who had served as Director General of the Prison Service under the Allende government. Held in agony and isolated from other prisoners in a dressing room, they endured kicks, punches, and blows from the butts of weapons for at least three days, according to dozens of testimonies in the court file reviewed by the Supreme Court.
According to judicial findings, military personnel at the Estadio Chile identified both men as “prisoners of some public prominence.” In Víctor Jara’s case, the files state that the assaults were primarily driven by his artistic, cultural, and political activities, which were closely linked to the recently overthrown government. His captors accused Littré Quiroga of an “alleged act”—which was never proven—claiming he was responsible for the imprisonment and mistreatment supposedly suffered by Army General Roberto Viaux. In 1969, during the administration of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970), Viaux had led an attempted military uprising at the Tacna Regiment barracks, an event known as the *Tacnazo*.
“These victims were being killed slowly, day by day. In the end, the gunshots were merely a finishing touch, as they were already on the path to death,” said lawyer Nelson Caucoto, who represented both families, in his final closing argument.
